Hunting the Turkey

The tragic prosecution of Anthony Klaseus, who killed his own eight-year-old son, mistaking him for a turkey while on a hunt, reminded me how much distaste I have for our state’s “great” hunting tradition, the hypocrisy of “sportsmen,” and the power their interests wield.

Anthony Klaseus deserves to be prosecuted. He took his child’s life under the rubric of male bonding and family traditions. He didn’t intend to. But he loved nature, and pot, and beer, and guns.

I spent a weekend a long time ago researching a story about a family of hunters at their deer shack in northwestern Wisconsin. They were stand-up guys, responsible, affable, and completely disdainful of the louts. But they could never explain the one thing to me that I most wanted to know—why this unequal battle between them and a deer was the linchpin that kept them bonded and steeped in family traditions.

Hunting for them was an excuse to be together, to be challenged, to play. And hunters romanticize it because it is what the men pass down from generation to generation, like baseball in my family. But if I bring a rifle with a telescopic sight to the Metrodome, I’m locked up on terrorism charges.

Explain to me how thousands of guys (mostly) armed with telescopic sights, fake animal urine, camouflaged tree stands, underwater radar, and other advanced weaponry and aids, convince themselves they are engaging in an battle of wits with an animal armed with nothing but its sense of self-preservation?

I’m all in favor of men hunting each other. That’d be a fair fight. I think Gov. Ventura proposed something like that a decade or so ago.

I am stereotyping here, but within every stereotype is an ugly truth. I am suspicious of most hunters’ regard for nature beyond its ability to provide them with prey. Trust me, nature is twice as nice when you’re not worried your buddy thinks you’re a deer.

I support people’s right to hunt; and when they consume what they kill, they’re better than I, who lives off the depravity of the commercial meat industry. But let’s stop kidding ourselves about why people hunt and do away with the romantic fairy stories about hunters and hunting.

So happy fishing opener. Watch out for carp that jump and whack you in the head. I mean, people get hurt.

Watching the Women

I am puzzled by the apparent interest in women’s basketball and hockey. Not the interest in playing but in viewing it. I don’t think anyone out there would claim the quality of play is equal to the men’s sport at the same level, whether it’s preps, college, or the pros.

The Star Tribune covers Gopher women’s ball as a sort of Affirmative Action project. It’s so equal to the men’s coverage that you often have to read into the story to figure out which team they’re talking about. Obnoxious.

And we’ve made big local heroes of Lindsay Whalen and Janel McCarville (I could not bring myself to even skim the profile of McCarville we ran in our magazine, not that I’d react any differently to one about Spencer Tollackson, who I’d imagine can outplay Janel.). They now are in the WNBA, I believe. The WNBA is a joke.

Now, this isn’t some sort of misogynist rant. I fully support most of the Title IX stuff and have no objection to men’s athletics profits funding women’s at the U, for example. I just don’t understand why any of the rest of us are supposed to care about the games. For the same reason I don’t understand why people claim to care about the St. Paul Saints.

The Saints are a yuppie social club, by and large. And that’s fine, and no one who goes to their games claims otherwise. Throughout the years, media coverage of them has eroded as it has become clear that’s the case. But that’s not the situation with women’s athletics.

If I am going to spend my dollars and time watching athletic competition, I want to watch the best. College sports makes my cut because they play a more exciting, less predictable brand of football and basketball than the pros. But watching the Gopher men’s b-ballers collapse to Indiana this week reinforced how hard it is to watch and care about demonstrably inferior talent week in, week out.

I’ve listened to WCCO’s Don Shelby go on and on about women’s ball. I know he has daughters and did some coaching. I will go watch my daughter play prep or college sports, if that’s her thing. And I understand why other people do the same. I have friends who insist the standard of play in women’s volleyball is equal to men’s, and they have season tickets to see the UC Berkeley team play.

But I am wondering if the increasing media attention and interest in women’s ball is a function of the vast stretches of time cable TV has to fill and the great liberal, egalitarian underpinnings of the print media and academia. Cause it ain’t about the ball.

A friend of mine took his kids and mine to a Gopher women’s hockey game. “Why?” I asked him. “It wasn’t bad,” he replied. My point exactly.

Who’s Afraid of “The Super Bowl?”

There, I said it. And on a commercially driven website. I am using the Super Bowl to advance the fortunes of my employer. It’s only minutes before we hear from the lawyers, I’m sure. Cease, and desist.

As we approach the game this weekend, I am more and more aware of the gradual replacement of the name “Super Bowl” in our culture with the phrase “The Big Game.” It’s long been rife in advertising, ever since the NFL started pursuing businesses trying to make money off its event without becoming a paid sponsor.

Want to advertise your salsa’s utility for Super Bowl parties? Like to promote a plasma TV as just perfect for watching the Super Bowl? Can’t do it anymore if you don’t want to pay the NFL. So instead, marketers call it The Big Game. Everyone knows what they’re talking about, and the greedy NFL and its coterie of billionaire owners, sour coaches, and recidivist players gets nada. Nice.

But have you noticed the phrase “The Big Game” showing up in casual conversation? I was sitting at a restaurant’s bar the other day, and the guy next to me was talking about “The Big Game.” “The Super Bowl, you mean?” I said.

“Well, yeah, but we’re not supposed to call it that,” he said.

Then on the Today Show, Matt Lauer introduces a cooking segment of chicken legs that might be suitable for halftime munching, and he says “The Big Game.” Cut to the TV news—“big game.” Newspaper headlines—“Big Game.”

What’s going on? As best as I understand the law, as long as you’re not using the term Super Bowl to promote a product that is separate from the Super Bowl, you owe the NFL nothing. TV anchors can say it. Guys at restaurants can say it. Even Hillary Clinton can say it. (Bill can’t.)

Much the same situation exists with the upcoming Oscars. The “Academy” maintains very tight control of its trademark and pursues anyone who uses it to promote a party, prix fixe menu, plasma TV sale. Problem is, there’s no real catchy generic label for the Academy Award.

Unless you’ve sat through one end to end. Can we all agree on “The Big Snooze®©™?”

Kinda catchy. And no lawsuits.

Crush Load on the Bandwagon

I like to think of myself as not easily suckered. I am repelled by hype and won’t easily board the bandwagon. Nonetheless, by mid-December, I was comfortably ensconced aboard the Vikings train. I shelled out $330 for four tickets to last Sunday’s portentous classic against the Redskins.

I blame the Star Tribune sports section for most of this. I mean, three weeks ago, my view of this team was that it had a third-rate quarterback with major skill-set deficiencies and had defeated only one good opponent all season. Adrian Peterson seemed promising, but he was so soundly routed by the 49ers and Bears (second game) that I wondered if it might be too soon to anoint him as the second coming of Walter Payton.

But I trusted the experts. My football-preoccupied colleague, Steve Marsh, told me this team was the real thing. I was impressed with the intensity of his belief after he became so agitated at images of Peterson that he loudly yelled, “Go! Yeah!” in the bar at Morton’s—while watching a three-day-old replay on a rerun of SportsCenter.

And the Strib? What a disappointment! I’ve long accepted the fact that La Velle Neal and Joe Christensen simply will not second-guess anything the Twins do. If I want a contrarian’s take, I know it’s got to come from Reusse or Jim Souhan. But the paper’s Vikes coverage has long seemed more balanced and emotionally detached—with a realistic view of the team, its players, and management.

But as the Vikings started their streak against the bad teams and A. P. amassed yardage, the paper changed its tune. The skeptics became acolytes. Even Reusse sold me a bill of goods. This town wants to love these guys so much that we need to be thrown just a crumb or two by the Vikes, and we swoon.

Back to Sunday . . . the Vikes dropped a big Christmas turd on the fans and decided the brass ring didn’t much matter to them. I trudged through blocks of snow and wind, pushed through the vast human sandwich that is the Metrodome concourse, and sat down to watch as my big-ticket purchase turned into the dumbest money I’ve spent all year. (The price of four upper-deck seats came to half a Twins Flex 40 season ticket, I’d note.)

Trust me when I say that there is nothing about the Metrodome that is comfortable or easy when it is packed with 60,000 anything, and when it’s 60,000 addled Vikings fans, well, you get the picture.

I know I won’t convince the guy in front of me—who spent the entire game standing and didn’t speak to his wife/girlfriend sitting next to him for three-plus hours—but these Vikes are mediocre. Tarvaris Jackson is not on his way to greatness. Adrian Peterson has yet to prove he has skills that can outfox a good defense—the mark of a great running back. And the Vikes have amassed its 2007 success on the backs of bad teams. They don’t deserve to go to the playoffs, and if they back in, they will be quickly excreted.

Which is what I have done with the Kool-Aid I drank in from the sports pages of my local paper.

Zygi: Soul Man

Did my eyes deceive me, or is the Zigster soul-shaking Adrian Peterson after his NFL record 296-yard game on Sunday? (Sign of the apocalypse #474-A: The Wilfs go hip-hop.)

Stadium Games

The long slog to settle the land cost of the new Twins Stadium has concluded, and the team has agreed to kick in an extra $15 mil to cover the overrun that the negotiated settlement of $28.5 million exceeds the legislature’s limits on what the county can spend on land and infrastructure. There’s been so much spin on this topic that it’s hard to tell where the facts lie, but both sides obviously felt their case was tenuous enough in a court battle to split the difference in a settlement.

Now’s the time to start discussing what this area will look like in three years' time. Take a walk around the immediate ballpark area. It’s not inviting. The county garbage burner is hideous, its adjacent office building even uglier. They are surrounded by a no man’s land of wide streets and commercial structures. Target Center is a wall of concrete that looms over the site. An I–94 freeway ramp separates the ballpark from the adjacent “village” being planned, a massive physical barrier that inhibits connecting the ballpark with the adjacent neighborhood.

Real efforts are going to be required to overcome these things, but the ongoing real estate crisis is likely to limit additional short-term residential development in the area. The city of Minneapolis appears ready to fulfill county commissioner Mike Opat’s fears, and under-fund the infrastructure for which it is responsible, resulting in a rebuilding of the 5th Street bridge that will not accommodate a pedestrian crossing to the “ballpark village” and public plazas that are Spartan and unwelcoming.

Now I know the council is weighed down by a core of liberal activists who spend more time preoccupied with social justice than working to make the city function, but decisions that make the adjacent area unfriendly to visitors only serve to deter them from finding their way into downtown to spend their money.

If the council looks at the Pohlad family’s bailout of the stadium land purchase and sees more money raining from the heavens to absolve the city of its obligations, it may be in for a rude awakening. The land purchase had to get funded. I’m not sure the Twins need attractive plazas and good pedestrian flow from downtown. But downtown Minneapolis’s merchants sure do.

Update: The Tuesday Strib revealed that “the county will forgo some planned street improvements in the Warehouse District around the stadium, such as plantings, new streetlights and repaving.” I’m pretty sure these were the improvements the county was hoping to get the city to fund.

I would also note for the Pohlad bashers out there that the Twins’ payroll is higher than three of the four teams competing for baseball’s league championship, and well below at least one of the upcoming World Series contenders. Small-market teams can win with 52 percent of their revenues going to player salary.

Next Year

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago called Wilmette, where the L train ends its run north from the city. Three blocks from our house was Marie’s Restaurant, a little greasy spoon across the street from the train station.

Marie’s was run by a German immigrant couple, Adam and Marie, who talked with thick accents and worked from about 4 a.m.—when Adam arrived to make doughnuts—to 7 or 8 p.m., when they closed. The place had more counter than table seating, all of it yellowed Formica.

Marie’s was the hub of the neighborhood and resolutely old-fashioned. It cut fries from fresh potatoes (today they call that “hand-cut”), the soft drinks were mixed from syrup and soda water, and Adam formed burgers in his hands from fresh ground beef. He was the only person I knew who shared my name for my entire childhood.

The place jumped at breakfast and lunchtime, but I usually arrived after school, around 3 or 3:30, when Central Elementary or Howard Junior High let out. Jim from Demas Fine Foods would be sitting there, Johnny the barber was smoking, or asleep, a huge woman with a black wig drank milk shakes, one of the guys from Shawnee Service in greasy overalls nursed coffee, and a couple of the CTA motormen idled between runs of the Evanston Express.

There was a Zenith TV high up in the corner, and every afternoon it was tuned to WGN. The Cubs played eighty-one home day games, at 1:15 p.m. Jack Brickhouse (Hey, hey) did the play-by-play.

I started following the Cubs in 1970 at age six, the year after their historic collapse of 1969. The seventies were lean times at Wrigley Field; the Cubs were bad, or worse. A seat in the bleachers—scalped today for $150—could be had two minutes before game time for $3 from the ticket window.

I didn’t start ditching school for the ballpark until high school, so usually I would be at Marie’s, watching the end of games after school with Brian Kelly or by myself with a plate of soggy fries sided by little paper cups of ketchup. These were my first ventures into independence—my money, my fries, my people, my Cubs. Frosted with personal nostalgia, those grim years of sporting malaise seem preferable to today’s wall-to-wall yuppie scene at sold-out Wrigley.

The common denominator, though, is failure. The Cubs were eliminated from the playoffs over the weekend by the Arizona Diamondbacks—which play in a plastic ballpark (that feels like Block E) with a hot tub in the outfield. The Cubs did not win a game.

Back in the day, during May or June, in the waning innings of a particularly ugly losing streak, Adam would pronounce, “Cubbie not going anywhere this year.” The Cubs, to most Chicagoans, are the Cubbies—a diminutive evoking a naïve little bear getting kicked around by Cardinals, Pirates, and a big Red machine. Cubbie, in fact, had not gone anywhere for many years, their last World Series victory being 1908. One of these years, the Cubs will win it all, and many of us will momentarily rejoice. But after that day it will probably never be the same.

Winning is easy. I’ve lived and cheered through two Twins championships, six playoff runs, Cy Young MVP, and batting championship seasons, and they don’t collectively equal what I learned as a kid in Chicago: That the brass ring will inevitably elude, so you find joy in small moments.

You learned to appreciate a beautiful old ballpark, ivy clinging to its walls, the magnificence of a sunny day, a great play by Ron Santo at third, an Oscar Mayer Smokie Link fresh from the griddle with French’s mustard, or, if you missed the game, a blue light shining above the scoreboard in the darkness. You watched for it as you passed by Addison Street on the L: Blue meant smiles all around, white meant back to the newspaper.

Baseball is the most evocative sport because it is so local, so personal. The ballparks are all different, a city’s baseball culture uniquely its own. The 162-game season is six months long, a marathon to which the playoffs are merely a short coda. Even the worst teams win sixty to eighty games, meaning there is joy and wild abandon amidst all the failure.

Today, I am a Twins fan, and proudly so. I have lived in Minnesota longer than in Chicago. But a huge piece of my history and a very soft spot in my heart remains in the land of the Cubbie. I knew them not as a yuppie phenomenon now reviled by many through overexposure on cable TV, but as the guys who perpetually broke our hearts. As this year’s Cubs bowed out over the weekend, I remembered one of the CTA motormen, who, after a particularly dispiriting loss, bemoaned, “These motherf**kers are going to do this to us for 100 years.”

Adam and Marie left the restaurant the same day we moved out of our house in 1985. My mom and I wandered in for the first time in months for a nostalgic burger as they trained-in the new owners, shocked by the synchronicity. I wonder if Adam will be around or aware next October, when the motorman’s prophecy becomes historical fact.

Jews have a prayer that reaffirms their faith in one god, uttered at every religious service. As a child, I remember the rabbi referring to it as “The watchword of our faith.”

To the Cubs fan, whether at Clark and Addison Streets or here among the diaspora, that watchword is wait till next year. It always comes, but it doesn’t either, which is fine with me.

What Do American Cars, Smokers, Splenda, Alice Waters, Overhead Bin Abusers, and Soggy Buns Have in Common?

I feel a rant coming on:

+ Smokers are uniformly some of the most inconsiderate narcissists around. We’ve driven them all onto the streets with clean-air regs, which is good, but try walking down the street or waiting for a bus without inhaling somebody’s nicotine exhaust. And why do smokers believe the entire world is their ashtray? They flick ash without regard for where it goes or who’s downwind, and then they dump the butt on the sidewalk. Maybe when the Minneapolis City Council is done saving the elephants it can do something about the 500 cigarette butts on every block.

+ There is a special place in hell for people who board airplanes before their row is called and then use the tactic to put their humongous bag in an overhead bin above someone else’s seat before they head back to row 34. And no, you don’t need an ID when you board. You haven’t needed it in more than five years! Five years! Put it away!

+ Why do about 20 percent of all the restaurants in town not offer Splenda with beverages? Yes, that’s you Ike’s at the Airport, yes that’s you D’Amico & Sons, yes that’s you Punch Pizza. C’mon boys, this is the first artificial sweetener that doesn’t taste like chemicals and you’d think it was foie gras. I know it’s a little more expensive, but it’s the one you need to have.

+ Another baseball season has come and gone and they are still precooking hot dogs and brats at the Metrodome and storing them in warming ovens for hours. Even my hot dog–loving kids won’t touch the tepid things after the gummy, wet bun has been peeled off. Please, Twins (the concessions at the Dome are under the domain of the Sports Facilities Commission, not the teams): don’t let this horrible concessionaire get anywhere near the new ballpark. Twenty-eight years of wiener abuse will be quite enough.

+ The auto workers are on strike as of Monday against GM and the American carmakers are all teetering on insolvency. I always argued that the millions of Americans who bought Fords, Buicks, and Dodges solely because they were American were only hurting the car companies. Today, the U.S. manufacturers make much better cars, but after years of turning out the lowest common denominator, huge swaths of Americans won’t even consider an American vehicle. Truth be told, I’m one of them. A poor reputation will haunt you far longer than a bad product lasts.

+ Is it just me, or has Alice Waters gone from a national culinary hero to a sour polemicist for a cause that she’s basically won people over to anyway? If the mark of success of the California-grown local foods movement is when kids choose beet salad willingly and their parents spend two hours preparing dinner after working ten hours, then there will be no victory. There’s idealism, and then there’s fantasy. The latter is just not sustainable.

Justin Morneau Mixes a Strong Drink

I was fortunate enough to be at an event Sunday night with about a dozen Minnesota Twins players. It was the annual Boys & Girls Clubs dinner at Morton’s, where the players act as waiters to raise money for a great cause. I rarely use this blog as a diary of sorts, but I found the evening so pleasurable and interesting I thought I’d share some observations.

Everything you hear about the Twins and their down-to-earth organizational culture was borne out during the night. Roughly half of the twenty-five-man April–August roster was in attendance, from rookies to big stars, and I chatted with most.

Some tidbits:

+ It felt really odd to have my water glass refilled by guys earning more money in a year than I will earn in a century. Wages aside, these players occupy such an exalted place in sport fans’ worlds that even making conversation with them was awkward at first.

+ The evening’s “hosts” were Michael and Claudia Cuddyer. Cuddy spent the evening strolling from table to table doing card tricks that would have made a professional magician proud.

+ Kevin Slowey was glib and friendly. He did spend much of the evening carrying a tray, so if he tanks against Texas Monday, blame Morton’s.

+ Joe Nathan told my son that there isn’t a hitter in baseball he’d rather not face, though he mentioned A-Rod as one of the tougher outs. His fearless approach to pitching seems to explain some of his success.

+ Boof Bonser is just about as tall as TC Bear, the Twins' strange mascot.

+ Matt Guerrier and Brad Radke would make a great “separated at birth.”

+ Justin Morneau tended bar, pouring generous drinks. Though Canadian, he revealed he has never eaten poutine (fries, gravy, cheese curds), the national specialty. My son seems to believe Morny committed himself to come over to our house for a social visit, but I suspect not.

+ Catcher Mike Redmond arrived fully clothed (he's known for his naked clubhouse "walks") and revealed that Joe Mauer probably passed on the evening because he’s a bit too introverted for that type of event. He says Joe gets such celebrity treatment in town that it’s hard for him to live a normal life.

+ Nick Punto seems genuinely shaken by his poor season at bat. His Gold Glove fielding is mentioned less frequently, and when I noted it, his comment that “it means a lot to me” reminded me that despite the salary and celebrity, the game has a way of humbling players.

+ I expected to mostly see the team’s young players and few stars. But none of the team’s Hispanic or black players attended. I know there are probably language issues for some, and guys like Torii and Johan have probably earned the stripes to pass on these events, but I was struck by the strict racial and ethnic breakdown.

Baseball’s fan base remains vastly white, but its teams are becoming increasingly Latin American (some teams predominantly), you wonder how ball clubs will remain relatable in mostly Anglo places such as Minneapolis, Seattle, and Toronto, especially if the Hispanic players remain less “integrated” into the general community. (If Rondell White retires and Torii Hunter relocates for next season, the Twins could be a team without a single black player.)

+ My son wanted to ask Joe Nathan not to leave as a free agent a season from now, but I told him it would put Nathan in an uncomfortable position. Baseball is now the only national sport whose players remain relatable and broadly admired in their communities.

So it does seem incongruous that $45 million dollars would not be enough to keep Torii on the Twins. Or that Johan will be looking for a $100 million deal next fall and wouldn’t settle for $80 mil. The money distances and divides today’s crop of players from the fans, but I understand both sides of the argument.

And fundamentally, ball players want to win. If the Twins are headed to a rebuilding phase and cannot keep guys like Hunter and Santana, then it makes it a lot less fun for guys like Joe Nathan and Justin Morneau. All food for thought while we “wait till next year.”

(Conflict of interest note: mspmag.com’s parent company publishes the Twins Magazine under contract to the team.)

A Weekend Without Mike and Larry

If things hadn’t gone so crazy this summer, tomorrow would be a very special day in the Twin Cities, as both Michael Vick and senator Larry Craig would have been in town (the senator on his brief Friday layover going from DC to Boise). Though much has been written about these various kerfuffles, as Dan Barreiro would say, I’m most interested in the public reactions to each case, and the fascinating similarities. 

In the end, I feel sorry for both Craig and Vick, just a bit. In Vick’s case, I can’t defend his choices. He is surrounded by people who supposedly have his back, had been briefed at length by the NFL about the risks and scrutiny you deal with as a pro baller, and yet continued to fight dogs, and behaved quite cruelly toward them. Yet I accept the premise that dogfighting was normalized in Vick’s world and he lacked an understanding of the gravity of the consequences he was facing. And I wonder about the level of our communal outrage. Admittedly, it is hard to gauge collective outrage when cable news is constantly amping it up, but this time, it seemed disproportionate.

Two factors were at work: One, we are a nation of dog lovers. Many dogs in America are treated better than the people in their homes. Cruelty to animals is unforgivable, but when Vick will likely do more prison time than pit bull owners whose dogs kill children, something’s out of whack. I also believe collectively we were so hard on Vick because he symbolizes the depravity evident in so many young black males, personifies this cancer no social program seems big enough to heal. Hopefully the judge will figure out a way to use Vick’s notoriety for good rather than merely caging him up. He’s probably a lost cause, but perhaps the consequences or his faux-contrition will move some kid.

The Craig mess is less disturbing on some levels, more on others. Craig is inevitably the victim of the intolerance and rigidity his conservative ideology sowed, which mitigates my sympathy for him. (Though the greatest hypocrisy we seem to have unearthed on him is opposing gay marriage. I’ve seen no evidence of homophobic or bigoted statements.) But if this isn’t criminalization of consensual sex and/or entrapment, what is?

You wonder how far we’ve come as a nation on sexuality when gay or bisexual men feel compelled to hook up in an airport bathroom. I mean, I don’t even want to urinate in an airport bathroom, and it has nothing to do with the risk of encountering the dreaded wide stance.

I am unconvinced this problem is of a magnitude worthy of law enforcement activity. I have never walked into a public washroom and encountered someone having sex (well, once in college, but hey, I went to Macalester), and even if I did, so what? I’d rather sit in a stall next to a senator gratifying a constituent than someone who’d just made the mistake of a big dinner at the airport Chili’s.

As with Vick, I wonder how much of this Craig episode isn’t built around disgust over public displays of homosexuality? If senator Craig had been caught actually engaged in sex in the john with a woman, as opposed to appearing open to the idea with a man, would he be resigning from the senate? My guess is no. And my guess is if the court allows him to recant his guilty plea, he might be able to beat the rap. The legal one, not the sexual one.

The Outdoor Era

I imagine there are elements of the Twins organization that remain bitter from the decade-plus fight for a new stadium. Who feel let down by the fans, the press, and the elected officials. Who see ownership magnanimity, not taxpayer charity, in the current stadium deal. Reality is in the eye of the beholder. But now the taxpayers have ponied up, and the fans soon will as well, as substantial increases in ticket and concession prices that come with a new stadium are revealed.

The key to the team’s long-term success is maintaining a larger, more stable revenue base. The stadium will go part of that way, but perhaps not as far as people think. After all, the Twins are going to lose millions in revenue sharing dollars dedicated to the league’s poverty cases (the Royals, the Marlins), a group the new ballpark’s revenues will knock the Twins from.

The formula requires making baseball a more broadly ingrained pastime in the Twin Cities. Turning us into a baseball town in the way that cities such as St. Louis or Cincinnati are. Places with a century of baseball history, (mostly) consistent competitiveness, and a fan base that doesn’t wilt when hard luck comes.

Inherent in that kind of loyalty is the fans’ certitude that management is intent in keeping a winner on the field, and when unable, following a sound plan for a quick rejuvenation. We cannot afford another era like 1992–2001, where the Twins not only lost, but were rarely competitive. It cost the Twins a generation of interest.

That era seems like ancient history today, as the Twins have last season’s MVP, Cy Young Award winner, and batting champion in the same lineup. Of those, only Joe Mauer is signed long-term.

The Twins have no choice but to adjust their payroll structure to keep 2008 free agents Johan Santana and sign Justin Morneau to a long-term deal as well. Joe Nathan, also a free agent after next year, needs to be re-signed or replaced with someone of similar skills. They are the present and future of this team, which is unprecedentedly blessed with high-impact talent. For the Twins not to make such a gesture toward securing the future would be a serious affront to the fans and taxpayers.

And in return, fans will reward the Twins with less and less regard to the current won/loss record. The return of outdoor baseball will function to evolve a community of fair-weather, passive fans into one that is dedicated, steadfast, and assures the means to put a competitive team on the field.

When the Cleveland Indians disbanded a talented team several years ago to rebuild, its management made a wise move. They published a letter in the ballpark program laying out a vision and purpose, acknowledging that short-term failure was inevitable, but that long-term success would follow. It was a gesture of respect to the loyal, regular components of the fan base who filled the ballpark, win or lose. The Indians are competitive again, and seem poised for many years of success.

I’m putting my money where my mouth is: I’ve bought my season ticket, I’m paying my sales tax. I’ve got my new stadium priority. The Pohlads have said they are committed to owning this team for the long-haul. I’m confident that part of that commitment is doing what it takes to evolve the boom and bust cycles into long periods of competitiveness separated by short periods of rebuilding, and not losing world-class talent in our midst.

A Home Run for Minneapolis

Baseball is important to me.

I attended my first Twins game over Labor Day weekend 1981, a week after I arrived in St. Paul from Chicago. I’ve been wracking my brain to remember whether I saw them lose to the Brewers on Sunday or beat the Blue Jays on Labor Day, but most of what I remember is how dingy Met Stadium was and how unfavorably it compared to the turn-of-the-century ballparks I grew up with, Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park. But the following April, when I wiped construction dust off my seat at game two of the Metrodome era, puzzlement turned to despair.

I have been to forty-one Major League Baseball parks, and of the current crop of thirty, the Metrodome is the worst (I never saw the Astrodome, but the Kingdome was grimmer). Say what you will about the Pohlads, the economics of small-market baseball, the innovative marketing of the Saints—the Metrodome set baseball back two generations in this town. Utilitarian in every respect, from food to finishes, charmless and plastic, it hurt more than losing Big Papi, more than the 1992–2000 decade of irrelevance, and more than the growth of the NFL.

The new Twins stadium is an unequivocal win for downtown, Hennepin County, and the entire region. This from a guy who accepts the naysayer premise that there is a finite pool of entertainment dollars and what new revenue the Twins glean comes directly out of Mystic Lake Casino’s or Restaurant Alma’s pockets.

Why is it a “win” on such terms? Because eighty-one game nights of 20,000 people or more will add a vibrancy to downtown that can’t be bought any other way. It’s a lot of people of the right demographic at the right time of year. Target Center or a new Vikes arena can never provide that kind of impact. Too few games and/or too much weather. If you believe the Twin Cities ultimately thrives or stagnates on the strength of downtown Minneapolis, it’s the kind of investment that wise communities make.

It’s hard to argue that the contraction nightmare, despite its bad taste, didn’t have the intended effect. Ultimately, the “stakeholders” did their part. MLB uplifted smaller-market teams with revenue sharing. A combination of luck and wisdom brought the Twins a stretch of competitiveness that has eclipsed the blips of 1987 and 1991. And the men of the Hennepin County Board, led by Commissioner Mike Opat, took a gamble on behalf of a city with a mayor who would not make it a priority and a dilettante city council. The fruits of these efforts move earth this week.

A month ago, the Twins’ one legitimate superstar, Johan Santana, attacked the philosophical underpinnings of its baseball operations and questioned management’s commitment to take it to the next level. Whether Johan is right or wrong, it’s a relevant topic on such a future-focused week.

My son and I completed a six-year path through the current MLB parks last month in Cincinnati and St. Louis, both smaller metropolitan areas than ours, less affluent, less lively, and with less fundamentally going for them. But they remain great baseball towns, with fans who stuff the parks (Busch Stadium and Great American Ball Park), line up to traipse through museum-quality local baseball hall-of-fames, and support a literate baseball dialogue among young and old alike. In bad times and good, the Reds and Cardinals are part of the unfrayable fabric of those communities.

It will take more than Pohlad Park at Target Plaza to turn the Twin Cities into real baseball towns. Failing that, the alternative, I believe, is ending up back in the same boat in two decades—asking how we can keep a competitive team, or a team at all, after the sport’s economics inevitably shift again.

In part two of this post, on Thursday, I’ll talk about what I believe the city, the team, and the fans owe one another to assure that twenty years from now we’re not wringing our gloves over how to save the Twins.

(Conflict of interest note: mspmag.com’s parent company publishes the Twins' magazine under contract to the team.)

Ripoffs, Pizza, and Bad TV

OK, enough bridge talk. On to other matters of great importance.

+ Are prices for soft drinks, and especially iced tea, out of control in restaurants? I mean, $3.75 for a glass of flavored water? I think restaurants are using our thirst to cover their losses on rising meat and commodity costs. And while we’re at it, if you price your wine at $14 a glass, you’re not selling any to me.

+ Pat Reusse doesn’t get enough credit. He’s the best sports columnist in town by a mile.

+ If you want to read an insightful piece on how one pundit went from pro-Iraq war to anti-, check out Michael Ignatieff’s essay in last Sunday’s New York Times. It’s a bit long and abstract, but the comments about how Bush’s lack of real-world failures lead him to imagine himself infallible seem right on.

+ The Cubs’ surprising drive to win the NL East must fail. As a born-and-bred Chicagoan and Cubs fan, the most fitting record the Cubs should hold is to go a full century without a title. They are the embodiment of failure and perseverance. Win it all, and they’re just another bunch of short-term heroes. This is year 99, if I’m counting right.

+ If you’re headed to LA anytime soon, don’t miss a meal at Nancy Silverton (La Brea Bakery) and Mario Batali’s new Pizzeria Mozza. Killer. Makes Punch seem like Pizza Hut, and I love Punch.

+ HBO’s Entourage has lost me entirely. Does anyone care about the characters or find the show the least bit fresh or original? How quickly it went stale. If you want fresh and original, tune in at 9:30 p.m. Sundays for Flight of the Conchords. It’s smart and not the least bit crass, which is Entourage’s stock-in-trade.

+ While I’m on the subject of TV, there’s an awful lot of good stuff this summer. Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America (Can Fox’s version this fall be anywhere near as good?); Damages and Rescue Me on FX; Mad Men on AMC; this hilarious new reality show Flipping Out on Bravo about an obsessive-compulsive house flipper in LA. My only reservation is that it’s summer. Run these shows when it’s cold, not when we want to be outside.

+ Who do you think won the Zimmern/Bourdain battle of New York this week on Travel Channel? Andrew’s clearly the better dresser. And he tells me his ratings were better. You will find over time that my TV recommendations are far better than Zimmern’s.

+ Can we all agree that websites that play music when you land on the homepage are a plague that must be snuffed out? Yes, that’s you, Via.

+ I have not given money to Minnesota Public Radio in a long while. I’m just not a big fan. But I’m considering writing a check because The Current (89.3 FM) just gets better and better. Could they start a similar station for all the great music that’s more than two years old that never gets any airplay?

+ Spent last weekend in San Diego, a metro area that’s about the size of ours. Want to know what life is gonna be like here in a decade if we don’t invest faster in roads and transit? It’s gonna be gridlock seven days a week. Traffic in San Diego is so bad, so much of the time, that it’s actually a deterrent to visiting. And that 75 and sunny every day really wears on you.

+ Finally, one more bridge item. The Strib’s cutesy headline after the collapse—“Buckling and Swaying, Then Down, Down, Down”—was tacky. Just as the headline “Terrorized” was after 9/11. I don’t know what consultant told them that factual headlines don’t work after big news events, but the cutesy crap trivializes it.

Bridges or Schools or Stadia?

Nick Coleman has lived up to his hard-ass rep, post-bridge collapse, with a series of polemical columns all but calling for us to burn down Edina in retribution for the state’s misguided priorities. Nick is too often turned up to 11 for my taste, and I find his workingman routine a bit fake, but a newspaper needs a columnist with a bit of wit, big cojones, and a willingness to go ballistic.

But here’s where Coleman and the other liberal polemicists are overreaching. It’s one thing to condemn the mentality that funds new stadia but not new bridges. Fair point. It’s another thing to say they have anything to do with one another in a real-world way.

First of all, I don’t know many folks who supported the Twins stadium tax who don’t support better transportation funding. It’s much the same constituency.

Or take the example of schools: I have a kid in the Minneapolis Public Schools. The schools are battered in every direction: by a goofball teacher’s union, societal problems they did not create nor can they solve, and years of discontinuity of leadership and vision. But money would help. Money to reduce class sizes, buy textbooks, replace 1950s desks, you name it.

My state senator, Scott Dibble—who voted against the legislation to authorize Hennepin County to tax for the stadium—used the schools in the same way Nick does the bridge—as a manifestation of misguided priorities and a reason to oppose good things. But the Legislature, which funds schools and bridges, was not asked to spend a penny on the Twins. Hennepin County levied the tax.

Had we given the Twins (conflict-of-interest notice: my employer publishes the Twins’ magazine under contract to the club) Nick Coleman’s middle finger, the bridge would have still collapsed and the schools would still be bailing water. The bleeding-heart segment of the DFL has abdicated on public works, period. That there are jobs for their constituents, economic development for their communities, and intangible benefits all around is seemingly irrelevant. Or as Hennepin Commissioner Mike Opat described the mentality earlier this year, “That’s not going to solve poverty, therefore we shouldn’t do it.”

The problem here is the right’s unwillingness to tax and spend period, not to tax and spend for things that aren’t sexy. The problem here is the left’s relentless focus on inequity to the detriment of everything else. The problem here is an electorate easily lured by “taxes and government are bad” reasoning.

Nick Coleman raised the right question. But the us vs. them stuff has so little resonance these days outside the political fringe that he lives in that I’m not sure Nick’s polarizing wrath, entertaining as it is, is what we need to convince those on the fence to vote for politicians who see a mandate beyond equity, terrorism, and taxes.