Great catch highlights day at the ballpark
Attending games to write about all levels and ages in every sport year-round has never caused me to feel weary of just-another-game. The rest of my family also loves sports, but they work ridiculously long, hard weeks outside of sports, so attending a game is more of a special occurrence.
My wife, Joan, came up with the idea of spending too much for tickets to a Twins game, as a combination father’s day and her birthday gift. The game she picked was last Sunday, at Target Field in Minneapolis, against the Texas Rangers. I wanted to shoot photos, and I hate shooting through the safety netting, so Joan picked Section 106, Seats 1, 2 and 3 in Row 14, for us and our older son, Jack, who works far too much the other six days a week. Our younger son, Jeff, is far away, working in Bellingham, Wash., and couldn’t get back.
Since Joan and I moved back to Duluth, working harder than ever for a small percentage now of what we used to earn in the Twin Cities, I miss coaching hockey and playing and coaching baseball. Having coached both Jack and Jeff through all their years of youth baseball up to high school, I was impressed that when Jack reached proper age to join my 35-and-over baseball team, how quickly he regained his quick hands and great batting eye. A left-handed hitter, he is a reliable line-drive hitter for average and distance. His great reactions and quick hands made him capable of remarkable plays at third base, also, and as a pitcher has great stuff, including an unhittable knuckleball.
Of course, sons continue to annoy their dads throughout their lives, and I hated to play catch with him warming up, because after about three throws, he would hit me right about in the belt buckle. His knuckleball doesn’t rotate, but comes floating at you with the seams staying in place until the last moment, when it would dive about a foot, and he loved to have me holding my glove up for a chest-high catch and have the ball hit me by surprise.
I was alarmed, however, at the difficulties Jack had corraling pop-ups. He played a shallow third base and could spear the hottest low line drives, but tended to feel uneasy and get rigid while he got to the right spot, but his soft hands turned wooden and he’d often fumble even easy pop flies. When I was a kid, growing up outside of Duluth, I had to invent games for one, and among those was developing a strong arm by firing a hard rubber ball against concrete steps, and later throwing a baseball straight up, extremely high, and repetition allowed me to become supremely confident chasing down every pop fly a shortstop could get to. Because of that, I was sure a few more minutes before each game and a few extra throws could have solved Jack’s odd problem. But he never came early, and it never happened.
He remains a student of the game, and we talk often about incidents in Twins games, so our Sunday was going to be a highlight. The forecast said 50 percent thunderstorms all afternoon, so we brought rain jackets. Jack suggested we bring our gloves, but I had the camera, so I told him to go ahead.
We left Duluth in time to pick up Jack and drive to Dinkytown, to Al’s Breakfast, which is simply the best breakfast place in the universe. I could already anticipate the inch-tall Dinkytown omelet and wholewheat wally blues — wholewheat pancakes with walnuts and blueberries — and a generous pile of hashbrowns to share.
But when we got there, Al’s was full of people, and a dozen more stood outside, which meant yet another dozen were inside, lining up behind each stool-sitting customer. We didn’t want to risk being late to the game, so we drove downtown, found a parking spot in a $10 lot, and walked from Washington Avenue toward Target Field. Less than a block away, we spotted the Red Rabbit, an open corner restaurant and lounge where we found an impressive array, with perfectly poached eggs.
Then we walked on, arriving just right. By sheer luck, the pitching rivals were Jose Berrios, Minnesota’s ace, against Bartolo Colon, the aging and pudgy guy who spent last year with the Twins, pitching only scant innings on his way to becoming a dependable short-term spot starter, but the Twins let him go after the season. Instead of retiring at age 45, he got one more chance, with the Rangers. They are treating him as though he is 10 years younger, and he has responded with an outstanding season. So he gets to go against the team that treated him as though he was done, one year ago.
It was a fantastic game, despite the low safety net, which caused me to run out to the right-field corner for the last of the first inning to get some photos that didn’t look like I shot through a screen door. The top of the first started ominously, as Berrios opened by firing a fast ball that Shin Soo Choo lined off the top of the center-field wall for a double. Berrios got the next two out, but Adrian Beltre hammered a liner to left for a single hit sharply enough that Choo stopped at third, respecting the fact that Eddie Rosario not only has become the Twins best hitter, but has one of the best arms in the Major Leagues.
Those two hits, incidentally, were the only hits Berrios allowed through seven superb innings, striking out a career-high 12 Texas batters. Colon was almost as good, blanking the Twins until the last of the fifth, when Robbie Grossman blasted a leadoff double off the center-field wall and took third on a sacrifice fly to deep center by shortstop Ehire Adrianza. With two out, catcher Bobby Wilson, hitting ninth, singled to left and the Twins had a 1-0 lead.
One inning later, in the last of the seventh, Rosario led off with a first-pitch single to right for his second hit of the game, and made up for his fourth-inning gaffe, when he led with a single but was picked off first by catcher Isiah Kiner-Falefa — a costly blunder that was made worse when Eduardo Escobar followed with his league-leading 33rd double. This time, Rosario took second on Colon’s wild pitch, and after Escobar walked on four pitches, Rosario scored two outs later when Grossman singled to left-center to make it 2-0.
Colon finished seven innings giving up the two runs on 7 hits, walking 1 and striking out 5 on only 82 pitches. Berrios threw 107 but gave up only 2 hits, 2 walks and 12 strikeouts. As an interesting aside, he had yielded 3 hits for most of the day. First baseman Joe Mauer went 0-for-4 and his average dipped to .266, and in the seventh inning, second baseman Rougned Odor dropped a near-perfect leadoff bunt down the third base line. Berrios, amazingly quick off the mound, got to the ball and fired a rocket to first. It was low, but Mauer went down to catch it, beating Odor by a heartbeat. But Mauer dropped the ball! Unheard of or not, the official scorer ruled it a hit, only the third hit of the day for Texas.
One day later, that call was quietly changed to an error. Good call. When he is on his game, Mauer is as good a fielding first baseman as there is; he is not on his game, and just because he has had a great career, he should never be immune from being given an error. Trevor Hildenberger came in and threw a perfect 3-grounder eighth inning, and Fernando Rodney — this year’s aging righthander — struck out the side in the ninth, meaning the Twins had stymied the Rangers without a hit after the first inning.
Meanwhile, up in Section 106, the guy in Seat 1 was fiddling with a notebook and a camera most of the day, fascinated by the great pitcher’s duel. But the lack of scoring, and the fact that it was a perfect 80 degrees without any thundershowers, caused me to glance left after three innings and see that Jack had dozed off. I leaned forward to mention it to Joan, and saw that she, too, was taking a short nap. Incredibly, next to Joan in Seat 4 was a nattily dressed, tie-wearing young man from Rockford High School, waiting for the seventh inning stretch to harmonize on an excellent God Bless America. He, too, was asleep, right there in a nearly filled section.
So the well-publicized lack of offense by the Twins can have residual value. Joan and Jack woke up just as I was snapping a cell-phone photo to send to Jeff in Bellingham, and they stayed awake and alert the rest of the way. Good thing, because the true highlight of the game came two innings later, in the top of the fifth with the game 0-0.
Berrios got first baseman Ronald Guzman on a foul pop to Wilson leading off the fifth. Up strode center-fielder Delino DeShields. Berrios knew the Rangers were having trouble catching up to the fastball that was jumping out of his strong right hand, so he went to it again. DeShields swung late and hit a high fly ball to right, clearly heading foul. An instant reaction from our Section 106 saw me scrambling to move my camera and the jacket I was holding, while Jack scrambled to quick-draw his glove from the plastic bag holstering it. Joan watched the ball all the way, and said later she was pretty sure it was going to conk her on the head.
The ball appeared heading about 10 feet away from us, but it sliced, and sliced some more, and suddenly it landed with a smack — directly in the glove on Jack’s outstretched hand. It was an outstanding catch, and Jack looked right at me and ducked the glove with the ball still in it under his arm.
Now, Jack is a very talented person, but he would just as soon avoid the spotlight. He is a high-skilled guitar player who evokes Stevie Ray Vaughn-like notes from his electric guitar, but when he played in a band, he was happy playing his creative solo parts without ever being featured. So if somebody on radio or TV remarked about an outstanding catch of the foul ball, there was no holding high the prize and waving it to the crowd.
An usher came down to check on us, I pointed to Jack, and he complimented him on the great catch. Then the usher checked with the friendly older gentleman behind us, who was holding a tiny baby grandchild, sound asleep. The man said: “No, we’re fine, but that man is a hero. He made a great catch to protect us.”
Afterward, we got the car and drove back to Dinkytown, intent on stopping at Cafe 421, another of our favorite spots. It was closed for the day, for some renovation. We went up a block to Annie’s Parlor for cheeseburgers, fries, a hot fudge shake and a butterscoteh malts. Nice ending to a wonderful day, even if we had better luck at the ball game than getting to our favorite restaurants. It was made better by the nonverbal exchange Jack and I enjoyed of our baseball secret: Nobody knows — other than a few thousand Reader readers, now — that Jack had just made a catch not only better than Joe Mauer, but possibly better than any pop-fly adventure Jack had ever made with the Shoreview Hawks.
