It was Saturday, September 24, 1987.<\/p>\n
The Twins, against all odds, had gone from the AL cellar in ’86, through an improbable rally to carry them to the AL Pennant.<\/p>\n
When it comes to sports, I’m like one of those Jewish people who never goes to Synogogue, drinks, eats non-kosher food if he feels like it, dates goyim<\/em>, but hangs on to the “Jewish” heritage. I enjoy certain sports (baseball) and teams (the Bears, the Cubs, the Twinks) just on principle, because <\/em>I like saying <\/em>it, and because it brings me occasional insight or the occasional stray shaving of pleasure.<\/p>\n And like anyone who’d ever been anywhere near <\/em>Minnesota sports, I’d learned to rely on the insights, since the pleasure was pretty sparse. With the Bergmanian pessimism that lies behind most Scandinavian life, I figured the ’87 Twins would, eventually, flop.<\/p>\n So with the Twins down 3-2 going into Game Six, I figured it was basically all over – that we were set up for a classic Minnesota “close but no cigar” at the final wire. I figured I’d forstall the disappointment and take in a movie.<\/p>\n I drove to the Roseville – then as now, a “dollar” theatre. As I parked in the lot by the Rainbow Foods, I flipped on WCCO…<\/p>\n …as Carneal (or John Gordon or whomever the F) set up the call – Ken Dayley or some other pitcher from the “who the hell was he” list pitching to Herbie. It was, of course, the grand slam that became one of the big highlights of Kent Hrbek’s career. I sat in the car and listened, grinning like a hummel, totally missing my show.<\/p>\n As the game ended with a big, surprising Twins win, I figured they’d choke tomorrow – but it’d be fun while it lasted.<\/p>\n UPDATE:\u00a0 Yeah, I got your emails\/comments.\u00a0 In response, feel free to check the post for evidence of how little I care about sports trivia.<\/p>\n I mean, that was fairly clear, no?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was Saturday, September 24, 1987. The Twins, against all odds, had gone from the AL cellar in ’86, through an improbable rally to carry them to the AL Pennant. When it comes to sports, I’m like one of those Jewish people who never goes to Synogogue, drinks, eats non-kosher food if he feels like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}