To celebrate the advent this year’s MLB playoffs, which I am looking forward to with rapt anticipation (no, really), I’d like to do a few posts featuring YouTube finds representing each team that’s made their way to October. Next, the Twins.
The Twins are my favorite non-Mets team. They’re a smart organization from top to bottom that knows how to field a competitive team every year, despite being in the middle of the financial pack. I like them even more now that they’re playing ball outdoors, leaving the garbage bag-lined Metrodome behind, and also because they’re giving JI- JIM THOME one last shot at winning a World Series. If the Mets, with all their money, had half the Twins’ brains, they’d be dangerous.
But even smart organizations do embarrassing things every now and then, like the Twins did back in 1991. That year, they won a fantastic seven-game World Series against the Braves, but still found some time during this storybook season to make a “music video,” an unfortunate trend among pro teams of the era. It’s not any better or worse than its contemporaries, but it has a definite Last Years of the First Bush Presidency air to it. The notes on this video’s YouTube page label it as a “funky” music video. I respectfully disagree.
Other than baseball itself, the Twins are quite good at local commercials. Here’s one for their move into brand new Target Field. Can’t think of too many teams who’d make their outfielders wade through a box of styrofoam peanuts, or would simulate violently throwing a rival team’s fan into the back of a moving van. That was a simulation, right?
Another move-related ad handles the Twin’s mascot, TC Bear, and his difficult transition from indoor to outdoor living.
One other awesome thing about the Twins: Bert Blyleven, ex-pitcher and current broadcaster. I have an NBC baseball preview video from 1988, which is jam packed with Mr. Blyleven saying awesome things, which I can sadly not share with you without endangering my own YouTube account (because obviously NBC and/or MLB are hammering out the DVD deal for this highly valuable footage as we speak).
In its place, please enjoy Bert screwing up royally live on the air, prior to a Twins-Yankees game.
Most baseball fights are pretty pathetic affairs. Not this one. Archival news footage shows a brawl between the Twins and Orioles from 1980, in which Rick Dempsey barrels hard into John Castino. Some words are exchanged, and then the Twins treat Mr. Dempsey to a big ol’ blanket party.