“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.”
Babe Ruth
Sonnet 25
Let Those Who Are In Favour With Their Stars
by William Shakespeare
Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,
Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most.
Great princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread
But as the marigold at the sun’s eye,
And in themselves their pride lies buried,
For at a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foil’d,
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toil’d:
Then happy I, that love and am beloved
Where I may not remove nor be removed.
If you are not a baseball fan, then you have missed a stellar year. It’s not too late, the play-offs start next week and its going to be a post season with high caliber baseball. Never can I remember so many good teams battling until the final game for both a play-off birth and for home field advantage. There are several dominant teams who are expected to win, the Dodgers in the National League and the Houston Astros and Yankees in the American League. But the hottest teams in baseball right now are potential wild card teams; the Milwaukee Brewers, gamely rallying after their superstar Christian Yelich went down for the season with a knee injury and Rays, A/s and Indians who all have played fantastic down the stretch, though only two of them will make the wildcard game.
However it is the Minnesota Twins who most surprised me this year. They are on pace to win 100 games for only the second time in their club history. They have won with a rag tag assortment of starting pitchers, cast offs by and large and rehab projects, along with a lineup that has hit a startling 301 home runs as of Thursday. The faithful Twins fans hoped they would do better than last year, but I don’t think anyone thought that they would be as good and as entertaining as they have been. Will this team win it all and bring home a world series championship to Minnesota? My heart says I hope so, but my head says they don’t have enough starting pitching and are prone to too many errors fielding for this team to make a deep run in the playoffs. They will likely play the Yankees in the first round of the playoffs and the Yankees have won a staggering 13 straight post season games against the Twins. But streaks eventually end and sometimes the underdog rises up and does the impossible, win.
Congrats to this 2019 team and best of luck in the post season. Regardless if they win or lose, its been a fun year being a fan and I can’t wait to see what this team with a little more pitching might accomplish in 2020.
Fourteen Lines 