First Place

If you don’t count the winter months, when every team is in both first and last place, my son’s favorite baseball team has only been in first place for a handful of days in his young lifetime. Prior to this weekend, it had only happened briefly at the beginning of the 2007 season, when he was only three months old and not really able to fully enjoy it. Now that he is 15 months old, the Twins have found themselves in an unlikely position on top of the AL Central. Sure, they are only 30 games into the season and but two games better than .500, but the father in me is going to make sure that my son knows how rare an occasion this might be.

In contrast, my wife married into a baseball family in in August of 2001, the year that most remember as the starting point of the current success the local franchise has experienced. She watched the “Get to know ‘em” Twins mature and win four of five AL Central titles. For her, division wins for her favorite baseball team are par for the course, they happen more often than not.* All that does is make my job all the more important, to try and communicate the value of first place to a 15-month-old.

*You can’t really call my wife a fair weather fan, however, because she probably wouldn’t have had any interest in baseball at all had she not decided to spend her life with me. Now she has a collection of bobble heads in her basement and ticket stubs representing her visits to multiple ballparks around the country.

I don’t expect it to last this time (how do you explain small sample size to someone so young?), but the small hope that it might is enough to create some excitement where it had been lacking a month ago. Though their plate discipline is still worst in the league (63 walks and .310 OBP through Sunday, both last in the AL), the Twins offense has seemed to come alive over the past week, scoring 29 runs in five games since being shut out at Texas on the last Sunday in April. Will it continue? Probably not. Will the rest of the division continue to play sub-.500 baseball? Probably not. But they might, and the fact that I can even speculate in that direction makes the first month plus of the 2008 season a success.