Okay, so that wasn’t the score of one game, but rather the whole weekend series. But the game I went to (Saturday afternoon) was nearly as bad — 18-1. (By comparison, Friday was 9-0, Sunday was 6-0.) At least we went to the one game where the Twins actually scored. I have pretty much nothing good to say about the game itself, so I’ll just leave you with the box score:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | R | H | E | |||
| Minnesota | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 7 | 1 | ||
| Detroit | 3 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 4 | 2 | 1 | X | 18 | 23 | 0 |
And with that out of the way, onto the positives…
My parents were in town to help me move and the Twins were also in town, so we drove into Detroit straight from the airport to catch the 1:05 PM game on Saturday. As it happens, this was the day of Tigers On-Field Clinic #1 before the game, and since we were there early, my mom and I wandered the field listening to various bits of advice about how to be a better ballplayer. Some key lessons learned:
- “You hold the bat like you’d hold a dove. Think about holding a dove — if you squeeze too tight, you’ll kill it. Now, if you’re holding a pigeon, go ahead and squeeze the little sucker all you want, I don’t care.” — Andy Van Slyke (Tigers First Base Coach) during the batting clinic
- “If you want to be a catcher, then I think you should try being a catcher. If you don’t, then that’s okay. Just find another position.” — Gene Lamont (Tigers Third Base Coach) during the catching clinic, which featured Vance Wilson, not Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez (which would have been cooler)
- “Parents need to let the kids be kids. Because let’s face it, when the game ends, they don’t care if they won or not. They just want pizza and ice cream.” — Unknown dude in a Tigers uniform during an unknown clinic that we caught the tail end of
Besides the clinic, we also wandered around the stadium a bit and took a ride on the Foul Ball Ferris Wheel. Have you ever ridden inside a baseball? Because now I have.
And as an added bonus on the day, my scorebook now has two signatures in it: Juan Rincon, pitcher for the Twins, and Mike Redman, back-up catcher who signed right under his name in the line-up of the August 21, 2005 game. Now here’s to hoping that at least one of them as a break-out year and becomes a star sometime soon.
And then there was that massacre of a ballgame… blech.
Colossus of Rhode 
Are you moving to a new apartment?
-QM
awesome ferris wheel!!!
I moved to a nine bedroom house in downtown Ann Arbor, with a similar setup to Ducksberry, as opposed to my old apartment in complex on the north, much less interesting, side of campus. For example, tonight I walked to a bar to go to trivia night with my new housemates. This was not possible from my old place, unless I wanted to walk for hours (which I did once and we got lost in a golf course, but that’s a story for another time…).