My big brother fancied himself a baseball hurler, a righthander with promise, when I was a kid in North Dakota. He threw heat, and to tighten the screws on his helter-skelter delivery, he drew a square using chalk on the brick wall of a neighborhood school and on weekends commanded me to stand about three feet in front of it, bat in hand, and "hit anything I could see."
For long hours during those training exercises, baseballs rained down on me like meteors, and with about as much accuracy. Years later the great Yogi Berra, the malapropism all-star, would famously opine that, "In baseball, you don't know nothing," an existential if not altogether nutty utterance that somehow made sense to me, the kid who passed his formative years perpetually bruised.
We were still kids, my brother and I, when our parents picked up and moved to Michigan.
The first thing you need to know about Michigan, as the prodigious Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter once said, especially about playing baseball in Michigan, is that it's really cold — a fact so particularly true in the Upper Peninsula, where our family landed, that the small school in our small town fielded no baseball squad.
Home plates, after all, are intended to be dusted off, not shoveled.
So it was that until my phone rang a couple weeks back with an invitation to toss the honorary first pitch Saturday night when the Twins play the Texas Rangers, I hadn't been thinking much about America's pastime.
Don't mistake, I'm a Twins fan. But the stats I pay attention to aren't those typically highlighted in the team's media guide. Joe Mauer, for instance, likes to shoot his bow, or so I've heard. The second baseman, Brian Dozier, grew up hunting and fishing, and still does both. And the club's hometown slugger, the big guy with the quick wrists and two World Series rings, Kent Hrbek, never waves off a sign telling him to bait up for walleyes or lock and load for ducks.
So, too, Ron Davis, the hard-throwing Yankee reliever who was traded to the Twins in 1982 in the deal that sent Roy Smalley to New York.