The student news site of Guilford College

The Guilfordian

The student news site of Guilford College

The Guilfordian

The student news site of Guilford College

The Guilfordian

For Twins fans, “wait ‘til next year” may not apply

Baseball is our national pastime and all baseball fans have their own special memories. If you’re a Yankee fan, you remember how you felt the first time you saw Yankee Stadium and if you’re a Red Sox fan, you remember the Green Monster and Bill Buckner. Through good memories and bad, through championship seasons and losing seasons, the baseball fan still comes, year after year. We all have our team, the team that we root for. We feel the joy of their success and we also feel the pain of their loss. So when the news came that Major League Baseball was getting rid of two teams, the collective hearts of all their fans hit the ground like a ton of bricks.

The two teams that seem likely to go are the Montreal Expos and the Minnesota Twins. With the Expos, they should have been gone a long time ago. People in Montreal do not care about this team and at games minor league teams often outdraw them.

With the Twins, however, contraction of this team breaks my heart. It’s true that the Twins hardly draw record crowds to their games and have long been one of the most anemic clubs in baseball. The difference between the Expos and Twins is that there are still Twins fans out there. With contraction, though, they are now left without a team. Just over a decade ago the Twins were World Series Champions, and showcased the great outfielder Kirby Puckett on their roster.

It is disappointing that baseball can overlook that, that they can overlook the fans and the history of this baseball club. If baseball ever eliminated my team, the Philadelphia Phillies, it would be a bitter pill to swallow. When I imagine not having a baseball team to root for, it allows me to feel only a small part of what the Twins fans might be feeling right now.

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoon and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.” – A. Bartlett Giamatti, MLB commissioner.

Come next season, I am going to have the opportunity to cheer my team to victory and I will take in ever moment spent at the ballpark. Unfortunately the people of Minnesota and all the Twins fans are never going to have that chance. Twins fans will never be able to cheer on their team or bask in the glory of a championship. The baseball fans creed is always “Wait till next year.” But what do you do when there is no next year?

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