RandBall: My long history of investing in bad baseball teams

In between meetings and other obligations on Wednesday, I managed to stay true to an opportunity I had spotted on the calendar.

I needed to get over to Target Field to see and feel this year’s version of the Twins with my own eyes. There’s a difference between watching bad baseball on TV or reading about a record-low attendance number and checking the vibe in person.

The stay was abbreviated, only for innings two through five, but it was enough to spark both immediate and broader observations.

Immediate observation: The vibe was better than I thought it would be. The crowd was announced at just a shade under 20,000, about twice as many as the record-setting one announced from a chilly and drizzly loss on Monday.

Fans were into the game, and the brand of baseball was equal to their modest but noted enthusiasm. The Twins had taken a 2-0 lead by the time I left — spending each of my four innings from different vantage points around Target Field, as I like to do when I pop in solo for a partial game — with good defense, good pitching and timely hitting.

Broader observation, which I discussed on Thursday’s Daily Delivery podcast: I feel unusually invested in this year’s Twins, and upon reflection that has been a theme in my baseball watching over the years.

To a certain degree I am invested in any and every Minnesota sports team because of my job.

But I have watched a lot of Twins baseball already this season, far above and beyond what is necessary to stay connected and speak/write about them. After I left Wednesday’s game and saw they had coughed up a late lead, I watched or listened to the rest of the game.

Why did I need to see it through to its conclusion? Did it really matter that much if the Twins fell to 6-13 or improve (as they did with a walk-off win in the 10th) to 7-12?

And then it hit me: I have an unusual affinity for bad baseball teams. We don’t know yet if these Twins fit that category or if they are a decent-to-good team off to a bad start, but my past choices are not in doubt.

My baseball fandom came of age in North Dakota during the mid-1980s with ravenous consumption of some absolutely terrible Atlanta Braves teams. They were always on TV (Superstation!), much to their own detriment.

It seemed like the worse they got (54-106 in 1988) the more I was determined to watch every single game, sometimes twice because of the always-set VCR.

I was devastated when they lost to the Twins in the 1991 World Series, but after coming to Minneapolis for college in the mid-1990s my viewing inevitably shifted.

By 1997 I was taking advantage of cheap outfield bleacher seats in a sparsely populated Metrodome and following a 94-loss Twins team.

There is of course something wonderful about watching your team win a championship, as the Braves did in 1995.

But there is also something strangely satisfying about hanging out with a few thousand other desperate baseball sickos and hoping the odds that are stacked against a team somehow go your way that night.