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| Chairman Mauer |
Joe Mauer played in what was likely his last professional baseball game last weekend. While the aging star is remaining coy about his future plans, the fact that the Twins sent him out for a ceremonial single pitch back behind the plate indicates they likely think his career is over. Did I cry watching that moment? You bet your sweet ass I did. Mauer's not just one of the most under appreciated Twins of all time, but represents even more to folks in my generation.
It's not just that he's a great ball player, though he was (is?) an amazing ball player. Check out this article and the comments for a sample of his impressive statistical achievements. Or check out this article for a much more sentimental look at his career achievements. Or check out this one. Or follow Aaron Gleeman's twitter account. I could easily provide you a few dozen more links, because God damn, dude could play baseball. While his entire career is pretty great, and we'll always be left to wander what ridiculous heights he could have achieved had not concussions robbed him of both much of his prime and his inhuman batter's eye, his 7 year peak as a catcher is arguably the best 7 years of any catcher ever, and while it's far from guaranteed, it's not too terribly difficult to put together a Hall of Fame argument for him.
In many ways, Mauer's life is like a sappy movie script -- he grew up in St. Paul, got drafted by the hometown team, became an All Star and MVP while playing his whole career for said hometown team. Hell, he even went ahead and had twin daughters just to make sure his life was as on the nose as possible. But what really made him lovable (and oddly hatable to some weird slice of the population) is how peak-Minnesota he is.
His first ubiquitous ad campaign was for milk. I'm pretty sure he genuinely said "golly" on a regular basis. I shit you not, when he was interviewed on-field after the game in which he collected his 2,000th hit, his first words were that it "sure was neat." His career hit spray chart looks like someone programmed a computer to the "solid fundamentals" setting. He says one of his favorite hobbies is mowing the lawn. Granted, there's a delightful symmetry in here in that he echoes Twin great and Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew who once said washing the dishes was his favorite hobby, but I think it's worth noting that a millionaire sports superstar in his 20s reported mowing the lawn as what he liked to do with his time off. This man is the state of Minnesota granted sentience.
Yet what made him so great was also what made him come across as boring to so many people. Mauer's skills weren't awesome home runs that make highlight reels, but instead opposite-field singles appreciated only by people over 65 who have coached at some point in their lives. I remember after one of his batting titles the Star Tribune published a giant graphic that was just his batting line from every game that season, and what stuck out the most was how ridiculously consistent he was. There weren't big hot streaks or slumps, just constantly one or two hits every single night (or, you know, the exact thing every hitter is trying to do, but only a rare few are capable of).
Weirdly enough, this all seems to have caused a significant and vocal section of the Twins fan base to just hate Mauer, to the point where even national publications are running stories wondering why Twins fans hate the greatest player they've had in a generation. For many of these people it was that Joe was somehow too much of a weakling to shake off a brain injury and just go back out there. For others, it was that he was paid for his work, which as this nice summary points out is incredibly stupid both because A) the family that owns the Twins is worth multiple billions and can easily afford it, and B) at least by FanGraphs valuation, Mauer produced at least $100 million more in value than he was paid by the Twins. For other, even more dumb people, it's because he never single-handedly won a World Series. Which, considering that Mike Trout, the greatest player alive, already by Baseball Reference WAR the 144th best player out of all 19,103 to ever play in the MLB, has only been to the playoffs once and didn't get out of the first round, should put to bed that argument.
I, on the other hand, in addition to remembering the near-decade of Hall of Fame-level play, choose to enjoy the fact that Mauer was actually quite incredibly weird in a fun, goofy way, albeit one hidden behind suffocating layers of Minnesotan reserve. Like the fact that despite being the #1 pick of the team, he shared a house with teammate Justin Morneau, and for many years, when new players were called up from AAA, they would stay in their basement. Although a google search is not turning it up, I swear to all that is Holy that I once read a profile about what it was like inside the Mauer and Morneau house, and it was an adorable baseball version of the odd couple, where the fastidious Mauer has all of his shoes carefully arranged in his closet, and the slovenly Morneau has empty pizza boxes all over his room with his curtains actually just bedsheets he nailed over the windows. Hell, Mauer once had a beat-making lab in his house because he's so into rap music. Seriously, this guy had a studio for making rap music. Tell me that's not funny and endearing.
The funny thing to me about having to defend why people should like Joe Mauer is that I'm not a particularly big fan of his. I actually have his jersey, but it's only because I bought it when I was broke grad student and knew I could only ever afford one nice realistic jersey (though it's definitely still a knock off, I ain't paying clubhouse prices), so I had to go with someone I knew would never leave the team. I don't want to be walking around Target Field with a fucking Boof Bonser jersey on or some shit. And yeah, his style of play can definitely be pretty boring at times. And, of course, he himself seems to be pretty boring most of the time. But he's also a really fucking good baseball player.
A large part of my defensiveness about Mauer, despite the obvious fact that he's arguably a Hall of Famer but many Twins fans think of him as a bum, is that he really represents an era of not only Twins baseball, but of my life. Joe's only a few months younger than I am, and came up to the big league level the same year I moved to Minneapolis, so I've always felt a special affinity for the guy. Moreover, he was central to the scrappy Twins teams of the 2000s that really coincided with me falling back in love with the game of baseball after not really having paid much attention to it since I quit little league.
Even though those teams never won anything of much importance, they were fun as hell to watch. And despite the lack of post season success, I did get to see a Cy Young and two MVPs during the stretch I lived in Minneapolis, and the far lesser impressive but insanely fun rise of The Piranhas, so it's always an era I'll remember fondly. Beyond how the team performed, my affinity for that era is probably due a lot more to the fact that it coincided with the majority of my 20s and my first time living in a major metropolitan area. The Twins of that era, and their incredibly shitty home field, were perfect for a young, broke graduate student. Tickets, which were never expensive, were available for 5 bucks on Wednesday nights, which were also Dollar Dog nights. Someone like me with basically no money could go to a game AND get dinner AND still afford a few overpriced ballpark beers. This era of Twins baseball also coincided with the time that my brother and I both lived in Minneapolis, and much of actually getting to know one another again as adults happened with a Twins loss going on in the background.
In the end, I'd argue that's really where the value of baseball lies. As the late great George Carlin noted, a baseball game is a lot more like a picnic than anything. Even the structure of the season belies how unimportant most games are -- lose tonight and there's a hundred more chances to get it back. Yeah, winning is great, but really baseball is about the experience. I'd probably rather watch a bunch of Twins losses with my friends at the field than I would want to watch the Twins win a World Series by myself in my living room.
So yeah, a lot of this affection has little to do with the team, but there was one constant through it all, and that's Joe Mauer. So I'm probably prone to be a bit overly-protective of the guy and/or inflate his importance. I'm definitely not arguing he's, like, a good person or anything; I don't know the guy and if the past few years have taught us anything, it's that the public face of famous people is often very different than what they're really like.
The point is just that he's undoubtedly one of the best Minnesota Twins ever and yet a lot of Twins fans think he sucks. That's dumb. If you don't like Joe Mauer, fuck you.
Image credit to the dearly-missed blog of Bat Girl
