Might be Joe Mauer's last game. True to form, he's working his hardest not to make a big deal out of it. I stopped watching the Twins a month ago, when they announced Byron Buxton wasn't going to get a September call-up, punishing him for bad performance that they themselves credited to his willingness to play through injury. It's just a temporary protest for a front office that I believe behaved dishonorably, and I'll be back on board when 2019 opens up and we try this bullshit again. But it means that I missed a bunch of what might be my favorite player's last season. That's kind of a bummer, but it's supposed to be fun right?

In any case, if this is Mauer's last season then he'll wrap up with something in the range of .306/.388/.439 in fifteen seasons and just shy of 8000 plate appearances. His catching career ended prematurely due to concussion issues, but it remains his primary position by a pretty big margin, and he did it well - earning three gold gloves in the process. He won an MVP in 2009, following MVP-worthy seasons in 2006 and 2009.

I moved to Chicago in 2002 for grad school, and the Twins were a weird lifeline there. I'm not particularly friendly or pleasant, and being from somewhere else has always been an easy identity to inhabit and allowed me to make friends on my own terms. In Chicago, I was the Twins guy. It let me meet other Twins people, cranky White Sox fans, and general saintly folks who indulge weird out-of-towners who won't shut up about their sports team.

I watched his 2004 debut with skepticism. I was happy for the apparent (according to prospect-watchers) haul from the Pierzynski trade, but saw Pierzynski's role with the Twins as precisely what I loved about the early-00's Twins, an overachieving, emotional leader who'd do anything to win. Mauer seemed like the precise opposite: a sublimely gifted athlete who'd succeeded at every level, who apparently played with an unnerving maturity that made me worry how he'd handle the inevitable slumps - which he literally never had until his appearance at the highest level - of MLB play. He won me over immediately with his willingness to work the count (an mostly novel skill among those Twins squads, except for Corey Koskie and the imported Shannon Stewart) and patiently wait for his pitch. His skillset dovetailed perfectly with my growing awareness of how an MLB offense should work, and he *immediately* struck me as the guy who'd take the scrappy, overachieving Twins to the next level, gathering a pair of hits and a pair of walks whilst making baseball look like the dumbest, easiest thing in the world.

In his second name, he hurt his knee sliding for a foul pop-up and missed almost two months. His play the rest of the season was "eh" but the impression was already made, and even a further "eh" 2005 season didn't change my mind.

Since that debut, I've:

-finished a master's program
-gotten married
-bought a home
-started a PhD program
-read approximately 1000 books in six different languages
-adopted, loved, and buried four cats and four dogs
-lived in seven apartments in three cities
-coached baseball (badly)
-sold a home
-learned to cook (mixed bag there, but I braised some shortribs last week and put them in my four cheese mac-and-cheese, sooooo....)
-coached track (adequately)
-wrote a dissertation (just... awfully. it's so bad)
-finished a PhD program
-stayed married (seems worth a mention)
-gained sixty pounds
-lost twenty five of those
-started teaching

It's not the most interesting life, and if the two okayplayers I've met personally are any indication, most of you have had much bigger, weirder, and more adventurous ones. But it's mine and I'm pretty okay with it. And Joe Mauer's been patiently taking strikes and hitting left-center gap doubles for the entire time, which means that *if* he retires after this season I'm going to need some new way to mark my baseball fan age. And if he doesn't retire, then we will have done something almost comically Joe Mauer-ish - waited until he had all the information he needed to make a decision and did so with dull competence and steadiness.

I really don't want to see him play for another team, though. Anybody else tuning in today? There's no "there" to this post. The actual end of an era for somebody with a rich inner life he literally*never* reveals to us is just going to mark another baseball game among literal thousands I've watched. So, I'll just watch it. I'm going to guess he goes 1-3 with a walk and a single.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad