I never expected this.

The MVP this year was supposed to be between Derek Jeter of the Yankees and David Ortiz of the Red Sox.

The two Minnesota Twins candidates – Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau – were supposed to split the votes, causing both to lose out.

East Coast Bias®™ was supposed to render a small-market American League player hopeless, constantly overlooked by reporters and slotted as lower in talent than New York and Boston stars.

I guess that’s why they vote, isn’t it?

Congratulations to Justin Morneau – the man that led the Minnesota Twins to an improbable regular season comeback; who hit .321, had 34 homers and 130 RBI; and who made only $385,000 last season. Yeah. $385 thousand gets you an MVP these days. In the National League, where MVP Ryan Howard’s salary is $355 thousand, you’d even have 30K left to spend on concessions.

Some people call it a bad choice. Well, you know what? The votes are all that mattered. Derek Jeter probably deserved to win the MVP this year. In fact, I’m almost certain he did. I’d have voted for Joe Mauer, myself. I don’t even think Morneau is the best player on his TEAM.

But, you see, sometimes the votes fall in favor of a guy with more emotion behind him – the guy who can get his team to play better and can charge up a clubhouse like no other – instead of the player with better stats, more marketability, and sheer popularity.

Ask Steve Nash. It happened to him twice. And there’s no denying it. The baseball writers of the nation have spoken. The sports writers around the world have spoken. This year, at least, they’ve voted en masse for Canadians – Nash, NHL MVP Joe Thornton, and now Morneau. Which is pretty sweet, actually.

But it’s even sweeter that a Minnesota Twin is the Most Valuable Player of the American League for the first time since Rod Carew won it in 1977.

The Minnesota Twins had the best pitcher (Cy Young winner Johan Santana, which wasn’t a surprise and therefore didn’t make it to BMOWP’s front page) and the best hitter. And they still lost in the first round. Is this what it’s like to be a Twins fan?

If so; God help me.

The Cardinals have just won the World Series. Regardless of how bad the press seems to think they were, and how many Detroit fans want to say they don’t deserve it, they’ve won. It comes down to this: no one else could beat them. Their regular season record meant nothing. The Cardinals were the best team this postseason, and they’ve got the World Series trophy to prove it.

I admit, it’s kind of weird. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. That’s my team – my old team, actually; the first professional sports team I ever felt attached to. I could have been celebrating a World Series win today. Instead, I’m watching it from afar.

Before everything – before the Michael Jordan-era Bulls and the Miami Dolphins, and way before the Twins and Pacers, I was a Cardinals fan. My grandparents, who lived south of Cincinnati, took me to Reds games, often when the Cardinals were playing. So at the age of four, I saw Ozzie Smith. I saw Willie McGee. I didn’t comprehend a single thing that was going on, but I was there. And I always remembered that. I connected to them. They were my team.

The Cardinals were an easily identifiable franchise with a deep history and one of the top stars in the game – Ozzie Smith. He did back flips, and his name was “The Wizard,” and those two things made it impossible for me to like anyone else. I stuck by them for a long time.

I fostered a hatred for the Minnesota Twins for a long time after 1987, the year they bumped the Cardinals out of the World Series. I was too young to remember the 1982 Series win, so I figured they’d never win. It was my first sports heartbreak.

My teams have won championships before. In fact, I was spoiled by the Chicago Bulls for three years. But as time went on, the Cardinals became an afterthought, and through the strike years of baseball, they became a negligent part of my life.

So it’s weird that this year – the year I stopped sitting on the fence and embraced the Minnesota Twins after years of restraint and common sense – would be the Cardinals’ year. They were my first team. And now they’ve won a championship. It’s like losing track of a good grade school friend. You find yourself hearing about them from time to time through your parents’ friends, and then you discover that they have signed to a huge movie deal, becoming wealthy beyond anything you could have imagined in grade school.

You know that, if you were still close friends, you’d be right there with him. You’d be shaking his hand and celebrating his good fortune, and you would be set up for life yourself, because you’d been such a great friend. Such a confidant. He couldn’t imagine doing it with you. But instead, you can only watch from afar, thinking about what it would be like to be celebrating.

Sure, I’m happy for them. But I can’t celebrate for them. I lost that right when I made the choice to be a Twins fan.

Congratulations, St. Louis.

*sigh*

If you asked me the chances of this Twins team being swept, I’d have given you a big zero.

But now? Well, looks like I’m back to “simply rooting against the Yankees.”

Fandom can be a bitter mistress, can’t it?

There’s always next year. Etc.

Baseball fever. It’s here. It’s playoff time. Every game means something, and every game is fantastic. And it all starts in about an hour.

Even as a casual hardly-fan, I always wanted to watch the MLB playoffs. There really is nothing better. It’s pure adrenaline, where every pitch is important and every hit is meaningful. And this year, after a one year hiatus, the Twins are back in the playoffs. It’s their fourth division win in five years. And this, I believe, is their year.

The best record in baseball over the last 100 games? Not the Yankees. Not the Mets. Neither New York team could match the blistering pace that one small market team, a team eagerly awaiting a new stadium, a team missing its Rookie of the Year candidate yet still winning games with a dink and dunk, piranha-esque lineup, could.

The Minnesota Twins.

And not only did they have the best record over the last 100 games, but they ended the season just one game away from having the best record in the league. Do you want to know the last time something like this happened – a team left for dead coming back from behind to win the division? 2003. The Florida Marlins did it. And they won the World Series.

The Minnesota Twins have rekindled my love for baseball. And after a decade of disappointing, underachieving Pacers and Dolphins teams, I finally have a team that I can call a sure fire winner.

When I finally gave in – when I finally became a fan – the Twins were in third place, frantically trying to get into the Wild Card hunt, pounding out wins with a newfound small-ball Murderer’s Row and the two best pitchers in the league. A few months later, I had to chance to see them live for the first time since I was five. They played the Detroit Tigers. They lost, 8-6. They were 59-43, and Brad Radke got his 8th lost. He would have just one more for the season.

Let’s go further back. On June 10th, they were 25-33, eight games below .500. No problem. It took them the rest of the season to lose another 33 games. By then, they were in first place, erasing an 11 ½ game deficit while becoming the most feared team in the league. No Torii Hunter? No Fransico Liriano? No Brad Radke, Shannon Stewart, or Joe Mauer (at least for a good chunk of games as he sat out due to the rigor of playing catcher)?

No problem.

The Twins are in the playoffs. They won the division rather easily, near the end, as if they weren’t even trying. And now, they’re poised to be the biggest championship favorite in my fanhood since I was a Bulls fan in the early 90’s.

This championship is the Twins’ to lose. There’s a lot of emotion penned up in this. It was 15 years ago that they last won the World Series. Brad Radke is retiring after this year. This could be his last chance.

Do it for Radke. Do it for Liriano, who played a hell of a season and is unfairly relegated to the bench after a season ending injury.

Do it for the memory of Kirby Puckett.

Go Twins.

I don’t know exactly when it was that I turned into a baseball fan.

Wait. Let me start over.

I don’t know exactly when it was that I turned into a baseball follower. I’m not a fan, by any means. I’m extremely fickle in my rooting. I don’t care about losing teams, and I don’t care about any game before the All-Star break.

The simple fact is this: 162 games is an awful lot. I can hardly keep attention for 82 regular season basketball games, and that’s my sport of choice. No, for me, the season doesn’t start until the All-Star break. After that, the storylines become more crucial. The teams that are struggling are forgotten – as they should be – and the contenders are boosted up. By this point, my three teams of interest (Cardinals [the team of my youth], Twins [the team of my rebirth], and the A’s [the team that exhibits my personal values in effective team construction]) have either forged ahead or can be forgotten about.

We’ve seen recently that what happens in the first half of the season really has nothing to do with how the whole thing ends. The Florida Marlins proved this three years ago when they came from nowhere to win lots of games and eventually beat the Yankees in the World Series.

This year is no different. My inner Cardinals fan backed Albert Pujols’ drive for history as he hammered out home runs faster than anyone had in the history of the game. The Twins were floundering early, saving us all the struggle of watching them lose their division lead with three weeks left in the season. The A’s were playing well from the start, which was odd for a team that makes its best drive in the second half. It looked like a good season to back the Cardinals.

Then Albert went down. And the A’s slid back into mediocrity.

Through it all, the team I always want to support – the team I adopted as my team of choice after spending four years in Minnesota – has given me a reason to watch again. Namely, they’re one game out in the playoff race (and up 7-4 in the bottom of the 9th at the time of posting). They’ve won a ridiculous amount of games — 32 of 40 or something like that. They’ve got two young pitchers that could rival the duo of Schilling and Johnson. And they’ve got the best hitter in the game. They’re scoring. They’re pitching. They’re unbelievable.

I always doubt, but I always seem to come back. Let’s start backing the Twins, friends.

In true symbolic fashion, I’ll be rekindling my newfound love of baseball this weekend with tickets to see the Twins play the division leader Detroit Tigers. The beer will flow like rain, and though I won’t see Santana or Liriano pitch, I’ll at least get to hang out in the cheap seats with good friends and a hot-as-hell team.

Yeah, I’m a casual fan. But it takes time to re-acclimate to baseball’s charms after years of neglect. You’ll have to forgive me – I’m fair-weather, I’m arbitrary, and I’m a carpetbagger. But for the rest of the season, the Twins have a chance to gain another lifelong fan.

And if they by chance win the World Series – well, you read it here first. I’m a Minnesota Twins Fan. So help me God.

Someone had better order me a t-shirt.