contributed by Austro

It’s a bit of serendipity that Dark Star asked me to pinch-hit for this series, since the very first MLB game that I saw in person was at old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington.

My father’s parents lived in southeast Minnesota for as long as I can remember, and we would visit them most summers when I was young, and sometimes they would take us to Twins games. That first game was in 1967, I think, and it was definitely against the Red Sox. Harmon Killebrew was huge, Rod Carew was smooth, and Tony Oliva unloaded a couple of bats into the stands. What with all of the televised games that we would watch when we visited my grandparents and the Twins’ general underdog status, I’ve always had a soft spot for them. Of course, they were always in the “other” league, so that didn’t present much of a conflict. Thank heaven my grandparents didn’t live in Seattle.

***

I grew up in Colorado (Grand Junction – also home to the late, great mihoba – and Denver) and Wyoming (Riverton, pretty much smack in the middle of the state), and we did a lot of camping and other outdoor activities when I was young. (You haven’t been cold until you’ve been winter camping at elevation in Colorado.) From that I developed a pretty good appreciation of nature and the outdoors. But when I was in high school we moved to the Chicago area, and the outdoor activities started to taper off. Nowadays I’m pretty much a city boy except for the occasional canoe trip with college buddies.

My wife and I live in northwest Austin, and while we’re definitely not “out in the country”, the nature of the terrain means that there is still a lot of undeveloped (and undevelopable) land. Like many others, our cul-de-sac backs onto a ravine that is home to one of the Bull Creek tributaries. Of course, that also means that it’s home to a variety of wildlife. Just off the top of my head, I know I’ve seen the following creatures in or near our yard: deer, skunks, raccoons, possums, armadillos, coyotes, rabbits, rat snakes, coral snakes, ribbon snakes, garter snakes, alligator lizards, spiny lizards, great horned owls, red-shouldered hawks, red-tailed hawks, kites, blue herons, and green herons. And, of course, all of the usual small rodents, songbirds, frogs, toads, and geckos that one sees everywhere.

In spite of these constant reminders that we’re actually the intruders in the area, we tend to think that the animals recognize the same boundaries that we do: the neighbors’ back yards are the dividing line, the canyon side of the boundary belongs to the animals, and this side belongs to us. Most of the time, that’s exactly the way it works. But every once in a while we’re reminded that the animals don’t really care about dividing lines.

***

Friday, August 2 – 7:10pm
Cosart (RHP, 1-0, 0.86) vs Deduno (RHP, 7-4, 3.18)

Since Cosart has just come up, he hasn’t faced any current Twins. But he has pitched well in his three starts, and his performance has been extremely encouraging. At the same time, the Astros have never seen Deduno before, and he’s right-handed, and we all know what that means. Selig may have to come out and call this one a tie.

***

When I married my wife, I also married her affinity for cats. As a result, we’ve had cats in our homes for nearly 34 years. She and I share the opinion that in spite of the risks, cats deserve to be able to spend time outside. And that means that over the years I have built a wide variety of cat doors for this purpose. In fact, I now regret not having captured a photographic history of these efforts. I’ve built high doors with intermediate perches, self-centering bi-directional doors, and Frank Lloyd Wright-esque cantilevered perches for elevated doors. As an engineer, I can hardly help myself.

As useful as all of these doors have been, they’ve all suffered from the same fatal flaw: any creature willing to stick its head through the door could use it. In most cases, we “protected” ourselves by designing things so that an animal would have to go through an outside door into a garage and then find a second door and go through that to get into the house. That’s certainly not foolproof, but combined with most animals’ natural timidity when approaching something unfamiliar, it worked for a surprisingly long time.

The first time it didn’t work we were away on a short vacation. When we returned we went into the house and immediately sensed that something was wrong. There was nothing immediately visible, but the sensation was palpable and unmistakable. As we started to walk around we noticed that certain foodstuffs (for example, bags of chips destined for our girls’ summer camp lunch bags) had been opened and eaten. We went upstairs and discovered that something had had a party with leftover Easter candy in our daughters’ bedrooms. We came back downstairs and discovered that the invaders had taken an occasional dump around the perimeter of the living room. Then we went back out into the garage and came face-to-face (or, more accurately, face-to-tail) with a skunk. It turned out to be a mother skunk with three babies, and they were setting up shop in the garage. They scurried into one of their hiding spots, so we started removing everything else from the garage. Eventually we removed everything else they could hide under or behind and waited them out until they left. Fortunately for us, they never returned to the garage. But I was motivated to up my cat door game.

***

Saturday, August 3 – 6:10pm
Bedard (LHP, 3-8, 4.28) vs Gibson (RHP, 2-3, 6.21)

Having played for Baltimore and Seattle before joining Houston, Bedard has more history against the Twins than anybody else on the staff. Unfortunately, that history is not encouraging. Morneau and Mauer have the lion’s share of the appearances against him, Morneau with a .379/.406/.655 line with 11 RBI in 32 appearances and Mauer with a .316/.381/.368 line in 21 appearances (but, somehow, no RBI). Gibson was the Twins’ first-round pick in 2009, and he just came up at the end of June. This will be his 7th start and first against the Astros, so they’ll be throwing the curse at us on consecutive nights.

***

After the skunk episode I started looking into more defensive cat doors, and I found a winner. Some genius found a gas that becomes conductive in the presence of a magnetic field and used that to build a switch of sorts. A vial gets filled with the gas, the vial goes in a lip in the bottom of the cat door frame, and it gets put in an electrical circuit between a battery and an electromagnet. A magnet goes on your cat’s collar, and when the cat dangles the magnet over the lip, its magnetic field makes the gas in the vial conduct, closing the switch. The resulting current flow energizes the electromagnet, and that pulls down a latch and releases the door. Without a magnet, an animal can’t get in. There’s also a manual latch that one can set that prevents the door from being opened in either direction.

In the interim we had built a screened porch and a new deck off the back of the house, and we used one of these doors to control access from the deck into the porch, with a second cat door (with no latch) in a window to allow the cats to come into the house from the porch. This system worked great for quite a while, but one night its flaw was exposed. The door is designed so that the electromagnetic latch is only on the inside of the door and only impedes the inward travel of the door; once inside, anything can exit by pushing the door outward, magnet or no. This would seem to be good enough to keep wildlife out, but anybody who has watched raccoons long enough probably knows what happened next.

One night I was asleep upstairs and was awakened by strange sounds from the porch. I determined that the cats were already inside, so I was certain that some other critter was screwing around with the door. I went downstairs and looked through the window, and sure enough, a raccoon was on the deck poking around the door. I cleverly decided that I would scare the crap out of it, so I burst out onto the porch and started yelling at the raccoon. That’s when I discovered that there was at least one other raccoon already inside the porch. I realized that at just about the same time that I realized that I had also left the door back into the house open. There was a mad scramble, and a raccoon flew out the cat door, but in all of the frenzy, it was impossible to tell how many had been on the porch and whether any had escaped into the house. I flipped the super-duper manual nothing-goes-in-nothing-goes-out switch on the door and headed into the house to figure out whether there was a raccoon in there. After about fifteen minutes of heart-pounding searching, I decided that there had only been one raccoon inside the porch, and that everything was ok inside the house, but for the rest of the night I had to check out every little sound I heard.

It turned out that these clever raccoons had figured out that they could use their terribly dextrous paws and slip a claw under the door flap, hook it, pull it out (rather than push it in), hold it up, and then enter that way. Bastards. After that we adopted a policy of locking the cats in for the night and using the super-duper latch to keep anything from coming in or going out the cat door, and things were fine for a good while.

***

Sunday, August 4 – 1:10pm
Keuchel (LHP, 5-5, 4.63) vs Pelfrey (RHP, 4-9, 5.31)

Mr. Happy’s favorite pitcher has only faced one current Twin, Kevin Correia, but he has owned him to the tune of 0-4 with 1 strikeout and no walks. Extrapolating from that data, I predict a perfect game for Keuchel. Of course, the fact that Correia is a pitcher may mean that there’s a flaw in my methodology. This is Pelfrey’s first year with the Twins. He played all 7 of his previous seasons with the Mets, but the Astros are so young that he’s only faced two of them: Castro (0-3) and Wallace (1-3, 2K). I don’t know how he’s missed Altuve, but baseball-reference.com wouldn’t lie to me, so I guess he has.

***

That brings us to last week. My wife was out of town, so it was just me and the cats, who like to sleep out on the porch when the weather is nice. On Thursday night I was awakened by a sound I didn’t recognize, and then by the sound of the cats tearing around downstairs and then racing up the stairs. But there was nothing after that, and I decided that they had just been chasing each other, so I went back to sleep. When I got up Friday morning, I went down to the porch to open the door and let the cats out, but, surprisingly, they didn’t come with me. On the porch I was once again struck by that feeling that something was wrong, and as I looked around I noticed that the stool that the cats use to go through the second cat door into the house was knocked over. Then I noticed that there were little puddles on the porch floor near the outside cat door, and those puddles turned out to be cat urine. After that I noticed that the screen next to the cat door appeared to have a small tear at the bottom. But when I investigated that, I discovered that the screen was actually torn completely from the frame on two sides. Apparently something, probably a coyote, had come after the cats in the middle of the night. The attack literally scared the piss out of the cats, but the screen apparently offered enough resistance to allow the cats time to escape into the house.

I started some makeshift repairs on the screen, and after about two hours of sniffing everything on the porch, one of the cats screwed up her courage and went out into the back yard for a few minutes; the other cat never left the house all day. Even now, a week later, neither cat is in a hurry to go outside, and they come back in pretty quickly after they go out. And I’ve got an ongoing project to reinforce the porch screens.

***

Injury Report

Twins
Brian Dozier (SS) – Day-to-day, back stiffness.
Darin Mastroianni (RF) – Due back any day, left ankle surgery.
Wilkin Ramirez (LF) – TBD, concussion-like symptoms. How is that different from a concussion?
Josh Willingham (LF) – Early August, left knee. It’s clearly risky to play the outfield in Minnesota.
Tim Wood (P) – TBD, right rotator cuff inflammation and biceps tendonitis. Pride prevents me from going for the easy joke here.

Astros
Jose Altuve (2B) – Day-to-day, tight left quad.
Trevor Crowe (LF) – 15-day DL, right shoulder sprain. Could return for this series.
Edgar Gonzalez (P) – 15-day DL, right shoulder sprain. Return TBD.
JD Martinez (LF) – 15-day DL, sprained left wrist. Return TBD.
Alex White (P) – Out for the season with Tommy John surgery.

Promotions and Giveaways

Friday – Fireworks after the game. Which is good, since there probably won’t be many during the game.
Saturday – First 20,000 fans get an oddly un-Twins-like cap, sponsored by Dairy Queen.
Sunday – Bike and walk to the ballpark. The first 1,000 bikers and walkers receive a special gift bag from Optum Health. 1000? What cheapskates. Those bags had better have about 5 pounds of gold in them.

***

One closing thought (besides hoping that my next wildlife encounter isn’t with a mountain lion): this entire AL experience is still quite odd. We should be in the NL Central making life difficult for the Pirates, not bopping around to foreign places like Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Seattle. I’m not sure whether I’ll ever get used to this, or whether I want to.

Fuck you, Bud Selig.