Twins Beat Writers Haunted by Ghost of Do-Hyoung Park at Spring Training

[Lou Hennessy]

The popular writer for MLB.com transitioned to a new job (and astral plane) this offseason. 

Image courtesy of Purple Wolf Graphics

Clue: The eerie presence of this two-time Jeopardy! loser has been felt by multiple members of the Twins’ beat over the last week.
Answer: Who is Do-Hyoung Park?

This year marks the first spring training in nearly a decade wherein Park isn’t covering the club, but some of his former peers are adamant that they still feel his spirit lurking in the depths of Lee County Sports Complex, the home of the Twins (and, as spillover due to overpopulation in the Tampa metro, the souls of the unfulfilled) for roughly seven weeks each year. 

“It was weird, I was taking a grainy video of Joe Ryan throwing his first bullpen session last week, and my phone turned white hot,” said Betsy Helfand of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, as she bottled a few ounces of holy water from a local church. “It fell to the ground, and when I picked it up I could have sworn I saw Do’s face in the reflection on the screen.”

Later in the week, Royce Lewis was taking batting practice when he clobbered a ball to the top of the berm in left field for a long home run. As it landed, everyone on the field heard the same voice whisper in their ears simultaneously:

“Guess what the swing speed on that one was. . .”

Later in the evening, members of the media went to Fort Myers Brewing for their annual trivia outing. Park was notorious for his incredible trivia prowess (did you know he was on Jeopardy!, back when network TV was still a thing?), so this was always a big event for him to show off in front of the other media jackals. 

When the crew couldn’t figure out the answer to a mid-round question in this instance, another unexplained event occurred to the suddenly paranoid media members. 

“The question was ‘John F Kennedy was a notable dropout of this university in 1940’ and I guess none of us could come up with Stanford University as the answer,” said Phil Miller of the Minnesota Star-Tribune, as he put the finishing touches on his homemade dream catcher. “When it went unanswered, my Hazy IPA suddenly transformed into what appeared to be boiling blood. I still finished it, but cripes.”

Park, of course, was a proud Stanford alumnus. 

The reflection in Helfand’s phone could have been a simple mistake on a hot afternoon. The whispers after the Lewis bomb were a weird development, but they're hard to conclusively characterize. But the boiling blood at the unanswered Stanford trivia question points directly to a supernatural phenomenon, the likes of which haven’t been seen in these parts since Pat Reusse spilled his Diet Coke on a local sacred burial ground in 2011. 

“Look, it was hard enough to get Do to take a hint and leave us over the winter. I’m not ready to start seeing him, or his specter, just yet,” said Twins Daily’s John Bonnes, before landing a perfect kickflip while wearing his new Vans slip-ins. “And if he's going to try scaring someone off, he should be up in Minneapolis, doing it to Gleeman.”

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