Twins Video
1. Memory – I have a theory that eventually you just run out of RAM. You reach a certain age where your brain just can’t hold any more and when you learn new things… something has to fall out to make room for the new information. For example… I was surfing the web this morning and learning some new things and right now… at this very moment… I can’t remember where I put my car keys.
2. – Post-It Notes -- These little things were invented right here in Minnesota by Romy and Michele. My wife likes to post them honey-do style on the fridge. If a few days go by and they are still on the fridge and still unacted upon. She will take them off the fridge and stick them on my forehead. I tell her that this makes them really hard to read but she still does it anyway.
3. Bedtime – If you have to memorize something… experts say that the best thing to do is to study right before bed and right after waking. In a nutshell… too much crap happens during the main waking hours of the day to keep you from retaining new information. I can personally say that this method does indeed work because every night I read Twins Daily and every morning I read Twins Daily and can easily remember that the Twins have won 4 games in a row.
4. Good Times Bad Times – We do seem to have a tendency to remember the bad times more easily than the good times. I… on the other hand… only remember good times because I try to turn the bad times into good times and therefore only remember good times even if they were originally bad times.
5. Russ – I met Russ back in the 90’s when he was a young 70 something. I worked alongside him for maybe 10 years at the scorer’s table of many Basketball and Football games. I gave him crap and he gave it right back and I enjoyed every minute. It must have been 5 years into our working relationship that I found out that he was a Veteran of WWII. It took maybe 5 years because he never talked about it. It wasn’t that he couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about it… it just never came up in our conversation and that’s probably because I was more apt to talk about the flavor of a Banana then something important like this. Russ was a Lieutenant with the 164th Infantry. The 164th was the first Army unit to engage in offensive action at Guadalcanal in the Pacific providing reinforcements for the Marines already onshore and at the time in a deadlock with Japan in a battle for control of a strategic location in the South Pacific and the airfields on the island. The Island was nicknamed “Green Hell” and the 164th were green themselves and barely unpacked when the Japanese attempted to reclaim an airfield and ran out of the jungles in the middle of the night backed by air and naval support. The unit bent but did not break and they held the airfield despite overwhelming Japanese numbers. Taking a look at the scoreboard from that night… there were over 1,700 Japanese casualties while only 26 killed from the 164th. It was quite an introduction to the War for the unit and it impressed the Marines so much that the unit received the nickname the 164th Marines from the Marines. Russ made it all seem routine as he talked about it. The complete darkness of night, heavy tropical rain while holding off a full scale assault on their position, battling for control of an airfield and pushing back opposing forces to provide a safe distance from artillery for the airfield, followed by jungle patrols and offensive sweeps of the island to find remaining Japanese resistance hiding on the island… fighting in jungles and up mountainsides at the same time while also battling… malaria, heat exhaustion, exotic tropical diseases… it was all pretty routine stuff I’m sure… like a Saturday night in Mayville, I suppose.
6 months after arriving on the island the 164th was no longer considered combat ready. The unit had buried too many of its men on the island and the majority of those who survived had lost 20 plus pounds but what they managed to accomplish... was a turning point in the Pacific Theater. As I tried to imagine what the conditions were really like… all I could say to Russ was “Thank You” and I truly meant it. I heard of Russ passing last year and I heard of it too late to attend the funeral. I missed my chance to say goodbye. Today… just might be a good day to find his final resting place and say “Thank You” one more time.
Twins: SP Ervin Santana
1. Eduardo Nunez 3B
2. Brian Dozier 2B
3. Joe Mauer 1B
4. Miguel Sano DH
5. Robbie Grossman LF
6. Oswaldo Arcia RF
7. Eduardo Escobar SS
8. Juan Centeno C
9. Danny Santana CF
A's: SP Graveman
1. Coco Crisp CF
2. Jed Lowrie 2B
3. Stephen Vogt C
4. Danny Valencia 3B
5. Khris Davis LF
6. Billy Butler DH
7. Yonder Alonso 1B
8. Marcus Semien SS
9. Chris Coghlan RF
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