But this year, ooh ho, this year I wore it three days in a row last week. For three straight games, the Twins beat the team they were trailing in the standings and by the end of the third game, had taken over first place. The oversized authentic Twins jersey had something to do with it, I’m sure.

With the Twins and White Sox in a one-game, Winner Take All playoff tiebreaker game, of course the oversized authentic Twins jersey had to make a fourth appearance. Of course it did.

But I didn’t stop there. I stopped by Hy-Vee and picked up my “Lucky Pizza”, which is a 12″ Traditional Crust Beef pizza. Seriously, you laugh but the Lucky Pizza never fails me. I’m convinced if I ate the Traditional Crust Beef Pizza from Hy-Vee every day, my life would be one continuous stream of domination. I would probably be a head of state by now. But the tradeoff would be that I would weigh 600 pounds and have to wear bed sheets for pants, with clothes pins strategically placed to fashion makeshift legs out of the bed sheet.

No, much like the oversized authentic Twins jersey, I only dine on the 12″ Traditional Crust Beef Pizza from Hy-Vee a few times a year. It too has never failed me. Just imagine, the forces of the jersey and the pizza combined! My enemies scarcely dare give it utterance; the mere thought makes them queasy.

You know its bad when my brother calls me hoping for calm, because usually I’m the one wildly bouncing off walls. “Who the hell are these jokers they got from the Mets?” he asked me. I tried to explain to him that they were good prospects, and that he shouldn’t rush to judge them because he didn’t know who they were.

After all, the Twins had done this sort of thing before, and had come out better off more often than not. Heck, they’d even done it with the Mets before, trading defending Cy Young Award winner and World Series MVP Frank Viola in 1989 for five prospects — three of which were key pieces to the Twins World Champion two years later.

They’d done it to the Yankees, trading the best leadoff hitter in the game in the prime of his career, Chuck Knoblauch, for four prospects — two of which were cornerstones to their three-year playoff run from 2002-04.

My opinion was that they’d done it again — and that one or more of the prospects would be key pieces to a winner in 2010 when their new ballpark opens.

***

Of course, having suffered through some of the worst baseball any team has ever played from 1993-2000, my brother and I were not too thrilled at the prospect of watching the team rebuild for the future. Yet that’s exactly what they were positioning themselves to do.

They let their starting centerfielder and defacto captain walk away and sign an overpriced deal with the Angels, a move I actually applauded. Torii Hunter was great once, and he’s still good now but in three years? He’ll be past his prime and still making HUGE dollars, and the Angels will be wishing they hadn’t given him the long contract.

They traded away their best pitcher. Oh, sure they resigned their MVP first baseman and All-Star right fielder to big contracts, but those seemed more like PR moves to keep the fanbase from a full-on revolt than anything else.

The “experts” almost universally picked them to finish fourth in their division, better only than the lowly Kansas City Royals. I disagreed, but only to a small degree: I figured best-case they would finish with around 78 wins and in third place. After all, the Indians had been a few outs from the World Series the year before and returned every single player from that team, most of them young and in the prime of their careers. The Tigers spent Yankee-type money to field an offense that looked invincible. I looked at things and wondered if the Twins could have competed even WITH Santana and Hunter.

***

On Opening Night, one of the players from the Mets in the Santana trade made a big first impression. Carlos Gomez showed that he is arguably the fastest player in the majors, smacking the ball all over the field and running crazy on the bases — and leading the team to a win in the first game of the year.

My brother, ever the realist, tempered my enthusiasm. “Their pitching is awful young, and 25% of their schedule is against the Tigers and Indians.”

True. What we didn’t count on is the Tigers fielding an expensive team that would lose 20 of their first 25 games, finding themselves buried by the end of April. The Indians, too, struggled, and it was the White Sox — a veteran team I thought was washed up — who took control of the division.

Throughout May, my Dad tried to tell me the Twins had a chance. “If they can make a run, the White Sox can be beaten!”

I figured there was no way this team of rookies could compete. This wasn’t Hollywood, and these weren’t actors unconvincingly pretending to be athletes. Yet there they were, hovering around .500 through May. June and July came and went, and the Tigers were proven to be frauds, falling out of the race entirely by mid-season. So too did the Indians, who traded away their best players at the end of July for prospects, effectively throwing in the towel on the season.

That left the veteran White Sox and the young Twins to battle for the division. National media types were quick to dismiss the Twins, thinking they would do what young teams do: fold in August and September. But for seven glorious weeks, the two teams battled back and forth, taking turns being in first place, neither team building a lead larger than 2.5 games.

***

When the teams last met in late July, fans were already circling the last week of September on their calendars. Three games with the Sox, at home.

“If the Twins can stay within a couple of games when that series rolls around…” we said. And here we are, in the last week of the season, and the Sox came to Minnesota with a 2.5 game lead.

The Twins promptly slapped them around the ballpark in the first game, knocking their starting pitcher out of the game early and rolling to a 9-3 win. My dad, brother and I were on the phone the entire night, sharing moments of disbelief. At one point I yelled so loudly at the TV that my neighbors rang the doorbell, concerned I’d hurt myself. “Jason Kubel just hit his second home run of the night!” I told them. I’m pretty sure they think I’m insane, and I probably am.

After all, I was wearing an authentic Twins jersey, cap and wristbands. In my living room. Shut up.

Wednesday night, the Twins won again, this time in a low-scoring high-drama pitchers duel, 3-2. Again my brother and I traded texts back and forth, and when they recorded the final out, we couldn’t believe this team was in this position.

.5 game out, 4 games to play, one of which is against the team you’re chasing. All at home.

The team we’d both written off in January, left for dead in April, and waited to collapse in August was now just a couple of wins away from a playoff berth in what was supposed to be a rebuilding year. Absolutely amazing.

You bet.

I’ve noticed over the last few years that my attention span is slowly getting shorter. Where I’ve really noticed it is in watching sports on TV. I can’t sit through an entire game without doing something else anymore. For example, last Saturday I was watching the Iowa football game on ESPN2 and before the first half had ended, I had the laptop open checking email. I don’t think I’ve watched an entire Twins game from beginning to end all year.

This is notable only because it wasn’t that long ago that I would record games when I had other plans and then watch them in their entirety, sometimes staying up until 2am doing so. Now I can’t even sit still long enough to watch a game live.

Ask Jack Bauhaus about it. He was over at my place to watch the Packer-Viking Monday Night game a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn’t even sit still with someone else in the room watching the game with me.

Well, for this Twins-White Sox series, I’m going to attempt an experiment. I am going to sit in my most comfortable chair before the first pitch, and I will not get up out of that chair until the end of the game. My laptop, my phone and the latest issues of my magazines will all be safely out of reach. I need to prove to myself that it is still possible for me to focus on a game without doing three other things at the same time. I doubt I can do it, but I have to at least try.

Someone asked me the other day if I was happy that the Twins could potentially make the playoffs while Johan Santana, their fantastic ex-pitcher and his new team the Mets, miss the playoffs. My answer was that yeah, I suppose so, but to be honest I really haven’t been following Santana anymore. This surprised some people, but when it comes to baseball, I don’t follow other teams closely.

Long before the Bush Doctrine, I had my own Max Univers Doctrine which applied to baseball players. Just as Bush unilaterally claims countries are either “with us or against us”, I have long said that baseball players are either “playing for the Twins or against the Twins.” What that means is that anyone who plays for the Twins is cool, and anyone who doesn’t is a punk. Period.

And it doens’t matter if a player used to play for the Twins, and has moved on elsewhere. One he leaves, he’s dead to me at least in terms of rooting interest. For example, Jack Morris played for the Tigers for many years during the ’80s, and pitched against the Twins in the 1987 playoffs. At the time, he was a bum. Then he played one year for the Twins and led them to a World Series title. For that one year, he was a great guy. Then he left and signed with Toronto, and he was a bum again. I remember booing him just seven months after his epic Game Seven performance for the Twins, purely because he was now the enemy.

My college roommate John will recall me turning my back on Chuck Knoblauch when he demanded a trade out of Minnesota. As the Twins best player, I had a Knoblauch poster on my dorm room wall (amongst other, more *ahem* collegiately appropriate wall decorations). The day he left the team for the Yankees, that poster came down. My memory is a little hazy, but I think I recall a game of Triple Play 98 on Playstation where I made the opponent play as the Twins, and then threw four consecutive pitches at Virtual Chuckster’s head.

In more recent times, you have the cases of Torii Hunter and Johan Santana, both of whom departed over the offseason. In Hunter’s case, I pretty much thought he was a punk even though he played for the Twins, due to his constant public ripping of teammates and management. In Santana’s case, he got the Knoblauch treatment.

My Santana jersey t-shirt went to Goodwill in February. The next month, when I was playing against my brother in a game on the Wii, he played as the Mets. Santana blew out his elbow in the third inning, and I cheered. Doesn’t matter that he is the greatest pitcher of his generation and his best years came with the Twins. He plays elsewhere now, so its of no concern to me.

That’s why I can’t play Fantasy Baseball (among other more sensible reasons, time being chief among them). I can’t root for players on other teams. Not in baseball. No sir.

You bet.

As anyone who reads this blog regularly can attest, I don’t care for the Yankees. Multiply the amount I hate them by a factor of ten, and you’re close to the amount that I hate the Chicago White Sox.

Why, you ask, do I hate a team that is an afterthought in their own city? Its simple, really. The Pale Hosers are in the same division as the Twins, meaning the teams play 19 times during each 162 game season. That’s just a shade under 10% of the entire schedule (8.5% for you math dorks). When you play that many times against a team that year in and year out you battle for the division title, a certain hatred develops. Its bound to.

Plus, there’s this: the Sox make it so easy to hate when they supply a continual string of anti-Twins quotes to the media. Hell, pitcher Mark Buehrle has supplied even stuff on his own to make Clubber Lang blush. My favorite was in 2003 when, after the Twins passed the Sox in the second-to-last week of the season en route to a come-from-behind division title, Buehrle told the media it was a shame the best team from the division missed the playoffs. To top it off, he said he would enjoy watching the Twins lose in the first round, because he was so unimpressed with them he was sure they would. Never mind that they did. Buehrle instantly went from punk to uber-punk, forever. And as you know, it is possible to receive redemption from the Max Univers Court of Punk Behavior. But once you move into uber-punkdom, there is no return.