One of the fun things about baseball (which is also one of the fun things about life in general) is that at any moment you can look and find something that you alone see, that you are the only one who cares enough to notice, that you are the only one who cares. Last Wednesday, the Twins ended up losing to the White Sox. The Twins had won their first eight games against the South Siders, and would beat the Sox again later that day. In fact, if it wasn't for the chance to beat the White Sox from time to time, Minnesota's first half would look a lot different and a lot darker. But just this once, in the first game of Wednesday's doubleheader, the Twins lost to the White Sox.
The bird appeared sometime during the first inning. It wasn't when Carlos Correa hit the 11th pitch of the game with a single to right, but in the bottom of the inning, when Andrew Vaughn doubled in a 5-4-3 and the camera panned the inning. the ball tracking horn, there it was – sitting on a metal wire above the circle on the deck as if it had been there forever.
The bird on the cable did not disrupt the game or announce its presence in any way. It wasn't a rally goose, a field cat, or even a field turtle. It was just a quiet bird that found a good place to play in a football game. I thought it was a mourning dove, but I know nothing about birds. I just get excited when I see a Cardinal or Blue Jay in the window. So you don't have to listen to me, but I thought it looked like a mourning dove, gray with long, thin tail feathers, turning its head to first base to watch as Carlos Santana came down from the bag and put the ball on it. course back around the horn in the opposite direction.
The White Sox didn't announce that there would be a first game, and I don't know how many people were watching on TV during the workday. I couldn't help but wonder if, among that infinite number of onlookers, anyone else was paying attention to the bird. Hundreds of people in the ballpark must have had it in their field of vision as it dived and reached the cable, but even if you're not all that interested in the action, the ballpark is a sensory overload: the smell. of hot dogs and popcorn, the ambient hum of the crowd, and a field so bright and beautiful that it's amazing. It's hard to imagine anyone seeing a single gray bird unless their seats were in the upper right corner and it was obstructing their view of the action.
For those of us watching on TV, the bird was only visible when the broadcast cut to the overhead home camera. That's a camera that tracks the ball in play. The center field camera shows you the tone, and the top home camera follows the action if someone actually hits it. That meant the bird was only visible when the ball was hit or thrown to the right side of the infield, usually for just a second, before the camera found what it was looking for and zoomed in on it.
The Twins put the ball in play once in the top of the second, and because it was a fly ball to center, the entire inning went by before the bird showed up on camera for the second time. When Lenyn Sosa missed, it also appeared that he turned his head to watch Santana defend the ball.
When I was a little kid, I often wondered if I was the only person doing whatever I was doing at the time. Am I the only person in the world brushing my teeth right now? Am I the only person in the world playing World Series Baseball '95 right now? Of course, I'm the only person trying to achieve a perfect game by coaxing 81 straight whiffs that start at the inside corner but break too far away from the batter at the right time.
But what you do will always be limited by what you know how to do. There are so many things I would like to do but I will not have the strength to do them, I will never be allowed to do them, I will never have the courage to do them. I'm a writer and a musician, two things that may sound strange but mostly involve hours and hours of sitting there and thinking, punctuated by bursts of typing or singing. If anyone can make a good calculation of my life and its merits, I hope that the fact that my knowledge was limited will not be blamed on me. For me, what goes on inside someone else's head has always been very interesting.
At the third peak, what seemed to be on the bird's head was freezing. It didn't move a muscle when Willi Castro fouled a cutter up the middle by Erick Fedde.
I don't know if I'm the only person watching this bird in the world, but it felt like I was. Its perch was out of the way and on the screen so briefly that you had no chance of seeing it unless you were looking very closely – and looking at the completely wrong thing. Of course, this bird may have felt the same way. After spending a lifetime on the roofs and walls of Chicago, stumbling upon this strange, green oasis must have felt like finding a whole new environment.
After scoring a few, Trevor Larnach was seen scrambling to avoid a 4-6-3 double play by the narrowest of margins.
In the past, I did stand-up comedy, which often surprised people because I was stable to all but my closest friends. For that same reason, my jokes weren't very thoughtful. My friends would get on stage and tell stories about crazy things that had happened to them. I didn't have any crazy stories. I never got into crazy situations. When I told the story, it was almost a thought I had. “I was in the store, in the freezer section,” began another. “I saw Choco-Tacos, and I thought, 'I've got to have a Choco-Taco!' And I thought,'It should was the wrong word in that sentence.'”
That was the whole story and the basis of the joke: I used the wrong word, for me, in my head. For a moment, I thought I should get a Choco-Taco, but then I corrected myself, because apparently no one, ever, it should eat Choco-Taco. There is simply no situation where putting a Choco-Taco inside someone's body is the best call to make. No doctor has ever raised his voice above the chaos of the emergency room to shout, “This man needs a Choco-Taco, calculations!”
That's what I loved most about comedy, more than singing or writing. To catch that first spark of an idea, to realize the power of something that everyone had seen but no one had really seen. I loved looking at the world that way: like anything that happens, no matter how ordinary, it can be the most interesting thing in the world if you find the right way to think about it. The story of Choco-Taco was a true story and I still remember it, even though it was almost 20 years ago and it really didn't happen at all. I just stood there in silence, thinking about how sad it was that the space was too small to contain a situation where someone would really need that perfect combination of tacos and choco.
In Chicago, in the bottom of the third, a birdie proved as Nicky Lopez hit a weak liner to second and Willi Castro waited for a big hop to get him out at first. The bird preened its tail feathers as Lopez ran to the bag. For someone with zero natural knowledge, it looks like he's been using it to check the weather conditions, like maybe he's starting to think about moving forward.
The bird was on TV twice in fourth place. It made for one short, faded look when Matt Wallner laced a single to shallow right, and one not-so-faded but equally short look when Manuel Margot flied to right-center to end the frame. I saw it for the last time in the bottom of the inning. Tommy Pham chipped the ball off the end of the bat, sending a weak spinner to Santana at first. After a while, the gliding bird flew away.
Coincidence or not, that's when I decided to stop keeping a bird for myself. I posted a screenshot of the game and tagged a couple of twin beat writers, asking if anyone else had noticed this bird. Up in the press box, Dan Hayes of Athletic answered the phone like a hero. He didn't see the bird, but he took out his binoculars to look. It was already gone.
I probably should have misheard this bird. Watching the White Sox play baseball in 2024 usually falls under the category of things you wouldn't wish on anyone, but I think the bird is no man and I liked the idea that it came down just to see if the Sox really are as bad as everyone says. Even more than that, I liked the idea that after three or four innings of watching Erick Fedde dominate, he flew out, found his friends, and said, “I don't know what you're talking about. The white Sox are untouchable.”
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