The tagline for our blog (“like butterflies with hiccups”) is derived from Willie Stargell’s quote, ”Throwing a knuckleball for a strike is like throwing a butterfly with hiccups across the street into your neighbor’s mailbox.”
That sounds like something time consuming to learn, difficult to do well with any consistency, and ultimately of questionable value to yourself or the world, at large.
It seems like a perfect description of our efforts to create this Twins blog.
The knuckleball doesn’t have a cool nickname like the fastball (“gas”, “heat” or “hummer”), the curveball (“Uncle Charlie” or “bender”), or even the slider (“yakker”). The knuckleball is stuck with “butterfly with hiccups”.
Guys who throw knuckleballs are generally looked upon as pitchers who just aren’t good enough to throw “real” pitches.
In other words, knuckleballs and those who throw them are outcasts.
That would be us.
It seems like we were the last Twins fans on earth without our own blog. The “cool” bloggers have all the inside information, all the latest news about the Twins, all the advanced statistical analysis, all the interviews with the players and front office types, and provide some of the most well thought out analysis of the Twins. There are at least 20 Twins blogs that should be “must reads” for any Twins fan virtually every day during the baseball season. We know because we’re regular readers of at least that many very cool Twins blogs and we even participate in many of them via their comment sections. You should, too!
Here at “Knuckleballs”, you’ll find us flitting around from day to day without any particular pattern to our posts. We’re Twins fans and we like to talk about our favorite team. We’ll cheer, laugh, curse, cry, and bang our heads against the wall on a regular basis as we live and die with the Twins and other Twins fans… and hopefully, we’ll have a lot of fun doing it, without taking ourselves too seriously.
So in the end, we’ve created “Knuckleballs” to lend our voices to the collective Minnesota Twins blog community. Does the Minnesota Twins blog community need another Minnesota Twins blog? That depends on how you define “need”, one supposes. In any event, this particular Minnesota Twins blog will focus on just having fun being Twins fans. We’ll share our thoughts, our pictures, our poetry, our memories and pretty much any thing else that may come to mind on any given day. We’re also hoping to get together for live chats during games as often as possible.
We hope you’ll find this little addition to the Minnesota Twins blog community to be worth your time to visit occasionally.
Sincerely, your hosts… KL, CapitalBabs, and Jim Crikket
(notice how cleverly we hide our “secret identities”? That’s just in case this whole blogging idea blows up in our faces. We wouldn’t want to have to move to somewhere like Bolivia to escape. You know how that turned out for Butch & Sundance!)
