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PROPS

This is from the Twins, it appeared in the Star Tribune on Sunday, October 10, 2004.

"The Tip of the Cap"

In the world of baseball, if there is one tribute,
one definitive acknowledgement of respect and admiration,
it's the tip of the cap.

Between generals there's the salute. Bullfighters sweep back their cloaks.
Among knights it's the lowering of the lance.

Ballplayers, they go to the cap.

And as such, hat in hand, we salute our fans.

You in the upper deck with your scorecard, lucky pencil and Hunter jersey.
You with your kids and your gloves and your diaper bag.
You, who drove 4 and one half hours to get here, and didn't leave till it was announced that the totals on the board are correct.

Your Minnesota Twins tip their hats to you.

Because of you, in the top of the eighth with two outs,
when you stand, so too does the hair on the back of our necks.
You can't possibly know how important it is to hear you reverberating inside our helmets as we dig into the box with a runner on third.

Thank you. Thank you since Killebrew and Oliva and Carew.
Thank you since Hrbek and Puckett and Morris.
And thank you since yesterday.

You know what?

In what seems a quick as a Nathan fastball, we'll be back.
With leather and wood and heart.

We'll look up, and what will we see?

You.

The best fans supporting the greatest game in the world.
Thanks for making us proud to be a Minnesota Twin.

Let's go get 'em in 2005.

 FLOPS - This appeared the day after the above ad did, in the Star Tribune.

Patrick Reusse: Twins fans too often out at home this year

Patrick Reusse,  Star Tribune
October 11, 2004 PATR1011
 

The Minnesota Twins purchased a full-page ad in Sunday's Star Tribune. It came with a title -- "The tip of the cap" -- and served as a salute to the team's fans.

We certainly appreciate the business over here on Portland Avenue, even if the Twins-supplied text did carry more twists of reality than your average political commercial.

Sunday's sonnet included the passage, "You can't possibly know how important it is to hear you reverberating inside our helmets as we dig into the box with a runner on third."

PR-wise, I suppose that does sound better than a message reading, "Where in the name of the Dome's green turf were you for the past six months?"

There was also the traditional close to such advertisements, a sentence describing the locals as "the best fans supporting the greatest game in the world."

Again, PR-wise that probably goes over better than, "It can be statistically proven you are the worst baseball fans in any major league city that's not in Florida."

The Twins' season came to an end Saturday when the New York Yankees rallied for a 6-5, 11-inning victory. The Yankees also won in 12 innings in Game 2 back in New York, making this a well-contested four-game series that wound up going to the team with the experienced, expensive batting order.

The Twins did have Johan Santana, the American League's Cy Young Award winner-to-be, going in their attempt to stay alive Saturday. It was a perfect testimony to the 2004 performance of Minnesota's baseball fandom that the match of the Magical Johan and the Mighty Yankees did not sell out the Metrodome.

Tickets were available by the handsful in front of the Dome, and there were officially 2,300 fewer people in attendance than for Friday night's sellout.

This was the most intriguing Twins team since the return to competitiveness in 2001. There was the Santana story line, there was the improbable emergence of Lew Ford, there was the arrival of Justin Morneau as a living, breathing, muscle-twitching power hitter, and there was Torii Hunter, on a nightly basis playing center field in a manner that even Kirby Puckett did not equal in his wall-climbing prime.

There was also the void-filling by Joe Nathan and Juan Rincon at the end of the bullpen. Some of us predicted a lousy bullpen would be the main reason for the Twins not to repeat in the AL Central this season. We were made to eat newsprint when Nathan and Rincon did their jobs even better than had the departed Eddie Guardado and LaTroy Hawkins.

There were also some disappointments -- No. 1 being the knee injury to catcher Joe Mauer. Kyle Lohse pitched poorly almost from start to finish. Jacque Jones did not have the big year that manager Ron Gardenhire and his coaches were expecting back in March, when they watched him in spring training.

Yet, no one in a Twins uniform came close to having a season as lousy as did the people who allege to be their fans.

The totals are in: The Twins finished 24th in the major leagues with 1,911,490 tickets sold. Atlanta had the next-lowest attendance for a playoff team -- 17th with 2,322,565.

Remember all your disparagement of Bud Selig and his new ballpark in Milwaukee? Digest this: The Brewers won 67 games, and they outdrew the 92-victory Twins by 150,000.

The deal is, merely stating the Twins were 24th in attendance gives the team's fan base far too much credit.

Here's the real bottom line: The Twins were 27th in the major leagues when it came to tickets sold per victory.

The orphans from Montreal don't count in this evaluation, meaning there were only two locations that produced fewer customers per victory than the Twins: Florida and Tampa Bay.

That means, if you throw out franchises affected by September hurricanes, the Twin Cities produced the worst attendance in ratio to victories of any major league area.

The Twins sold an average of 20,772 for each of their victories.

There's some distortion in the time-honored ATSV (average tickets sold per victory) chart. Arizona, Seattle and Kansas City won so seldom that their tickets sold per victory were inflated.

That does not change this fact: The Twins provided more baseball for less support than any franchise north of St. Petersburg, Fla.

"Thanks for making us proud to be a Minnesota Twin," the Twins' ad copy read Sunday.

Obviously, the Twins and their ad agency passed on "Thanks for nothing," which would have been a more fitting tribute to the fan support received in 2004.