Inside and Outside

Image credit: © Trevor Hughes/USA TODAY / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

It’s supposed to be one of the most joyful and family-friendly weekends of the year. TwinsFest is the team’s chance to celebrate its history and make personal connections with fans, and while some of the ways they do so seem manipulative or feel like a cash grab, others are downright wonderful. Because collectors power the fan convention economy, autographs are the first association many fans make with the event, but it’s also an occasion for some fans to see parts of Target Field they can’t access during the season; for the team’s executives and players to see and speak to fans in person; and for the team to knit itself into the community.

Children grow up way too soon, so I no longer bring my two sons to Urban Ventures each year to participate in the Twins Futures Clinic, but it’s an underrated part of TwinsFest, too. For a very affordable price, kids from early elementary school through their teenage years can show up at that community center in the western part of Midtown and go through several stations of drills in a fun and easygoing atmosphere, coached by Twins players and staff.

Elementary-aged kids were set for their turn Saturday morning at 10 AM. By then, the Saturday TwinsFest event had been underway for an hour up at Target Field, but no matter. For those kids, it surely felt like they weren’t missing anything. They were getting swing tips and being patiently coached on the art of the outfield dropstep by real, live big-leaguers. Inside, whether on Twins Way or at Urban Ventures, everything was fine.

Outside, things had gone from unacceptable to untenable. Five minutes after the gates opened to admit autograph hunters and happy families at Target Field, a gang of Border Patrol agents assailed and murdered Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, near the corner of 26th Street and Nicollet Ave, in the Whittier neighborhood of south Minneapolis. Pretti was there as an observer, exercising his rights as a citizen, and had been trying to help a woman coming under attack by the same agents. Without provocation, reason, or responsible thought, the experienced gang of federal officers riddled Pretti’s body with 10 bullets.

Until that moment, the Trump regime’s unwarranted and malicious occupation of the state of Minnesota had been a simmering pot, threatening to boil over. Arguably, it already should have done so. Another innocent observer, Renee Good, had been murdered in a separate incident 17 days earlier, and abuses of civil and even human rights were commonplace throughout the state. However, the rightly visceral reactions of many to the gruesome killing sent the water over the edge.

There’s a scene near the end of The Trial of the Chicago 7, a 2021 Netflix movie written by Aaron Sorkin, in which the building tension and (indeed) the rolling maul of Vietnam War protesters’ clash with Chicago police is juxtaposed with the staid, comfortable, oblivious environment inside a bar at the Conrad Hilton Hotel, toward which the police-instigated riot was inexorably moving.

Overlaid onto the scenes of action is the voice of Abbie Hoffman (portrayed by Sacha Baron Cohen), who was one of the defendants in the titular trial and one of the organizers of the mass demonstration that became such a brouhaha. The character is recounting the events to an audience much later, so he speaks with the smirking knowingness of hindsight.

“Fifties inside the bar,” he says, as the tension builds. “Sixties outside the bar.” The narration dramatizes the inevitable moment when, just as the people inside dimly become aware that something is happening, the riot crashes through the window and the bar is no longer a sanctuary. In the real events the movie dramatizes, that very thing happened. Police officers threw protesters through the plate glass and beat them while they were sprawled atop the shards. Thankfully, that night, no one died. We have not been so lucky.

Minnesotans did not ask for any of this, but nor have they buried their heads in the sand about it. There have been a few large-scale protests, but for the most part, the hard-bitten Midwesterners who reside in Twins Territory have fought to maintain their day-to-day lives. The events that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents would use to detain or harass neighbors have been canceled, but where possible, people have tried to carry on.

No longer will the pretense of normalcy hold. The windows have been shattered; the whole world is watching. TwinsFest ended a bit early, but even while it continued, it was overshadowed and rendered joyless by the irruption of evil into the city. Twins Daily, a prominent independent Twins blog, canceled their annual Winter Meltdown event, which had been scheduled for that evening.

Tom Pohlad and Derek Falvey were asked about the murder, the operation of which it is a part, and the world they’re trying to navigate during a panel session at TwinsFest. Their answers were not altogether awful, under the circumstances, but nor did they demonstrate courage or leadership. The black backdrop behind them as they spoke seemed as apt an answer as anything they might plausibly have said, and was certainly more telling than anything they did say. It was there to block excess light, but in context, it felt like a metaphor for a desperation to block out the wider world, from which came the decision to go forward with TwinsFest even before the shooting.

Obviously, that hope is now pulverized. Perhaps ICE will have departed Minnesota by Opening Day, but perhaps not, and either way, the Twin Cities are not currently in a place where baseball can be savored without interference. The world is too dangerous, too unstable, and too disillusioned for that.

Doing something to confront and halt the abuses of Minnesotans at the hands of the federal government doesn’t have to mean tossing aside pitch shapes or swing speeds. Normal life does go on. I wasn’t at that clinic a few minutes’ drive from where Pretti was killed, as I might have been a few years ago, but I was at a 4th grader’s basketball game in the northwest suburbs—one of the ones safe enough from ICE to go on as planned. My wife and other kids were at “puppy yoga” in St. Paul, where a yoga class near a local shelter gets the much-needed boost of adoptable puppies bounding around and climbing on the participants. However, that came a day after we eschewed work, school, and spending to support a Metro-wide general strike, and because of Pretti’s death, we ended our day standing on a pedestrian bridge over a suburban highway, joining neighbors and friends in a candlelight vigil for Pretti as the temperature pressed down toward -20°F.

All of these things are fine. That TwinsFest was not canceled proactively is understandable; it’s important to the team and their fans. That other activities pull us in various directions keeps us sane and hopeful, and in a state famous mostly for sanity and hope, both have been in short supply of late. Sometime next month, or the month after, you will participate in a fantasy draft, or you’ll fly to spring training, or you’ll crack open Baseball Prospectus 2026 and forget about the world for two hours. That’s good. Unfortunately, it’s no longer viable to escape that way for even entire days, let alone weeks.

Yearning for safety and comfort, we try not to stare danger and discomfort in the face until it’s absolutely necessary. It is absolutely necessary now. If you’re reading this, baseball is probably your favorite way to keep the world on one side of a window and yourself on the other side. You can stay on this side of the window; you can keep enjoying baseball. But the window is in a million pieces on the floor, and you have to let in the sights, sounds, and smells of what just broke through it. Neither baseball nor any other distraction will keep you above the fray.