The NFL returns tonight, so we’re writing about the NFL. It gets clicks. Even if it doesn’t have an NIT (although the Wild Card round mostly serves the purpose, and credit to the NFL for giving teams of that ideal stature a shot at its official championship).
I lived in Minneapolis for two years, and I retain a love/hate relationship with the city. The love comes from the city itself: It’s a cozy, easy place. The Mississippi River runs through it, there’s a lot of brick, the seasons change loudly and if you’re a white guy from a small-town Midwestern family, you’ll probably feel comfortable. The love also comes from the people. Live in a place, and you’ll almost always know some number of wonderful people in that place. Some of my favorite people in the world live in the Twin Cities.
The hate? Well, it’s probably better characterized as exhausted annoyance, but it also comes from the people. Minneapolis would be a lot easier to like if a Loud Share of its residents didn’t spend so much energy trying to convince you to love it. It’s a good-sized metropolis, but it’s not a big city in the way Chicago or even Detroit is. It’s got blue-collar roots (one of the things which makes most cities cool), but its ethos has turned whiter-collar than Milwaukee’s or Kansas City’s or Cleveland’s. It’s a nice spot to visit, but there’s a reason so many Minneapolitans leave Minneapolis on the weekends. The best parts of Minnesota lie far to the north.
To hear the Loud Share tell it, though, Minneapolis is utopia. It—get this—has breweries. They always mention the breweries. It—get this—has a big Pride parade. Terrible public education for racial minorities, but look how well its residents get along with people whose stereotype keeps well-trimmed hedges out front. It—get this—has a very clean, efficient airport. The exact thing we all look for in a city.
Minneapolis’s best identity is that of a cozy, easy place. A coffee shop aesthetic. A vaguely European commitment to leisure. A still-vibrant counterculture turned mainstream by First Avenue and Prince. Oddly, this is not where this Loud Share tries to find its hometown pride. Instead, it just makes stuff up, which is kind of the thing we do when we don’t have actual pride in a thing. Fargo’s just up I-94, and you don’t find many people there trying to convince you to like it. They like it, and that’s enough for them. The Loud Share? They try to convince you. And they make stuff up to do it.
One of the best examples of this is the classic fiction that Minneapolis has the second-most theatre seats in the nation, per capita. Nobody has ever measured this “stat,” and the classic script for sharing it says that New York has the most, which was a poor choice for a made-up stat with “per capita” as two of its words. Still, this gets tossed around as truth, because it signifies what the Loud Share wants to believe about their home. By 2018, my last year there, the “stat” had even transformed to drop the per capita piece. I was told once, earnestly, that Minneapolis has more theater seats than any non-New York city in the country, not accounting one bit for population. It doesn’t have that many theater seats. That would be an obscene number of theater seats. There are not enough people in the Twin Cities to consistently fill those theater seats. I don’t know how many cities have more, but Chicago’s right down I-94, it’s six times the size of Minneapolis, and it has plenty of stages to prove it. Hamilton didn’t make Minneapolis its first stop after Broadway. Nobody makes Minneapolis their first stop after Broadway.
Minneapolis is not Chicago, and it’s insulting to the latter to compare the two. Minneapolis is similar to Milwaukee, if you take all the things out of Milwaukee that blue-collar people like and replace them with things that white-collar people like. Both are great cities. I love them both. But the Loud Share wants you to tell it that Minneapolis is better than Chicago, because it isn’t content liking its home and letting you go on your way. The Loud Share doesn’t know if it likes Minneapolis. It needs you to like it to convince it that maybe it likes it too.
I had a highly concentrated exposure to the Loud Share. My Minneapolis experience probably wasn’t wholly representative of the place. I worked in a cubicle for a company whose HR strategy was to try to hire and retain people who wanted to stay in the Twin Cities for their entire lives. It overselected for the Loud Share. Again, this wasn’t everyone: Some of my favorite people in the world are former coworkers from that job. But the Loud Share was large, and as its name suggests, it was loud.
I’m not trying to re-pick any fights with Minneapolis. But you, disaffiliated readers, need to know about the Loud Share. Because the Loud Share loves the Vikings. Especially in the new stadium.
In the Metrodome, the Vikings deserved some respect. It was still silly for a team calling itself the “Vikings” to play indoors, but the Metrodome was the home of the Purple People Eaters, the Metrodome’s playing surface was a rib-cracking machine, and it’s hard not to respect a football team who plays in an industrial shithole. What replaced it is a sparkling corporate coffee shop of a stadium, complete with a big horn at one end where the Loud Share gets to cosplay the team’s namesake before snuggling up back at home in a fleece blanket in front of their mantle art which features the word “Hygge” written in cursive script. These are not Vikings who raid and pillage. These are those Vikings’ ancestors, the ones who take all the oil money from the North Sea, spend it on cappuccinos, and ask with irritation, in coded language (“sketchy” was the word du jour in Minneapolis when I was there), why people not of Scandinavian descent are being allowed across their borders and not being more “green” while they do it.
It’s this identity which leads the Vikings to be so damn annoying. One of the two years I lived there was the one where Aaron Rodgers broke his collarbone at U.S. Bank, something the Minneapolis Star Tribune later called a top-five sports moment of the decade. This was also the year the Vikings nearly won the NFC (of course it was when Rodgers was hurt, and of course they didn’t actually win it), traveling to Philadelphia to lose to the Eagles, something to which Vikings media, notorious members of the Loud Share, reacted by reporting on Philadelphians (who were simply behaving as Philadelphians are known to behave) as though the drunk teenager flipping double birds to a middle-aged woman in an Adrian Peterson jersey was on camera at Abu Ghraib. The next fall, in the Vikings’ first game, someone at U.S. Bank threw a beer at the Saints as the Saints celebrated a dagger pick-six. The reaction from the Loud Share? It must have been an out-of-towner. Whenever anyone does something destructive in Minneapolis, they came from across state lines.
This has been a long way of saying:
I really hope the Packers win in Minneapolis on Sunday. Because I really don’t like the Vikings. Because the Loud Share annoys me to no end.
Now. Let’s talk about Joe Kelly.
Joe Kelly Saves the White Sox’ Season Again
Does this guy ever not save the White Sox’ season??
The White Sox are even with the Twins in the standings, save for a winning percentage technicality, and Joe Kelly is the reason why. Tasked with facing the heart of the Mariners’ order in yesterday’s sixth inning, one out and runners on first and second, the White Sox clinging to a two-run lead, our hero did his job. The control wasn’t impeccable—Kelly walked Julio Rodríguez on four pitches, and he only threw five strikes during the outing—but he got Ty France to tap out to third and he froze Mitch Haniger on a curveball that can only be described as downright nasty. When he left? The White Sox still had the lead, and they went on to win the game. The story tells itself.
We haven’t checked in on the stats in a while, and they are these: His walk rate is still at a career high. His strikeout rate is also at a career high. His ERA is at a career high, which is a small-sample shame, because his FIP and xERA are right around their historic averages. Our guy is having a particularly nasty season, and ERA cannot capture nastiness. Maybe someday it will, and we will have our vindication.
Burnley and the Queen
Queen Elizabeth just died (RIP, etc.), and evidently that means sports in England are postponed for the next week or so, which probably means no Burnley games tomorrow or Tuesday or next Saturday. This isn’t confirmed yet, but it’s assumed. I guess they don’t want her ghost dictating too many outcomes while it’s still getting used to the third realm.
Shaka Smart 3, Texas 0
I missed this yesterday, but Marquette’s 2023 recruiting class is up to eleventh in the country after the latest addition, a four-star guard out of Worcester named Tre Norman. Sources say Norman “has that dawg in him.” Sources also say Texas has failed to garner a single 2023 commitment, possibly because they’re trying to be the Transfer Globetrotters but possibly because nobody wants to play for a program that turns on its national champions.
Mason Ramsey: What a Guy
Mason Ramsey knows the travails of going viral as a child, which may be why he sent this to Corn Kid:
Wise and kind. That’s Mason Ramsey.
More North Wilkesboro
The 2023 NASCAR All-Star Race will mercifully not be held at Texas, instead moving to North Wilkesboro, which has everyone roundly excited. Better racing, more history, drivers will care more, better pomp and circumstance, Dale Earnhardt Jr. front and center…just great. All around great.
**
Viewing schedule:
2:20 PM EDT: Reds @ Cubs (MLB TV)
Rubber match in the biggest series of the week. And David Bote’s in the lineup!
8:20 PM EDT: Bills @ Rams (NBC)
I like to know what everyone else is talking about.
9:40 PM EDT: White Sox @ A’s (MLB TV, second screen)
Guessing Joe Kelly has the night off after last night’s heroics, but if there’s a season to be saved…look out, Oakland. He’ll sink you straight into the bay. I mean that.
