Let’s Go to the Videotape

If 11 o’clock newscasts were what they used to be, the Minnesota Twins could have filled half of Warner Wolf’s Plays of the Month via their unintentional antics at frigid Target Field on Monday night.

They don’t go the videotape like they used to.

• Matt Walner lashed a ball that took one bounce the right field fence and then just lay motionless on the track as if it was too cold to move.

• Joe Ryan flung a pitch about a foot wide of Luisangel Acuña’s back.

• Justin Topa grabbed Luis Torrens’s simple comebacker to the mound and sent it flying down the right field line.

• Jorge Alcala did something similarly self-sabotaging with an Acuña bunt.

• Funnest of all for montage maestro Carmine Cincotta, the producer Wolf unfailingly credited, Twins second baseman Willi Castro received the relay of Mark Vientos’s liner into the right-center gap, the one that was in the process of perhaps scoring Pete Alonso from first — pending the outcome of a potentially well-executed throw home — and fired it directly…into the ground behind second, where it bounded up and flicked Vientos in what for standards & practices purposes we’ll call Mark’s rear end. First no fielders were anywhere near second base. Then three fielders surrounded second base, the same base where Vientos continued to stand as Alonso crossed the plate and Mark himself wondered what was that thing he felt tickling his backside region.

Mr. G was at the game!

Toss in myriad SNY shots of shivering fans, including a couple dressed as hot dogs, and sideline maven Steve Gelbs warming himself by decking himself out in Vikings gear (“Mr. G was at the game!”), and you’d have content that would go viral before viral was a thing.

The money highlight, however, wasn’t a blooper, but a blast: hoodied Juan Soto rocketing a home run of more than 400 feet with a runner in scoring position. BOOM! It wasn’t off the fair pole (of course it’s the fair pole, it’s a fair ball), but it was becoming fair to ask in muted tones when Juan might hit one out, or anywhere, with a man on base. Fifteen games versus fifteen years is a minuscule sample size, but we are not by nature a patient people.

Anyway, Juan quelled our percolating anxieties for a night, and the Mets kept us bundled in upbeat developments. Clay Holmes escaped his one jam of the night and went five innings; the Yeomen of the Bullpen (Brazoban for two, Garrett and Stanek for one apiece) proved characteristically stingy; the Mets converted Twin foibles into their own tallies; the Phillies lost; and except for learning Jose Siri will be out with a fractured tibia he sustained when he fouled a ball of his leg in West Sacramento, it was all good 11 o’clock news in the aftermath of first-place New York’s 5-1 win.

Back to you, Jim Jensen.