[157/365] Kepler
Jun. 6th, 2019 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistI have been watching old Twins games in my leisure/procrastination time and god it's so much fun. Best record in baseball! They're good at everything: not just hitting home runs (though they're doing a ridiculous amount of that), but stringing runs together in their old "small ball" way, and they're amazing fielders and the pitching is reliably good, when was the last time I've been able to say that?!
And also my love for Max Kepler has been not only justified by his playing but increased now that I know he's actually German -- I thought he was just what Minnesotans mean by German, like "my great-grandma was German" -- and his parents are both ballet dancers. How great an origin story is that for a baseball player!
I learned this because apparently the other day some Berlin media was in Minnesota doing a story about him and I tried to imagine any of my German friends on Mastodon (for some reason I have a disproportionate number of friends who are in and/or from Germany) caring about one random guy who went off to play baseball and I cannot do it, which for some reason makes the whole thing even more delightful to me.
My dad and I like going to the big sporting-goods store, Scheels, which had more choice of t-shirts with players' names/numbers than you'd get in Target or Shopko (like, the last Vikings jersey I had was that of a place-kicker; no cool quarterbacks for me!), which around the time I left were all Mauer and Morneau. So ever since I've played a little game with myself: which player would I want now. Last year it would've been Sanó. This year I decided on Kepler early on, maybe hoping even if no one recognized it for what it was I could at least talk about exoplanets, even if that was named after a different Kepler.
This Kepler's name is Max Kepler-Różycki -- his dad is Polish. His mom is from Texas! (despite her deceptively German surname) Maybe that's why he knows what baseball is, heh.
And also my love for Max Kepler has been not only justified by his playing but increased now that I know he's actually German -- I thought he was just what Minnesotans mean by German, like "my great-grandma was German" -- and his parents are both ballet dancers. How great an origin story is that for a baseball player!
I learned this because apparently the other day some Berlin media was in Minnesota doing a story about him and I tried to imagine any of my German friends on Mastodon (for some reason I have a disproportionate number of friends who are in and/or from Germany) caring about one random guy who went off to play baseball and I cannot do it, which for some reason makes the whole thing even more delightful to me.
My dad and I like going to the big sporting-goods store, Scheels, which had more choice of t-shirts with players' names/numbers than you'd get in Target or Shopko (like, the last Vikings jersey I had was that of a place-kicker; no cool quarterbacks for me!), which around the time I left were all Mauer and Morneau. So ever since I've played a little game with myself: which player would I want now. Last year it would've been Sanó. This year I decided on Kepler early on, maybe hoping even if no one recognized it for what it was I could at least talk about exoplanets, even if that was named after a different Kepler.
This Kepler's name is Max Kepler-Różycki -- his dad is Polish. His mom is from Texas! (despite her deceptively German surname) Maybe that's why he knows what baseball is, heh.