By Mark Yost
New York, NY, USA
I know a lot of great baseball fans.
My friend Angelo Kalogiannis is probably the
biggest Yankees fan I know. He grew up in Astoria, Queens, going to games with
his Greek-immigrant father, who revered Mickey Mantle and taught Angelo to do
the same. Baseball was a bond between them that would never be broken.
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| Mark Yost |
Ciaran McGovern is your quintessential Irishman,
albeit from the East Bay of San Francisco. His loyalties often drift between
the Oakland A’s and San Francisco Giants, depending on how their seasons are
going. But his love of the game has never wavered, from Spring Training to the
World Series.
And my son, George, has grown into a pretty good
baseball fan. He doesn’t know as much about the history of the game as I’d
like, but he’s in two fantasy leagues and knows most of the top players.
As much as these guys love the game, they all pale
in comparison to Ben Koster. He’s the first guy to ask on Facebook – usually
around Thanksgiving – “How many days until pitchers and catchers?”
He goes to Spring Training in Florida every year
with unbounded enthusiasm, his trademark Hawaiian shirt on his back and a cold
beer in his hand. Once the season starts, he relishes every win and agonizes
over every defeat like no one I know. And Ben encourages others to love
baseball, too.
What makes Ben’s fandom all-the-more remarkable
is that he’s spent his whole life cheering for the Minnesota Twins (and against
the New York Yankees). Long known for having one of the best farm systems in
baseball, the Twins have developed some of the best talent over the years...and
then promptly traded it away as players were on the verge of stardom and about
to demand that big contract.
Despite these many years of heartbreak, some of
it self-inflicted, Ben has never lost an ounce of hope or a drop of enthusiasm
for his beloved game of baseball. For him, there’s always the next game, the promise
of a 10-game home stand. And, sometime around August, inevitably, there’s
always next year. Or, put another way, the long-suffering Brooklyn Dodgers had
nothing on Ben Koster and the Minnesota Twins.
And that’s why I truly believe that Ben Koster is
The Greatest Baseball Fan in America.
With the Twins at 9-13 in late-April, I had a
chance to sit down with Ben.
MARK
YOST: What is it that you love about
baseball?
BEN
KOSTER: I love the history, the stats,
the smells, the sounds, the ballparks, the fans, the beer, the food. Everything
about the game just has always appealed to me as a way to get away for three
hours (four and a half if it’s a Red Sox game) and just enjoy a ballgame. I
don’t know if it’s a nostalgia thing or an escape thing but watching a ballgame
puts me in a very happy place, regardless of who is playing. When I travel to
other cities to catch a game I almost prefer that the Twins aren’t playing. It
gives me the chance to just enjoy the game I love without having the emotional
attachment to one team.
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| Ben Koster - All Star Game (2014) |
MARK
YOST: What makes baseball different
from other sports?
BEN
KOSTER: It’s a summer game. It defines
summer for me. The other major sports are winter sports and are all really
better on television, in my opinion. Baseball, though, can really only be fully
experienced at the ballpark.
I used to love the fact that there was no time
clock in baseball like in other sports. But that – to my utter dismay – is
being rapidly eroded. Not sure why there’s such a push to make games shorter. I
never want the game to end when I’m at the ballpark.
MARK
YOST: What’s your first baseball
memory?
BEN
KOSTER: I actually remember crying as
a young lad when the Twins lost. It must have been the early-1970s at the time.
I would listen to the games on WCCO radio with Herb Carneal and I took every
loss so hard. One of my happiest early baseball memories is when my dad bought
me a mini-Mike Cubbage bat when I was about nine or ten. It was red. I think I
slept with that bat. Not sure why I was such a big Mike Cubbage fan, although I
do remember the “Cubbage Patch” seating section at Metropolitan Stadium. I lost
that bat years ago and that still makes me sad. I also fondly recall Knothole
tickets to games at the old Met where kids could get into the ballpark for a
buck.
MARK
YOST: What are some of the greatest
games you’ve ever seen?
BEN
KOSTER: By far, the greatest Twins
game I have ever attended was Game 163 against the Tigers on October 6, 2009.
It was an incredibly exciting game, from the first pitch to Carlos Gomez’s
slide into home to score the winning run in the 12th inning. The
tension and the energy in the Metrodome that night was like nothing I have ever
experienced.
Playoff games are always great, too. There’s
just a different kind of energy in the ballpark than there is for a regular
season game.
But my favorite game of the season is always
Opening Day. New beginning, fresh start, the end of winter and all that.
MARK
YOST: What are some of the worst
games you’ve ever seen?
BEN
KOSTER: To be honest I don’t really
have any “worst games”...in retrospect. I have been terribly disappointed after
countless games (especially playoff games against the Yankees, whom I despise)
but to paraphrase a famous saying, a bad day at the ballpark is better than a
good day anywhere else.
I’ve seen some real stinkers, though. The Twins
have had some truly awful teams but I went to games those seasons regardless
just to take in a ballgame.
An embarrassing revelation...I did break my hand
a few years back by slamming it on a countertop when the boys failed to score
after a leadoff triple. I remember the worst plays much more that I would, say,
whole games.
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| Ben Koster and Mark Yost |
MARK
YOST: How many World Series games
have you been to?
BEN
KOSTER: I have never been to one. In
fact, in 1987, I was traveling abroad. I was doing a semester in London my
junior year at St. John’s University. I knew all summer that it was going to happen.
The Twins in the World Series and me 4,000 miles away from it all. It turned
out to be pretty cool, though. One of my favorite memories was sharing headphones
with a pretty little St. Ben’s girl listening to the ALCS on Armed Forces Radio
somewhere in Scotland. The day they won the World Series we tried our best to
wake up the entire city of London screaming out of the window of her flat. The
Brits must have thought we were crazy. She dumped me when we returned to the
states, however.
Then there was Game 7 in 1991. One of the
greatest World Series games of all time. I spent most of it driving to and
attending the visitation/funeral of a very close friend’s father. She pretty
much forcibly threw me out of the funeral home that night and said she and the
family would meet me at the local bar to watch the end of the game.
MARK
YOST: Like a lot of men, games with
your dad hold special meaning.
BEN
KOSTER: Can there be any better games?
I remember taking him to Opening Day at Target Field in 2010. He was so excited
and, I must say, proud as I played a part in building that ballpark.
[Editor’s
note: Ben is an accomplished architect when he’s not balancing a hot dog, a
beer and a scorecard on his knee in the left field bleachers. In an ironic and
much-deserved twist of fate, he was actually one of the architects who designed
the Twins’ new stadium, Target Field.]
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| Ben Koster at Target Field during construction |
As a kid, going to ballgames with my dad was
nothing short of heaven. As an adult going to games with him is kind of like
that scene in “Field of Dreams”...you wanna have a catch? I love sharing that
with him and will as often as we both can.
MARK
YOST: Having said all that,
remembering all these great times, it’s not easy being a Twins fan, is it?
BEN
KOSTER: Sometimes it’s hard. A small
market team like the Twins has to suffer through long stretches of lean years
in order to field a contending team and, more often than not, that window of
success is quite small and shuts very quickly. But, those years when they
contend are almost magical.
Of course, I love Target Field. It was a
struggle convincing friends to come to games with me at the Metrodome because
nobody really wanted to spend a beautiful summer afternoon, of which there are
precious few in Minnesota, indoors. Now that we have the best ballpark in the
majors in my somewhat biased opinion, it my favorite place to be.
MARK
YOST: How many games have you been
to?
BEN
KOSTER: Rough estimate, I would say
somewhere between 450 and 500.
MARK
YOST: What would you do if there wasn’t
baseball?
BEN
KOSTER: A world without baseball is a
world not worth living in. But if you want a specific answer, I think I would
buy a cabin up north and go fishing more in the summer.
Links:
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Mark Yost is the author of the Rick Crane Series of five noir novels set in upstate New York. In June 2016, he and his son George completed a decade-long quest to
visit every Major League baseball stadium in the county.