I Saw a Bird

One of the fun things about baseball (that’s also one of the fun things about life in general) is that at any moment you can look for and find something that you alone are seeing, that you alone are paying enough attention to notice, that you alone care about. Last Wednesday, the Twins finally lost to the White Sox. The Twins had won their first eight matchups with the South Siders, and they would beat the Sox again later that day. In fact, if not for the opportunity to pummel the White Sox at frequent intervals, Minnesota’s first half would look much different and much darker. But just this once, in the first game of Wednesday’s doubleheader, the Twins lost to the White Sox.

The bird showed up sometime during the first inning. It wasn’t there when Carlos Correa slapped the 11th pitch of the game through the right side for a single, but in the bottom of the inning, when Andrew Vaughn grounded into a 5-4-3 double play and the camera whipped around the horn to follow the ball, there it was — perched on a steel cable right above the on-deck circle as if it had been there forever.

The bird on the cable didn’t disrupt the game or announce its presence in any way. It wasn’t a rally goose, a cat on the field, or even a turtle in the outfield. It was just a quiet bird that found a nice spot to take in a ballgame. I thought it looked like a mourning dove, but I don’t know anything about birds. I just get excited when I spot a Cardinal or a Blue Jay out the window. So you probably shouldn’t listen to me, but I thought it looked like a mourning dove, drab gray with long, narrow tail feathers, turning its head toward first base to watch as Carlos Santana stepped off the bag and set the ball on its course back around the horn in the other direction.

The White Sox never announced the attendance for the first game, and I have no idea how many people were watching on television in the middle of a workday. I couldn’t help wondering whether, among that indeterminate number of spectators, anyone else was paying attention to the bird. Hundreds of people at the ballpark must have had it in their field of vision as it glided in and landed on the cable, but even if you’re not all that interested in the action, a ballpark is a place of sensory overload: the smell of hot dogs and popcorn, the ambient hum of the crowd, and the field so bright and beautiful that it’s overwhelming. It’s hard to imagine anyone noticing one gray bird unless their seats were high in the upper deck on the right side and it was obstructing their view of the action.

For those of us watching on television, the bird was only visible when the broadcast cut to the high home camera. That’s the camera that tracks the ball in play. The center field camera shows you the pitch, then the high home camera follows the action once somebody actually hits it. That meant the bird was only visible when the ball was either hit or thrown to the right side of the infield, usually just for a moment, before the camera found what it was looking for and zoomed in on it.

The Twins only put the ball in play once in the top of the second, and because it was a fly ball to center, a whole inning passed before the bird appeared on camera for a second time. When Lenyn Sosa grounded out to short, it once again seemed to turn its head to watch Santana secure the ball.

When I was a little kid, I used to wonder whether I was the only person on earth doing whatever I happened to be doing at that exact moment. Am I the only person on earth brushing their teeth right now? Am I the only person on earth playing World Series Baseball ’95 right now? Surely, I’m the only person trying to achieve a perfect game by inducing 81 straight whiffs that start on the inside corner but break sharply away from the batter at exactly the right moment.

But what you’re doing is always going to be limited by what you’re actually able to do. There are so many things that I’d like to do but will never have the ability to do, will never be permitted to do, will never have the courage to do. I am a writer and a musician, two things that might sound exotic but mostly consist of hours and hours of sitting there and thinking, punctuated by the occasional burst of typing or strumming. If anyone ever performs a grand reckoning of my life and its worth, I hope the fact that my experiences were so limited won’t be held against me. To me, what’s going on inside someone’s head has always been way more interesting.

In the top of the third, the only thing that seemed to be in the bird’s head was chilling. It didn’t move a muscle when Willi Castro fouled off a middle-middle cutter from Erick Fedde.

I don’t know if I was the only person on earth watching the bird, but it felt like I was. Its perch was so out of the way and on screen so briefly that you’d never have a chance of noticing it unless you were watching extremely carefully — and also watching for the wrong thing entirely. Of course, it’s possible the bird felt the exact same way. After spending a lifetime on the roofs and eaves of Chicago, stumbling onto this odd, green oasis must have felt like discovering its own entirely new universe.

A few batters later, it looked on as Trevor Larnach hustled to avoid a 4-6-3 double play by the slimmest of margins.

A lifetime ago, I did stand-up comedy, which often surprised people because I was very reserved around all but my closest friends. For that same reason, my jokes were extremely theoretical. My friends would get on stage and tell stories about the crazy things that had happened to them. I didn’t have any crazy stories. I never got into crazy situations. When I did tell a story, it was just about a thought I’d had. “I was at the store, in the freezer section,” started one. “I saw the Choco-Tacos, and I thought, ‘I should get a Choco-Taco!’ Then I thought, ‘Should was the wrong word for that sentence.’”

That was the whole story and the whole premise of the joke: I used the incorrect word, to myself, in my head. For a moment, I thought I should get a Choco-Taco, but then I corrected myself, because obviously no one, ever, should eat a Choco-Taco. There’s just no situation where putting a Choco-Taco inside a human body is the best call you could make. No doctor has ever raised their voice above the din of a churning emergency room to shout, “This man needs a Choco-Taco, stat!”

That was what I really loved about comedy, more than performing or writing. Catching that first spark of an idea, recognizing potential in something that everyone else had seen but no one had really noticed. I loved looking at the world that way: like anything that happened, no matter how mundane, could be the most fascinating thing on earth if you just found the right way to think about it. The Choco-Taco story was a true story and I still remember it, even though it was nearly 20 years ago and literally nothing at all happened. I was just standing quietly in a store, thinking about how sad it was that the universe was too small to contain a scenario in which someone could really need that perfect combination of tacos and choco.

In Chicago, in the bottom of the third, the bird bore witness as Nicky Lopez hit a weak liner to second and Willi Castro waited for a big hop and threw him out at first. The bird adjusted its tail feathers as Lopez jogged through the bag. To someone with zero ornithological knowledge, it looked like it was using them to test the wind conditions, like maybe it was starting to think about moving on.

The bird was on television twice in the top of the fourth. It made one brief, blurry appearance when Matt Wallner looped a single into shallow right, and one less blurry but equally brief appearance when Manuel Margot flied out to right center to end the frame. I saw it for the last time in the bottom of the inning. Tommy Pham tapped the ball right off the end of the bat, sending a weak spinner to Santana at first base. Moments later, the fidgeting bird would fly away.

Coincidence or not, that was the moment when I decided to stop keeping the bird for myself. I posted a screenshot of the play and tagged a couple Twins beat writers, asking whether anyone else had noticed the bird. Up in the press box, Dan Hayes of The Athletic answered the call like a hero. He hadn’t seen the bird, but he pulled out his binoculars to look. It was already gone.

I probably should have felt bad for the bird. Watching the White Sox play baseball in 2024 generally falls under the category of fates you wouldn’t wish on any person, but I guess a bird is not a person and I loved the idea that it had dropped by just to see if the Sox were truly as bad as everybody said. Even more than that, I loved the idea that after three or four innings of watching Erick Fedde dominate, it flew away, found its buddies, and said, “I don’t know what you’re all talking about. The White Sox are unhittable.”