I’ve written about Minnesota sports for almost two decades, and before that I was a slightly worse-than-mediocre high school athlete. I guess I played an inning of Division III baseball, too.
One thing I’ve always shied away from is normalizing my “experience” as any part of my analysis of any sport. Me hitting .253 in the spring of 2004 doesn’t mean I intrinsically know why Royce Lewis has fallen off in the last few seasons.
Now, could I do a little math or look into some data and try to figure out
why? Sure.
But I will almost never say “well this is what I saw or how I did it” as justification for one of my #takes.
I’m going to change course on that for one second here.
The Minnesota Vikings announced that they’d acquired Kirk Cousins for their original 2027 third-round draft pick — not the pick the team acquired from Philadelphia for Jonathan Greenard (a pick that will likely convey a bit better than the team’s original pick).
We all remember the fun and memes and whatnot from Kirk’s first go-round with the team. Kirko Chainz was the big one. It was fun. It really was. The whitest guy you ever saw play football was acting exactly the opposite of how you’d expect.
In a way, it was like Joe Mauer walking up to T.I’s “What You Know” for all those years.
But if there’s one thing I remember from my youth, it’s that jokes and gags don’t age well. They don’t transfer well from year to year. If your football team has a running inside joke or something one year, my experience has always been that the joke does not make a return in subsequent seasons.
It’s cringy. It becomes lore.
But it absolutely dies — a humane death.
The Twins did not do this with the Bomba Squad after 2019, and it just….wasn’t good. The Bomba Siren sounded long after Eddie Rosario — who initially coined the phrase — had left the Twins and been on multiple subsequent teams. The 2019 team set records for most home runs hit in a season — and haven’t come close since.
In fact, as I recall, the one thing that didn’t hang around was playing Rage Against the Machine’s “Bombtrack” as the song for when the hitter rounded the bases — similar to the Star Wars theme back in the mid-90s when I first started watching the Twins.
That was objectively the one good thing that should have hung around from the Bomba Squad, because Bombtrack after hitting a bomb just sounds cool, and if you line it up right, it jives nicely with the average home run trot. For example (this also lines up kinda nicely for the Kirk gif above, I might add):
Listen: I’m just some random idiot. I have no delusions about my value to this general space *gestures everywhere*.
I just think it’s time to let Kirko Chainz die — and let a new bit rise up from the ashes in its place. Learn from the mistakes of your former roommates and don’t let an otherwise cool(ish) meme become cringy.
