Citizen Twin: (One Sixty-Two: Day Two)

Writer’s note: This is the second in a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Two: Francisco Liriano, Minnesota Twins

I’m showing my seniors Citizen Kane in class. We’re watching, discussing, taking notes, and gearing up for their first film-analysis essay. Whenever I watch the film, I am blown away by the attention to detail, the innovation, the depth of storytelling, and the acting in this 1941 masterpiece. In creating Kane, Orson Welles dominated the medium of film so thoroughly it can take your breath away. As a producer, director, co-writer and lead actor, Welles commanded both the camera and the screen in a way that no one, save Chaplin, has ever done.

And the tragedy, of course, is that he made so few films afterward. It’s a well-documented story, the life of Orson Welles, and no matter how many times it’s told we still have just a handful of his glorious films to watch. His career as a film director was brief, yet brilliant. Were he a ballplayer, he wouldn’t have had the number of games played that’s typically required for the Hall of Fame. But the few seasons he played would make it so difficult to exclude him from joining the great ones.

Over in Minnesota, there was this left-handed rookie pitcher a few years ago who took to the mound like Welles took to Kane. In that summer of 2006, then-22-year-old Francisco Liriano was called up from the minor leagues and proceeded to blow major-league hitters away, tornado-style. He started 16 games, won 12 of them, and struck out 144 batters in 121 innings. He gave up two runs for every nine he pitched. No one could touch the guy.

And then, late in the summer, Liriano hurt his arm. Badly. He was done for that year, and for the next one as well. He pitched a bit during ’08 and ’09, but the magic wasn’t there. His left arm seemed to have no follow-up to the Citizen Kane he’d delivered in ’06. Such a shame. It was a story Orson knew quite well.

But then … wait, what do we have here? Three games started in 2010, with two wins already. Seventeen strikeouts in 21 innings pitched. Just over one run yielded per nine innings. It’s just a few starts, but it’s the closest we’ve seen Liriano to that force of nature from 2006. Number 47 is whipping that left hand around and throwing darts once again.

We’ll take what we can get. Perhaps this is Liriano’s version of Welles’ A Touch of Evil, that brilliant thriller from 1958 in which Welles reminded viewers of just how unreal his career could have been, if he and the studios had just gotten along a bit better. Maybe Liriano is showing us one more time what that comet we saw on the mound in ’06 really looked like.

Or, perhaps, the lefty is embarking on a longer string of successes. Scorsese-like, perhaps. Over in Minnesota, they’ll take that kind of career every day of the week.

No offense to Orson, of course. But Welles knew the game. For as long as Liriano keeps winning, he’ll sell papers. That, my friends, would make Charles Foster Kane one happy man.