Randal Stewart Stephenson has been down on his luck for some time. 

Now, you may have read the title and thought this was going to be some sort of hackneyed joke about how some guy from out in the sticks thought all his problems—probably his drunkenness, ongoing divorce proceedings, and children who won’t answer his calls or drop-ins at their office jobs on what he calls “Dadsual Fridays”—would go away when the man he likely called “Rockhead Baldummy” was axed.

Or maybe he was a “Doc Roc” type of guy. Maybe he even had some weird saying like “Spreadsheets put me in my bedsheets because I’m bored and don’t want to watch baseball anymore.” Or he called his microwave TV dinner choices his “2 o’clock pitching decisions.” You know the type. And that’s the type of lout I set out to find.

But Uncle John Bonnes recently rightsized the website, and I only had the funds for one interview. “Stew,” as his friends call him, is not that type of lout. I had one chance to talk to some ne’er-do-well about the Woonsocket Rocket, and I blew it when I spotted Stew Stephenson at the Lino Lakes Casey’s. Because, sadly, Stew’s not some sot, just a guy who’s run into some back luck that coincides with Baldelli getting the hook. He’s been liquor-free since ‘03!

A couple weeks back, Stew totaled his own car by colliding with a deer on I-35W, then borrowed his in-laws’ Escort—only to immediately put a rock through the window after it fell off a gravel truck. His lovely daughter Emily also lost her retainer this week. Life has been less Field of Dreams and more Final Destination. He’d hoped his misfortune would be over this week, but he’s gonna need at least another week to get back on the winning track.

His thoughts on Baldelli? He’s not a Twins fan. Or a “base ball” fan at all. You could hear it in the way he said that he thinks it’s still spelled with two words, like it’s 1845 Hoboken. 

In fact, when I brought up Baldelli’s name, he said “Oh I love that guy. From the Sopranos, yeah? Love when the little dude gives a big boom to things, too.” 

He then segued into a ten-minute monologue about authentic Italian cuisine, which, in his telling, consists of chicken alfredo and pepperoni pizza. This was punctuated by an offensive faux-Italian accent that landed somewhere between Luigi from Nintendo and Jared Leto in House of Gucci. I won’t reprint the anti-Italian slurs he threw in for seasoning, but let’s just say you shouldn’t repeat them around Aaron Sabato.

If anyone from the Twins is reading this, I would like a press pass. I’m a real journalist who knows fancy words like “communiqué” and “embargo.”

“Pope’s American, not Italian now. I hear he’s a Black Socks fan,” he eventually said. I can tell from the way he pronounced “Black Socks” that he definitely doesn’t know that it’s spelled “Sox,” but I digress.

Trying to get him back on track, I asked him his thoughts on the Pohlad family, and he responded that he recently bought his lovely daughter Emily one of those instant-print Pohloid cameras. “She said it makes her feel like she’s living way back in the 2000s, which hurts a little,” Stephenson said. Just another loss for the home team.

I asked him for his general thoughts on the team, in an attempt to get anything useful out of him, and he said “I saw on Twitter they’re bringing the trees back. Shame they removed them from the field. Who was it that had them remove them? Craig Monroe? You know that guy stole a belt once?”

How he knew the name Craig Monroe is beyond me. I don’t think I want to do these kinds of assignments anymore.