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SPEAKER 1: Oh, big O.

JON GORDON: Watching the Twins take batting practice the night before the team's first postseason game in 11 years, you're struck by how similar this group is to the Oakland Athletics. Both clubs are made up of mostly young, fun loving guys who've defied the odds to get to the playoffs. Ann Killion writes about the A's for the San Jose Mercury News.

ANN KILLION: This is the match-up that baseball fans should just be dying to see because it defies everything that we've had drummed into our heads for the last few years under the Bud Selig regime. That small market teams, low payroll teams can't compete. He wanted to vaporize the Twins. The A's at one point were on a contraction list. They're not supposed to be doing what they're doing.

JON GORDON: The teams are alike in other ways. Managers Ron Gardenhire and Art Howe are candidates for manager of the year. The A's and Twins both drew fewer fans than they probably should have. They each want a new stadium but haven't secured one. Minnesota and Oakland have mostly young players who do the things that young people do. Torii Hunter, have you played this series out on the video game console?

TORI HUNTER: Yeah, yeah, I played it out a couple of times on the PlayStation and I think the Twins, they won. I cheated a little bit, but we won the game. One

JON GORDON: One key difference between the Twins and A's, the latter team has recent playoff experience, having lost close series to the Yankees in 2000 and 2001. Tim Hudson is game one starter for the A's.

TIM HUDSON: Hopefully with the experience that we've gained over the last couple of years in the postseason, hopefully that can maybe give us a little bit of an advantage, but it's going to be tough. I know they're excited about being here for the first time in a while, and we're going to have our hands full. There's no question about that.

JON GORDON: Hudson's counterpart in today's game, Twins pitcher Brad Radke, concedes that playoff experience could help the A's, but he hopes it won't be long before the Twins will become postseason veterans using the A's as a role model.

BRAD RADKE: No, it's a good example for us. We can look out and say, look, look what the A's can do, with a small payroll and we're kind of in the same boat.

JON GORDON: One person who'll be rooting for the Twins at Oakland's network associates Coliseum is Keith [? Hedlund. ?] The 31-year-old San Francisco resident, who grew up in Edina, has tickets for game two tomorrow afternoon. Hedlund became a die hard Twins fan in 1987 after being allowed to skip out on a high school field trip to see the Twins' World Series victory parade in downtown Minneapolis. Now he follows the Twins by reading newspaper box scores.

SPEAKER 2: I haven't even seen them. I've seen Twins for Yankees 1 or a sentence or two about the game. But yeah, I've never seen them, physically move in person or even on television because they rarely appear here. So it'll be fantastic to see them here.

JON GORDON: Probably don't even know what Cristian Guzman looks like, do you?

SPEAKER 2: Well, I do know him, but a lot of these people who I've never-- Bobby Kielty, who is that?

JON GORDON: It's a good thing Hedlund has a ticket to one of the two games in Oakland. Otherwise, he still might wonder what Bobby Kielty looks like. That's because the games are playing on something called the ABC Family channel, a cable station that many people don't receive. In Minnesota, they will also air on the Twin Cities Fox affiliate KMSP-TV in Oakland, Jon Gordon, Minnesota Public Radio.