This story was excerpted from Do-Hyoung Park’s Twins Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

You never know what you’ll find written on the giant whiteboard in the hallway leading into the Twins’ clubhouse.

It’s been dominated since early in the season by a large message telling the players to “BE GANGSTA,” which has uncertain origins but remains on the whiteboard, we’re told, because the team started winning after it showed up. Before this last road trip, there was a reminder to the players that the temperature in Seattle would top out in the 60s during this series, and to pack accordingly. Sometimes, it’ll note that there’s massage therapy or haircuts available that day.

Anyway, we’re talking about this because there has also been a scoreboard to the far right of the whiteboard for much of the season, labeled “HORSE,” the game of making and matching basketball shots.

That’s the realm of Nick Gordon.

“I don't know what to say, you know?” Gordon said. “I'm the best. Everybody wants to be me.”

Gordon held a 6-0-0-0-0 lead over Alex Kirilloff, Joe Ryan (a.k.a. “Mullet,” per the scoreboard), Gilberto Celestino and the mysterious “Greg” for weeks and weeks, it seemed, with nobody having challenged his supremacy and the scoreboard remaining stagnant.

Well, until Trevor Larnach noticed -- and over the last two homestands, a flurry of tally marks have started to appear after the long period of dormancy.

“If you look at the whiteboard, it's Nick with all these tallies, and everybody else that's been playing him with zero,” Larnach said. “So I said, 'That's not right. I've got to see what this is about.’”

The hoop is smaller than regulation size and stands in the massive equipment storage room adjacent to the clubhouse. (In a digression, that’s where we used to hold postgame press conferences, and manager Rocco Baldelli would make communications vice president Dustin Morse sink a jump-shot before opening the room to the media.) Players will find time to duck in for a quick five-game series of H-O-R-S-E when they have a few free minutes.

Last I checked at the end of the homestand, Gordon was at 13, with Larnach hot on his heels at 10. But there’s controversy there.

“The thing is, you see, Trevor likes to put all of his wins on the board,” Gordon said. “I put just series wins on the board. So he'll win just two games out of a five-game series and you'll see two wins, but he lost the other three. He puts the individual wins. That doesn't mean anything.”

Gordon still lets the tally marks remain even though they’re illegitimate in his eyes, so he must not be all too fearful of Larnach’s encroachment -- and he talks a big game.

“They try to wait until I haven't played for a while, and then they want to play me,” Gordon said. “They want me to cool down. Trevor's been practicing since we got here. We got here at 1 o'clock and he's been practicing. And then we played at 3. So he had two hours of practice. I ate, stretched, hit in the cage, did everything, all kinds of stuff.”

Larnach claims that he’s the one who gets creative with his shots, while Gordon just goes for the jump shots, over and over again. ("Steph Curry. From deep,” Gordon said. “When I'm way back like that, they can't really do nothing with me.") Larnach does begrudgingly acknowledge that Gordon is much more consistent with that shot -- but he also points to how the commanding lead on the scoreboard has narrowed.

“It's God-given,” Gordon said. “With Trevor, he's got to practice. Trevor's got to practice.”

Again, this team is playing good ball and having a ton of fun while doing it – on the field and behind the scenes. And even without Jake Cave, Mitch Garver and Taylor Rogers, who are said to have started the shootaround last year, the competitive fun lives on.