This is no ordinary, off-the-shelf brand of happiness coming off Doug Mientkiewicz. This is happiness born of release, of salvation, of redemption. There's always misery lurking behind this kind of joy. You have to have been down and gotten up to get here. It isn't owed; it's earned. There are no shortcuts. You want to know why this guy is so happy? Why he can stand at first base after a dead-duck single and smile like a returning soldier who sees his girl for the first time? Because he's free. He's playing for himself and his Minnesota Twins teammates, and no one else. Because baseball is fun -- for the first time. Imagine that. Imagine being 26 years old, a big leaguer, and just discovering the joy of hitting a ball with a bat and running like hell, or spearing a hard shot down the line and turning a sure double into a thrown helmet and a spit-shower of expletives.

Pretend you're a 24-year-old rookie, up from Double-A, and early on you get a double off Pedro Martinez. Pedro throws, you swing, and the ball rockets out to right-center and two-hops the wall. What would your reaction be? In 1999, this happened to Mientkiewicz. He was so thrilled, he lay awake half the night in torment. Why? Because he was 1-for-4 off Pedro, that's why, and in his warped mind those three failures weren't acceptable.

Baseball in 1999 for Mientkiewicz was a hell of strikeouts, popups and paralysis at the plate. He hit .229 with 2 homers and 32 RBIs in 118 games -- numbers even the Twins couldn't afford to carry from their first baseman. In terms of achievement, it was like nothing he had ever experienced. In terms of enjoyment, it was like any other year. Baseball was a job, a burden, a responsibility. Worse yet, it was a test of his manhood. Just like always.

This was supposed to be an uplifting tale of a young guy with a long name (mint-KAY-vich) and an improbable personal story. This was supposed to be a light and airy look at an Olympic hero, a high school teammate of Alex Rodriguez who comes back two years after a rookie flameout and -- of all things -- leads the out-of-nowhere Minnesota Twins back into the public consciousness. It was all set to be an after-school special. But it turns out there's more to Mientkiewicz than tired name jokes and infinite public-address mispronunciations and a soft landing on a clean white base. In truth, the story is uplifting. You'll just have to give it time.

Eventually, you will know why Mientkiewicz's average topped .400 more than a month into the season, and why he and his teammates are the most refreshing story in either league. You'll know why he hit a doink single to right off Pedro in April and stood on first base like he'd just signed his name in the log atop Everest. Act like you've been there before? No way. He had been there before, and it almost killed him. So, at some point you'll know why he said, "This time around, when I got a hit off Pedro and I felt like doing cartwheels at first base, I was standing over there smiling, thinking, 'Thank the Lord, I just got a hit off maybe the best pitcher who ever put on a uniform.'"

But before that makes any sense, you need to know about the car Doug's parents bought when he entered Florida State, how they put 50,000 miles on it driving from their home in Miami to every one of his weekend games during his three-year college career. And how Len and Janice Mientkiewicz would call Doug's girlfriend before weekday games and ask her to put the phone next to the radio so they could hear the broadcasts. And how, even before that, Len made a vow to Doug to never turn him down if he wanted to play catch or hit or work on his fielding.

Len asked -- no, Len demanded -- something in return. "I was tough," the master electrician says. "My attitude was, if I'm going to spend my time out here, then you'd better be paying attention. That's just the way I am." The parents have gone to remarkable lengths to both form and follow their son's career. Len -- or, predictably, Mr. M -- coached every one of Doug's Little League teams, and when Doug was a sophomore in high school, Len built a batting cage in the backyard. The house became a sort of sports flophouse, with teammates -- including A-Rod during Doug's senior year at national champ Westminster Christian -- sometimes hanging out in his room when he wasn't home. His parents are such a presence in his life that Doug swears he feels them, even when they're not there in person. This was especially true in '99. Every time he walked to the plate, there they were -- all the devotion, all the sacrifices, all the demands.

He shot a look at his osteoporotic batting average on the scoreboard every time, every single time, he walked to the plate. He thought about his father and the satellite dish sitting back in Miami taping every game -- tapes containing only his at-bats. And then he'd think about the blunt words he'd hear later that night when Len called to report the findings of his research, ways to fix his approach and his swing and his career. "This is what I saw," he'd tell Doug's voice mail. "And this is how we can correct it."

Doug says, "That was the last thing I wanted to hear." It was, however, the Len Mientkiewicz way: The only way to succeed was to work harder, think more and bury yourself in it. If you go 2-for-4, forget the two hits and dwell on the two outs. Ignore success, self-flagellate over failure -- the Calvinist approach to career building. It's a tough way to live in a sport predicated on failure. "I was ashamed," Doug says. "If I was lucky, I did something once a week that would help us, and on those days I didn't feel good, because I thought I could do more."

Doug and wife Jodi -- a stunning would-be screenwriter with a master's in English from South Florida -- were in their first year of marriage. At one point during the season, she told him, "If this is supposed to be the best year of our life, I might go jump off a bridge." What was the depth of Doug's obsession? He'd watch SportsCenter every night and analyze each hitter -- Larry Walker turning on a fastball from a lefty, Rafael Palmeiro keeping his hands back before lashing a curve up the alley. What Len was doing to Doug, Doug was doing to the rest of the league. He'd say to Jodi, "See how he hit that pitch? I should try that." Says Jodi, "Before long, he was trying to be 60 hitters at the same time." On road trips, he'd return to the hotel and call Jodi, then he'd call his parents, then he'd stay up till 3 or 4 in the morning, listening to roommate Corey Koskie snore and wondering what he could have done differently. "We didn't do much together that year," Koskie says in his best Canadian deadpan.

"When it's the only thing you know how to do well, and you're a mess, what do you do?" Mientkiewicz asks. "I lost more than the feeling of being depended upon as a teammate; I lost the feeling of being a decent human being. For the first time in my life, I looked in the mirror and didn't like what I saw. It was that bad."

There were times when his cell phone would ring, and he would see his father's number flash, and he'd choke back tears. "Numerous times I called him when I was literally in tears," Doug says. "I was afraid I was letting him down. I was ready to quit. I thought, If this is my childhood dream, I need to do something different or get out."

Len says, "I'd tell him to have fun. Nothing's that fricking important."

Doug heard this, but he also knew there was a stack of paper back in his parents' house that contained every boxscore of every game he had ever played. He knew his father hitched the satellite dish to the trailer every time they went out of town for a vacation, so they wouldn't miss a game. Not that important? He knew the folks at DirecTV got a load of angry e-mails from his parents every Wednesday, when rights restrictions prohibited it from airing a Twins game. His parents had been everywhere -- Venezuela for winter ball, Alaska for summer ball during college years, every minor league pit stop along the way. When friends they hadn't seen for 20 years asked them what they're doing, Janice Mientkiewicz said, "The same things we've been doing since Little League. Nothing's really changed."

Some of the stories are incredible. After his first year of college, Doug played in the Alaska Summer League and his team qualified for the National Baseball Congress tournament in Wichita. The team was advancing, on its way to the finals, and it was doing this without the presence of Len and Janice. They didn't even have a way of listening to the games. This was not good. Len decided he had to find a way to keep up in real time, so he called the team's GM, who directed him to a radio station in Alaska that was picking up the feed of the game. Len called the station and had them place the phone where he could hear the broadcast. The call cost about $150, but Len and Janice caught the ball game. "That's just the way I am," Len says. "I'm not the smartest or the best, but give me a job and I'll get it done."

When Doug was playing Double-A ball in New Britain, Conn., Len convinced the radio station there to plug in a direct feed from his phone line to the broadcast. That way, he could just dial a number and get the game. When Doug played in Salt Lake City last year, Jodi would receive a call moments before the game started, at which point she would dutifully place the phone next to the radio. Marconi, it's safe to say, had no idea.

In late April, with the Twins and Doug on a major roll, Janice Mientkiewicz called her daughter-in-law to say she had just spent three hours in a Twins Internet chat room. That alone is a testament to her almost clinical devotion, but that's not the end of the story. While in this particular cubicle of ether, she learned that Twins games are a popular date for young couples in the Twin Cities area. Girlfriends, apparently, are more interested in the team because of Doug's good looks. The thick sideburns and the dark-brown eyes and the shaved arms and the 1940s socks, evidently, are a drawing card. Janice shared this knowledge with Jodi, who told Doug, "You looked the same two years ago, and nobody cared. I guess if you hit well, you get better looking."

So why is he so happy? For one thing, because he was sent down after spring training last year and spent almost the entire 2000 season in Triple-A. There, the pressure was off. Half the Twins were bobbing between the big leagues and Triple-A, and Doug found himself hitting well (.334) and enjoying himself. "My parents didn't understand how I could be having fun in the minors," he says. "They thought I should be totally focused on making it back. I was, don't get me wrong, but I also realized that being demoted wasn't the end of the world."

The Olympics helped too. The Twins allowed Mientkiewicz to leave the Salt Lake Buzz and play for Tommy Lasorda and country. The team was always described as a hodgepodge of over-the-hill big leaguers and hot prospects ("I always wondered where I fit in that," Doug says), and the one thing missing was ego. They were there to win the gold medal -- the only way their work would be remembered. Mientkiewicz hit the game-winning homer in the semifinal game against South Korea, sending the U.S. into the gold medal game against Cuba, which it won 4-0. Says Doug: "Nobody cared about themselves. Guys were taking 95, 100 mph fastballs off the helmet just to get on base. Anything to help the team."

These days, Doug not only helps his team with hits, but with hits that count. On the last day of April, he had two of the Twins' three hits off Andy Pettitte -- an RBI single and a solo homer -- in a 2-1 win. Two nights later, he went 4-for-4 against the Yankees, and one of his hits was a two-run single off lefty Mike Stanton that put away a 4-2 win. That night (May 2) left his average at .407. Not bad production for a guy making $215,000 a year.

Coincidentally, the Twins, owners of the worst record in the AL last year, ran off to the best start in team history (20-7). It's a turnaround that neatly parallels that of their first baseman. "We've got a little chemistry thing going," says closer LaTroy Hawkins. "We've learned that winning is contagious. We always knew losing was contagious."

The minors, the Olympics -- that's how Doug changed, but what about Len? He changed too, you know. He still travels with the dish and plans his vacations around Minnesota's schedule (next stop: Texas), but he doesn't give his son advice unless asked. How did that happen? How did Len come to realize that what once was considered parental support had long since morphed into undue pressure?

Accidentally, of course. When Doug was named to the Olympic team, the USOC called Len and asked if he had newspaper clippings or possibly even tapes of Doug's athletic career. Did he have clippings? His house is a few yellowed pages short of qualifying as a newspaper morgue. And tapes? Universal Studios doesn't have tapes the way Len Mientkiewicz has tapes. Tapes of Doug playing basketball, baseball, football. Just about every game of high school. Summer ball, winter ball, minor league ball. With all of this at his disposal, he figured he'd make a highlight tape for the Olympics. But after about a week of going through the tapes, he came to a realization: He couldn't send most of them. They were more Len than Doug, Len muttering about Doug's inadequacies at the plate, Len screaming about Doug's shot selection on the court, Len doing his fricking this and fricking that while Doug played football. "I really am a s-," Len said as he watched his son and listened to himself.

"Everything he's done was out of love," Doug says. "He was a great role model, and now he's my best friend. I was raised to be hard on myself. He was harder on me than anybody, and now I'm harder on myself. I can't function like that. I had to get past it."

Len says, "It sounds like I'm the heavy in this, but I'm not. I'm happy when he's happy."

"He never told me that," Doug says. He is sitting in the dugout at the Metrodome, baring his soul between spits of Copenhagen: "It wasn't our relationship. We're not that good with words. It was more of a macho thing." Len still throws his son batting practice in the off-season. At 60, he still tries to juice one past his big league son.

Doug's other passion is fishing, and this past winter he bought a Contender 31 boat he docks in Miami and takes on frequent trips to the Bahamas. Doug says, "You have to have a vice to make your way through this game with your sanity. Especially for me."

Father and son still talk, though less often and less intensely. Doug still feels him, even when he's not there, but the feeling has changed some. It's starting to feel a little bit more like support than pressure. "I'm like most people," the father says. "I got too smart too late."

"These days," the son says, "we don't talk about baseball. We talk about fishing." But now the rest of baseball is talking about Mientkiewicz. Maybe the father's work is done.

This article appears in the May 28 issue of ESPN The Magazine.