AUG. 13, 12:53 p.m., Target Field, Minneapolis.

Game 115 of the 2012 season, Tigers vs. Twins, is meaningless in the grand scheme, one game out of 162, one game in a lifetime of them for Twins catcher Joe Mauer. He will prepare for this one the way he has prepared for every one of the previous 114: intent on making sure his 6'5", 230-pound body forgets what happened in 2011.

He arrives at the ballpark in his 1969 Chevelle and dresses in a home jersey, cap, shorts and a pair of running shoes. He walks down the tunnel outside the Twins' clubhouse, shuffling a little, his back stiff, his legs tired. "So this is how it starts," he says.

After a quick trip to an interview room to tape a standard-issue, end-of-season promo thanking the fans, he heads back to the clubhouse, stopping every few steps to stretch his back. "I'm feeling a little run-down today," he says. His team is 16 games under .500 and 13 1/2 games behind the White Sox in the American League Central. Mauer walks through the clubhouse, passing his friend, Twins reliever Glen Perkins, and a couple of other early arrivals. "I'm always here because I like it here," Perkins says. "Joe's always here because he's working." First pitch is six hours and eight minutes away.

JOE MAUER IS one of America's last remaining geographical oddities -- the Midwestern stoic. He encompasses what an entire state believes to be its best attributes: humility, loyalty, self-deprecation, drive and conscientiousness. And yes, more than a fair measure of blandness. "You'll find that I'm really boring," Mauer said in mid-June. "I'm not as cool as I'm supposed to be." He is the Midwestern ideal sprung to life, as reliable as summer corn, with an image as square as his sideburns. His locker, home or away, looks like the hotel closet of a businessman on an overnight stay: shirt, pants and shoes. Other guys have family photos, food, books, even women's thongs strung across the backs of their chairs, but Mauer has nothing remotely personal.

Mauer's accomplishments this season help him and his fans forget 2011. Jared Wickerham/Getty Images

Mauer should be easing into his professional prime, a 29-year-old starting the Shakespearean third act of his career as a pro ballplayer. There are, presumably, as many years ahead of him as behind him, and the ones immediately ahead of him, chronologically and anecdotally, should be among the best of an already spectacular career.

Yet there is something distant about him, something assured but vulnerable too. You can see it in the way he scans a room, head held high, before entering it and the manner in which each word is weighed and measured on a mental scale to assess every possible interpretation. His wariness is an act of subtle genius and self-preservation, every bit as central to his brilliance as the ability to treat a two-strike pitch a hair's breadth off the corner as if it sailed over his head. Teammates marvel at his composure: stolid, immovable, an oak with deep roots. But there's a part of Mauer that remains circumspect, even now. "Private" and "guarded" are the two words repeated most by teammates. He appears slightly wounded from the questions and criticisms that dominated 2011, when injuries limited him to 82 games and his stoicism created an air of mystery that fostered speculation and distrust that led, inevitably, to questions about his passion for the game.

You must understand: Before the 2011 season, Mauer's decision to stay home, to spurn the come-hithers from the debauched temptresses on either coast, was viewed as more reinforcement of his best Minnesota-bred attributes. Mauer wouldn't abandon the small-market Twins and their sparkling new ballpark. He was the rarest of heroes: a local boy who stayed local.

The change in 2011 was startling. All the qualities that gained Mauer wealth and fame and drew reserved, down-home Minnesotans to him -- the humility, modesty and desire to be treated as just another guy -- were flipped and used against him. He was criticized for being in the background, for not seeing himself as above the backup catcher or middle reliever. His heart was challenged.

Mauer doesn't seem compelled to convince anybody of his ardor for the game, which might be part of the reason the questions arose in the first place. "When something that you love to do gets taken away, it's tough" is about as far as he will go. His passion is more analytical than ebullient, which creates confusion among fans who see playing baseball for a living as an unattainable dream.

More than any other big leaguer, Mauer -- the first pick of the 2001 draft -- is community property. "There are times when I feel overwhelmed," says Perkins, also a Twin Cities native. "I can't come close to imagining what it's like for Joe." As Twins manager Ron Gardenhire says, "It's all on his shoulders, all of this." Sitting at the desk in his office, Gardenhire leans back and throws both arms to the side, signifying what a wide swath all of this entails. When Gov. Mark Dayton needed someone to help pitch the state's tourism in an "Explore Minnesota" television spot, he went right to Mauer. "I didn't know I was going to have to sing until I got there," Mauer says with a laugh.

He is so tied to Minnesota and its monochromatic idiosyncrasies that the distinction between Minneapolis and St. Paul is a cultural gulf for him. When Joe made the big leagues as a 20-year-old in 2004 and enlisted a friend to help him find a place to live, Joe's father, Jake, asked, "Where are you looking?"

"St. Paul," Joe responded. "And a few places in Minneapolis."

Jake Mauer got quiet.

"Remember, you're a St. Paul boy," he said in a fatherly tone.

Joe chose St. Paul 00 the less glamorous, remember-where-you-came-from city. Locals say you date Minneapolis but marry St. Paul.

"My dad was joking," Joe says. "Well, maybe half-joking."

His parents and grandparents come to most games. His fiancee, Maddie Bisanz, is a high school classmate from Cretin-Derham in St. Paul. They're getting married Dec. 1, in St. Paul. "That's home for us," Mauer says.

On a purely anecdotal level, she is his soul mate. When asked whether Bisanz would be available to be interviewed for this story, Mauer said no. "She's not into any of that," he says. "She probably wishes I did something else."

There might have been times last year when Mauer wished the same. If public opinion is the gauge, his worst season as a professional came at the worst moment: the first year of an eight-year, $184 million contract extension. For the first time, he was surrounded by forces of negativity and skepticism. After an offseason to recover, 2012 became his season of forgetting.

1:30 P.M., Target Field weight room. Ten minutes in the 55-degree cold tub is followed by 10 minutes in the 104-degree hot tub. From there, Mauer changes into workout clothes and starts with 12 minutes on the stationary bike. He clasps his hands behind his back and watches the MLB Network as it plays soundlessly on a screen hanging from the ceiling. "You form so many friendships throughout baseball, and sitting here is a good time to watch and catch up on everybody," he says. The Twins lineup has not been posted, but Mauer expects to play first. "That's the word on the street," he says. The Twins strategy to keep his bat productive and legs healthy has him catching a little less than half of the time. He would prefer to catch -- "We're still working on it," he says -- but the numbers make it hard to argue with the division of labor: .316 with an AL- leading .412 OBP. From the bike, he moves to a balancing/stretching platform called the Power Plate, where he spends 15 minutes working his back and legs before logging another 15 on a hip-strengthening device called a Rotex. Starting pitcher Scott Diamond is doing box jumps in the corner. Reliever Jared Burton appears to be practicing his golf swing with a weighted bar. "You build athletes from the ground up," says Twins strength coach Perry Castellano. "Working up the kinetic chain." Mauer is halfway there. First pitch is four hours and 35 minutes away.

Mauer has a daily routine of hip stretches, balance drills and reps in the cage. Jenn Ackerman for ESPN The Magazine

HONEYMOONS END. Marriages begin. The glow fades, and something that might have seemed minor -- he bites his fingernails or never cleans the toothpaste off the sink -- becomes insufferable as time passes. It's the familiarity/contempt continuum. And so it can happen that a guy who hits .320 and gets on base 40 perent of the time, a guy who is the only catcher to win three batting titles, a guy whose MVP season of 2009 is arguably the most remarkable offensive year for anyone who ever wore the gear, is less appealing when he sits out with an uncommon injury and is near the top in grounding into double plays and often walks rather than swings in potentially game-deciding situations. A backlash is inevitable, maybe, but no less surprising.

Consider history: Mauer is the only high school athlete to be named USA Today national player of the year in both football and baseball. He averaged 20 points per game in basketball his senior year. Rick Majerus, then the coach at Utah, scouted a teammate and told John Janke, the Cretin-Derham athletic director at the time, "I like the shooting guard, but I really like the power forward." Janke told Majerus, "Well, Coach, he's got a scholarship to play quarterback at Florida State, and he's probably going to be the No. 1 pick in the baseball draft. But good luck."

Mauer's propensity for multiplatform excellence has long been viewed by teammates with a mixture of awe and maddening frustration. In 2006, when Guitar Hero was at its peak, several Twins would gather in hotel rooms and play. One night, Mauer decided to join them. "He was terrible, just terrible," Perkins says. "I left and came back an hour later, and he was killing it. I looked at everybody and said, 'Great, something else for him to be better than us at.'"

After another year of success in 2010, the $184 million contract kicked in. Mauer had knee surgery that offseason but was slow to come back. He rehabbed through part of spring training, attempting to get himself in playing shape. Frustrated with the pace of his recovery and cognizant of the enormity of his contract, he pushed. His knee pushed back. "Looking back to what I was doing, the volume -- it was kind of a crazy workout," he says.

"When people come out to see you play, you want to be able to play," Mauer says. Something -- poor advice? the obligation to return quickly? -- created endless setbacks. An early-season announcement from the team that Mauer had bilateral leg weakness compounded matters. It was met with one part alarm (it can be a precursor to Lou Gehrig's disease) to 10 parts derision (too vague, and besides, $23 million a year?). As a result, bilateral leg weakness was deemed mysterious and was all many Minnesotans needed to throw up their hands and conclude they didn't even know him anymore.

"I don't think the Twins handled it very well," says a source close to Mauer. "They should have just said, 'He had surgery, and he hasn't fully recovered yet.' That was the reality, so why not say that? The problem was, he was the hometown hero who had just signed a huge contract. People thought he'd better be playing every day."

Rick Anderson, who has been the Twins' pitching coach throughout Mauer's career, says, "There were many times Joe told me, 'If people only knew what I was going through physically.'"

Why, then, didn't Mauer make a better effort to explain himself publicly? Why wouldn't he tell the Twins fan base what he told Anderson? The pitching coach shrugs. "That's Joe," he says. "He doesn't bitch and moan. Nobody gets thrown under the bus."

So what happens when adulation becomes cynicism? What happens when Internet message boards -- never barometers of cultured thought but still reflective of some base element -- get peppered with posts like ones from a guy named Mark Barrett, who wrote, "This singles-hitting, no-passion lazy sissy is REALLY getting on my nerves!"?

On June 17 of this season, Milwaukee's Rickie Weeks plowed hard into Mauer on a play at the plate. The slide was questionable: Mauer had given Weeks a lane to the outside, and Weeks chose not to take it. Inside the Twins' clubhouse, it was viewed as a dirty play. Mauer missed the better part of a week with a deep thigh bruise, which prompted the St. Paul Pioneer Press to conduct the following online poll: