Is there anything more pathetic than a dizzy bat race where no one even stumbles?
Between games today at Bulldog Diamond, they had a dizzy bat race, and both girls did that little, half-bent-over, slow turn, rotating at the speed of a clock's second hand, and then both sprinted down the line as sober as Mr. Rogers.
Do you not understand how this works? If we wanted to see who was faster, we'd give you both starting blocks and have you race. There's an entire sport based on just that.
You're supposed to bend all the way over at a 90-degree angle and then spin so fast blood rushes to your head, overflows your capillaries and spills into your eye sockets and ears, blinding you and drowning those little bones that control your balance: the anvil, the pinto and the Santa Maria.
And then you try to race. But here's the secret. It's not a race. You're supposed to be so dizzy that you stumble and fall. And not just fall, "crazy" fall, face first, because the part of your brain that controls your arms has been flooded, too, and instead of breaking the fall, you crumble like a wounded giraffe, your legs still spinning as you spit out a big hunk of sod.
The crowd laughs, because that's our role in the bat-race/crowd relationship. It's highly-entertaining when done correctly. Of course everyone knows this by now. No one goes into the dizzy bat race thinking, "Hmmm. Wonder why we have to spin at the begining of the dizzy bat race." And you don't need a medical degree to figure out that less spinning and less bending make it easier to win.
A lot of people don't realize that performing a memorable fall is the ultimate victory, especially if the other person just sprints to the win and the entire crowd knows he or she didn't commit to the true spirit of the dizzy bat race. So until then, we're stuck with lousy, lousy dizzy bat races. That's why participants should only be little kids. Because they're gullible and they appreciate a good fall.
When aliens invade -- as they inevitably will -- before they drain our bodies for fuel, or are recruited to the cast of "The Real World" for their culture-clash potential, we should line them up for dizzy bat races. They'd never see it coming. At least we'd go out with smiles on our faces.
Assuming blood rushes to their heads the way it does ours. Or that they even have heads.
I am watching what will inevitably be the longest, scoreless softball game in recorded history. It's Saturday afternoon, the bottom of the sixth and the Fresno State Bulldogs lead Hawaii, 0-0.
I say "lead" because they have a runner on second, and in this game, that's progress.
This ump is calling strikes a foot outside and a foot inside. She's calling strikes at the chest and just above the knees. If it doesn't bounce or hit the backstop, it's a strike. She's consistent, but if a runner gets to third, I'm expecting her to rule that the batters can only come to the plate with rake handles.
Maybe the NCAA just made a rule that softball umpires are paid by the inning, and she's short on a car payment or something.
I remember writing a feature about men's fastpitch a few years ago, about a game that went something like 26 innings without a run scored, and each of the pitchers struck out 50 batters. They finally agreed to stop the game at 4 a.m. because one of the pitchers was a policeman and had to go to work.
To clarify the Fresno Grizzlies mascot situation -- and those are seven words I never expected to type -- Wild Thing is now extinct.
Nothing against Wild Thing. He was a working-class kind of mascot. Fur was a little rough, like he'd performed a rain delay or two. You wondered, perhaps, if he'd been lost in the '70s and experimented, briefly, with intravenous drugs.
He wasn't cute and cuddly. In fact, when he was first introduced, years ago, he had big fangs, which were quickly eliminated because they scared kids. He still had claws, which were also somewhat disconcerting, right up until the end.
If you have a bear mascot, you want him to look more like Baloo from "The Jungle Book," big and lovable, like he could whip up a tension-relieving sing-a-long in a tough spot -- first-and-third, nobody out, for instance. Wild Thing was scrawny and kinda mangy-looking. He was the bear version of the Big Bad Wolf.
So instead of just retiring Wild Thing during the offseason, Fresno's Triple-A baseball team came up with this storyline about how Wild Thing was leaving the team to get married to a female mascot named Wilda, and then they took it even further by holding press conferences introducing the new couple, and then they took it even further by having them introduce the new mascot (Parker) and appear at the first couple of home games, and then took it even further by holding a wedding for them.
Little kids had to be thinking one of two things: A.) "My dad is married and he still has time for a job. What kind of controlling partner is this Wilda? I give it six months," or B.) "It's a guy in a bear suit. Just tell us he got hit by a tractor trailer or chased off by bulldozers that scraped away his natural forest, and let's move on. Bury him in the backyard, and bring on Parker, the cute bear!!"
They've taken the charade so far that adults are now confused. A guy I know thought the actual guy who puts on the Wild Thing suit was getting married, which is why they were getting a new mascot. Not sure why he would have to retire because of marriage, either, or why they couldn't just get someone else to jump in the suit ... You know what? It doesn't matter.
Wild Thing is finally gone and Parker is here. Good-looking usually wins out, even in mascot world.
Got a call from Yoshi Fujii tonight, the Fresno boxer who fought his first professional fight in Lemoore.
He apparently knocked his opponent out in the third round.
That makes him 1-0. His manager, the man who runs the Southeast Fresno Boxing Club, said Yoshi's the real deal, and it looks like he might be.
His opponent was Ed Melendrez, a two-time national amateur champ from Bakersfield, not at all the easy fight they wanted to start him with, but the Southeast Fresno Boxing Club doesn't produce enough pro boxers to get to hand-pick opponents at the Tachi Palace. (It's a weird buddy system, this boxing world.)
They want Yoshi to get to 10-0, then he can start making some bigger purses. He's off to a good start.
For whatever reason, people feel the need to cheer athletes after they get injured.
It might have started at a football game, because that's where some of the most serious injuries seem to happen. The standard image is of a player being wheeled away on a stretcher, giving the thumbs-up as the crowd cheers.
We're glad you're alive, seems to be the crowd sentiment, which isn't a bad thing at all. It's important to remember sometimes that games are just games.
(Can't help thinking about the Southern Illinois cheerleader last month who fell from the top of a pyramid. Paramedics strapped her head and body to a stretcher, and she kept on cheering, swinging her arms back and forth as they wheeled her away. That's not doctor recommended.)
It's the minor injuries that bother me. Do we need to cheer that a guy gets a sprained ankle? A slight concussion? If a guy lies there for 2 minutes, is looked over by four trainers, and then jogs off the field, does he deserve a cheer?
At Tuesday's playoff game between the Falcons and the San Diego Gulls, a guy for San Diego just got wrecked into the boards and, when he finally got up a couple minutes later, he was booed all the way off the ice. You gotta love those hockey fans.
It was an entirely different message than what fans usually give after a guy gets hurt. This was more of a "You're a wimp. Get up and toughen-up before we turn someone else loose on you."
Of course, they might have also been upset that Brad Both, the guy who hit him, had been given penalty minutes.
I have been a Cubs fan since the summer of 1983, or possibly 1984. It was a long time ago. I just remember Ron Cey was the third baseman and I wanted to support a team who would play a guy who looked like Ron Cey. (Great stache, by the way.)
There have been some tough times since.
The ball went through Leon Durham's legs. They lost a lot. The Bartman incident. (I will never again step foot into the house where I watched the Bartman game. It's cursed, too.) They lost a lot more.
In 1997, my college roommate, a guy from Chicago, and I, put up the Cubs schedule on our dorm room door in Swanson Hall and were going to write "W" or "L" next to every game and keep a running total for the season. They lost the first 13 games.
But none of that matters because the Cubs won today, on Opening Day, 16-7. They are tied for first. Juan Pierre is hitting lead-off and the world is in perfect harmony. I can hardly remember Corey Patterson's name, or how painful it was to see him and his .254 on-base percentage leading off last year.
I realize Mark Prior and Kerry Wood are hurt, again, or still, or always, whatever the official injury list designation is. (Can we just go ahead and write them down as questionable for Opening Day 2007 and 2008?) But I have a good feeling anyway, that this ... just ... might ... be ... the ... year.
