Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

There’s a great couple lines in Douglas Adams’s Mostly Harmless, the concluding fifth installment in the unaptly named Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. It’s from a scene where the series’ protagonist Arthur Dent is coming to grips with his place in the universe now that Earth has been destroyed:

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn’t, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn’t do it. Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was not a lot of demand for his services.

In that spirit, I’ll pass along this link, containing a .gif that shows you how a sewing machine works. Look at it! How amazing is that!

I start writing things from time to time, and nine times out of 10, if I stop, that post never sees the light of day. You know how it is when you have a great idea that fizzles out, or you just lose interest, or whatever. So it’s extra awesome when events conspire to make something from the dustbin suddenly relevant again. Here’s a little snippet of something I wrote around like, October 1ish.

My roommate and I were watching Roy Halladay and the Blue Jays completely dismantle the Red Socks yesterday. It was a 12–0 romp. A total delight to watch. The final score wasn’t the best part, though. The best part was watching Dusty Brown, the Socks’ fourth string catcher, come in to pitch in the ninth inning.

I’m going to echo Bill Simmons here and say that there’s nothing more exciting that watching a position player pitch. It’s the best! . . .

Sports fans everywhere should by now be aware of the 20-inning epic that the Mets and Cardinals engaged in last night. What does this have to do with a paragraph and a half that I wrote six months ago? Well, Cardinals second baseman Felipe Lopez and backup outfielder Joe Mather pitched the 18th, 19th, and 20th innings. That’s three innings of position players pitching!

There’s a few wacky sports events that are just awesome to see as they’re happening. A hole in one. A triple play. A buzzer-beating half-court shot. All of these events are over in the blink of an eye, though. A position player on the mound, though, is something to be savored. It lasts. There are moments within moments. It’s my favorite.

I feel like I’ve read this or heard this somewhere else, so forgive me if this sounds completely like something you’ve seen before, but my buddy and I always say that there should be a service where like, you get a text message whenever a position player is about to start pitching. And then you should obviously be able to watch it on some special channel that activates in these situations. No matter where I was—a bar, the mall, a wedding, a lecture—I would bolt to go watch a position player pitch. It’s awesome! Why can’t Major League Baseball and the networks conspire to make this happen?