I had to take a brief sabbatical following my near-mental-breakdown after responding to Eric's last post, but I am well refreshed now and ready once again to attempt to tear Mr. Walkingshaw a new butthole, although this time, due to court order, I must do so from a distance and with words instead of in person and with a butter knife (note to self: next time, bring Ginsu!).
In today's post, Eric addresses his second great love, baseball (his first love, of course, being the robotic re-creation of Wayne's World-era Tia Carrerre). Specifically, he addresses those local Sultans of Suck, the Mariners, and their recently released giant first baseman, Richie Sexson. What insights does Eric have to bring us about the aging athlete and his rapid decline from free-swinging power hitter to free-swinging douchebag non-hitter? Well, if you count numerical gobbledygook as "insight," then plenty. If, however, you're looking for the kind of wit and inside-the-box thinking of such laudable luminaries as ESPN's Jayson Stark or Fox Sports' Mark Kriegel, then you're left sadly wanting.
Like a math teacher in an after-school special (the kind where the teacher inspires the students, not the kind where the teacher statutorily rapes them), Eric believes that through the power of numbers we can come to understand our world, and solve the mysteries of the universe. Thankfully, most of us abandoned such wild hopes once we stopped watching Sesame Street, or at the very least once we figured out that math is hard. And with his magical, mystical "numbers," Eric attempts to show us that contrary to popular belief, Richie Sexson was not a terrible defensive first-baseman, but actually an unsung defensive hero, snagging errant throws with a dexterity not even matched by a level 50 Half-Elven Thief. But numbers schmumbers, I say! We all know Eric's little theory is far from true, not the least because Richie Sexson has never proven himself capable of performing a successful saving throw when encountering a master-level floor trap in the Cave of the Unguarded Magical Pantaloons (Who has, you ask? Just a certain native of Kara-Tur who goes by the name Satrick Pheehan, that's who).
I counter Eric's "numbers" with the most irrefutable evidence available to mankind: the eyewitness account. I have watched the Mariners play their game of base-ball on at least a half-half-dozen occasions, one of which probably featured Richie Sexson at the first base. And while he is no doubt a large man and has been known to have an admirable love for drink, I could detect, with my own two peepers, no great skill in his ability to catch balls thrown at his face by diminutive Caribbeans. In fact, it seemed to me that he did so with great reluctance, as if he was tempted to let the balls smash into his enormous, flat-faced noggin and remove him from this mortal coil. On at least two occasions I can recall the big fella simply letting balls go right by him, refusing to stretch his tree-trunk arms an extra seven feet to interrupt the errant throw on its way towards the right field corner. "You lousy bum!" the disgruntled fan who'd mysteriously teleported from 1930's Brooklyn yelled from the seat next to mine. "Why, Roosevelt himself could have caught that zipper, and in his wheelchair too!"
I'm sure that many more such misplays have occurred over the course of Sexson's bafflingly long career, although they've probably been accompanied by fewer exhortations of the phrase "Dadgum!" than they were on that particular day. And how can I go about proving this, you might ask? Well, let me forgo Eric's quaint approach of "providing supporting evidence," and instead fall back on this time-tested and unbeatable tactic: Because God told me so.
Yup. That's right. Straight from the Lord's mouth: Richie Sexson is a terrible fielder. Told me in a dream, he did. What, are you calling God a liar? Because if you disagree with me, that's what you're doing, you know.
Good. With that settled, I'd like to point out one last thing: this whole "defending the indefensible awfulness of Richie Sexson's fielding performance at first base" trick is a clever, if over-used, ruse to get us to believe that Eric embraces the fallibility of human beings. Any casual Eric observer--or for that matter any obsessive Eric stalker with no less than thirteen restraining orders from seven different states--knows that Eric much prefers the steely, calculated perfection of robotics to the unpredictable, unreasonable reactions of humanity. But you're not fooling anyone, Mr. Walkingshaw! We can see through this transparent "I love Richie Sexson" act! In fact, you give yourself away within the confines of that very same post, where you carelessly extol the virtues of Albert Pujols, whom everyone knows is a robot hellbent on bending that beautiful human game of baseball to his iron will. Albert Pujols is one of the few robots brave enough to openly flaunt their roboticism, whether that be through self-portrait or simply by adopting the name "Pujols," a name so laughably ridiculous that only a nigh-indestructible machine who can melt your face off with its flame-hands would be brazen enough to keep it.
So nice try, Eric, but you'll have to do better than that to fool me. Why don't you go play with your precious numbers some more? I've got some important business to attend to; Goram the Dark has invited me along on his dungeon-raiding expedition, deep in the heart of the Foul-Tree Forest. I could really use a new pair of chainmail greaves, so here's hoping!
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