Back in the Day by Eric Scott for March 12, 2025

A baseball without Steve McQueen seems trivial.

If the ball were tiny and had hundreds of tiny dimples, they’d call it golf.

That’s the essence of it. Enjoy it.

Ah, the game of numbers!

Once upon a time, my approach to assignments in my college Freshman English Class was to write whatever I wanted to no matter what the “assignment” happened to be. Oh, I’d always compose an introductory statement about why I thought my approach was more interesting than the one… “requested” by the professor.

Because Dr. Loewen found my papers to be original and thought provoking, he let me get away with this approach all year.

That is, until he invited me to teach the class ( ! ) during one of the final sessions of the year. He asked me to speak about the “Medium is the Massage” by Marshall McLuhan.

What I did instead was create a mimeographed handout including quotes, cartoons, drawings, jokes… all of which served to illustrate the points I would have made if I had given a conventional lecture on the subject. In this case, the medium was itself the massage/message.

It went over very nicely with the other students, but Dr. Loewen had this to say:

“You don’t waste your time, do you? Never mind. I’m sure you don’t. For example, you’d never sit through a doubleheader baseball game, would you?” He smiled, and went on… “But I wish that just once you had actually done what I assigned you to do.”

I was so entirely ignorant about baseball that I didn’t get his joke. I had to have a couple of other students explain it to me after class.

I wouldn’t have even understood this cat/possum exchange today without having had that experience. My ignorance about baseball remains intact.

Of course nothing happens if you play it or just watch it like that.

play ball!

The last time I caught fungoes, I was in Mexico. … wait, what?

David Letterman, May 9, 1996

Fungo: is a ball tossed into the air and hit by a batter during practice. The origin is unknown (possibly Scottish from fung or fling). The word fungo first appears in 1867 in The Baseball Player’s Book of Reference, p. 138

Well it’s well known that there are slow balls, fast balls, high balls, lowballs, and those juicy spit balls…Zzzzzzzz. HEY!

Are you listening to me fellas?

Before the pitch clock you could watch 3-4 baseball games at once , now it is 2-3. I stopped watching Baseball when Don Mattingly retired for playing.

just wait until they get to the 7th inning stretch!

My husband lives for baseball ~ always telling me how long before spring training etc., etc. He also lives for basketball (women’s these days) and football. He also gets in a lot of naps while watching these! Thankfully, we have two tvs!!