The Public Consequences of Making A Personal Decision
So the Kansas City Royals had to go to Toronto to play the Blue Jays and because those famously pushy Canadians require you to be vaccinated if you want to hear an umpire say “you’re oot” instead of “you’re out” 10 of the Royals couldn’t go because they weren’t vaccinated and were apparently replaced by some of the guys who hang around outside Home Depot looking for work and a chance to play second base in Canada.
The Royals lost 3-out-of-4 in Toronto which you could blame on the Big League players who refused to get vaccinated except at the All-Star break the Royals were in last place, with 36 wins and 56 losses which adds up to a .391 winning percentage, and the Royals did most of that with all their unvaccinated Big League players so I’m not sure those vaccination-holdout guys would have made a huge difference.
Nevertheless…
Most of the players who refused to get vaccinated called it a “personal decision” which is kinda, sorta true, but driving 120 MPH down the freeway is also a personal decision as long as you don’t think about the passengers in your car and the other people on the freeway.
You don’t mask up and get vaccinated just for you; you mask up and get vaccinated for the people around you and sometimes those people are also teammates.
As you’re no doubt already aware prices have gone batshit crazy and I can’t help but think that some people are price-gouging because they see the oil companies charging an arm and a leg and the rights to your first-born male child for a gallon of gas and think they want to get in on that too and suddenly they announce a “supply-chain disruption” which makes me wonder if that ship that got stuck in a canal somewhere is still stuck because if you’ll think back that was the excuse they used for raising prices in the first place and while I have absolutely no evidence that American bakers are part of an International Baked Goods Cartel, I recently saw that a loaf of bread could cost as much as $10 which also makes me wonder just how much cocaine is hidden inside a $10 loaf of bread.
Hey, if Hostess can figure out how to put whip cream in the middle of a cupcake, I’m pretty sure Walter White can do the same with methamphetamine and a loaf of Wonder Bread.
So Pope Francis (y’know…the Cool Pope without a copy of the Old Testament shoved up his backside) decided the Indigenous People of Canada were owed an apology for the way the Catholic Church treated them in their “Let’s Make ‘Em Act White” schools which made me think the Catholic Church owes a whole bunch of people an apology and the list was way too long to include everybody in one cartoon so that’s why I added a door so you could imagine that line of people stretching from Vancouver to the previously-mentioned Toronto which reminds me of the one time I saw a Toronto Blue Jays game in Canada and some jerk beat a child to a foul ball so the Canadian crowd started pointing at him (the jerk, not the child) in unison while chanting:
“Oot, oot, oot.”
Eventually the jerk couldn’t take it anymore (just imagine 43,737 people confirming your worst fears about yourself) and got up and left and the crowd cheered and I thought it was the most polite ejection I ever saw.
Which reminds me (these days, everything reminds me of something, which is what happens if you live long enough) of a minor league manager I knew who left the dugout to argue about a double down the line hit by the opposing team.
The ball was clearly fair so an observer might wonder what the manager could possibly say, but the umpire had been missing calls all night and after the manager got ejected I asked what he said to the umpire to get tossed and here it is:
“Well you picked a fuck of a time to get one right.”
Which reminds me…
Recently I was watching a baseball game and not much was happening and one of the announcers started talking about the Taco Bell ads that featured “Fourth Meal” (the one you eat at 2AM while shitfaced and hoping the refried beans soak up some of the alcohol) and it made me think of all the baseball announcers who have to come up with some bullshit to talk about when games are slow and over the years I’ve heard discussions of candy bars and Seinfeld episodes and shout outs to fans you never heard of who are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary without ever killing each other and it made me think baseball announcers have it way tougher than the guys who cover basketball because in that sport, even in a blowout, something is always happening.
Which is not true in Baseball when a pitcher decides he needs to go behind the mound, stare up into the sky and contemplate the Meaning of Life before throwing ball four.
According to a 2021 Sports Illustrated article by Tom Verducci, Big League Baseball asks its fans to wait 24.9 seconds between pitches and four minutes between balls in play and Baseball knows it has a problem so they buckled down and decided a pitcher doesn’t have to throw four pitches to issue an intentional walk, limited mound visits and a reliever had to face three batters and according to Verducci, the Commissioner and Owners held three weeks of Zoom meetings to talk about how to speed things up.
(And now let’s take a moment to enjoy the fact that it took these geniuses three weeks to decide how to speed things up.)
But it was 100 percent worth it because back in 2020 it took three hours and six minutes to play a ballgame and this year they’ve managed to whittle that down to a mere three hours and seven minutes.
OK, that’s it for today and it’s time for me to make a personal decision and I’ve decided to walk to the store and see if they have Noilly-Pratt sweet vermouth because those cocktail hour Manhattans won’t make themselves.
Have a nice day, because I know I’m going to.
I think the first-born-son market has dried up.
If they were traded to a contender would they get vaccinated?