Behold, the cleverest man in Major League Baseball. King of jugglers, fire eaters, tongue curlers, and eyelid flippers everywhere, Tim Wakefield has made his professional sports career out of a parlor trick.
Wakefield is a sports anomaly. An aging, average-build pitcher who subsists solely on the basis of a trick pitch that he has mastered. He has literally improvised his way from mediocre AAA first baseman, to MLB mainstay.
Wakefield achieves all of this by virtue of his knuckleball, a pitch that is flung via fingertip to achieve nearly zero ball rotation and use the surrounding weather conditions to determine its final location. And so he thrives pitching in the dreary, rainy, windy climate of Boston.
It’s a pitch that can baffle the most skilled and coordinated people in the world. It has been known to throw off the timing of an entire team for weeks after dealing with its bends and dives.
Needing only a mere flick of the wrist to release the knuckler, Wakefield has the ability to pitch every two or three days, more often than a normal hurler. Wake can pitch in any situation, foul up the timing of virtually any hitter, and compete in a World Series caliber rotation.
The knuckle flick has earned Wakefield tens of millions of dollars in his 17-year career. In other words, it’s the world’s most valuable stupid human trick.
While I can’t embed it in the page like I usually do for you lazy internet folk, I’m going to recommend that you flip over to this interview:
Tremendous piece by Bill Moyers’ Journal on The Wire, The Drug War, the corruption of American ideals, and the inevitable end of the American Empire. It’s all in there. You will learn more from David Simon here than in any civics or business class you have ever taken. So, click over and grow your brain immediately.
Okay, so I’ll admit it, I get most of my news from the Daily Show and whatever catches my attention on the front page of msn.com as I’m logging onto my email.
Big news is Miss California claiming she lost her title due to her anti-gay marriage answer during the Miss USA competition. Well, I had to watch the clip, didn’t I?
Well, go ahead if you haven’t already. You know you want to.
Last week, I posted the viral sensation that was Billy-Bob Thornton’s tirade on a Canadian talk show. Today, a very insightful blog has extracted the subtext from the entire exchange and added it in closed-captioning form. Fun stuff…
I’ve been sequestering myself recently absorbing all five seasons of The Wire. I would venture to say that it is the greatest television drama ever created. It delves into some painful truths about urbran life, corrupt bureaucracies, and addiction. It forces you to rethink old stereotypes that you may have held.
On the surface, the series covers the Baltimore City Police’s crusade to bring down a local drug kingpin. But there are no true good guys or bad. Every character is flawed to some degree. In fact, the most consistently ethical character throughout the series is a gay drug stash stick-up man and murderer named Omar…
Today we revisit one of the most impactful moments in the history of TMR. Episode 86 marked the departure of Mepper Storey. While he was partially resurrected in Episode 95, he merely was able to roam the Mep landscape as a tortilla-eating zombie.
Here is the official sendoff for Storey as recorded by the Mep deity known as the Giant Flying Beaver that Rules the Universe:
A hearty congratulations are in order. Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter feed reached the pinnacle of uselessness this week when it became the first to garner 1,000,000 subscribers
Enjoy the pandering for Twit sign-ups as his mom/spouse, Demi Moore, scolds him for getting too worked up in his electioneering.
In narrowly beating out CNN to the million mark, Kutcher will now undoubtedly hold a virtual monopoly on the dissemination of Twit-centric retellings of mongoloid celebrity Punkings.
