Thursday, July 12, 2007

I'm Not Sayin'...

I have a money making scheme. I'm not saying that any one actual human being would attempt to do something like this, especially not me or say, anyone who "plays" a sport for one of my favorite teams or anything. I'm just saying that it is possible that something like this could happen. Were someone so inclined. Okay, say you sign a big contract. You're asked to produce "runs" and "hits" at a certain rate, the same rate that you've done so consistently throughout your career. But it's been a long career and frankly, you're tuckered out. You're not even asked to do anything athletic, like say run around in left field of a major league baseball stadium and catch hurtling white orbs. You just have to think about "running" and "hitting" all the time and meander up to plate once in awhile, say three to four times a day. But you suck at it for awhile. Suddenly, one of your teammates gets hurt and you are forced to try and catch hurtling orbs once again. Your hitting starts to improve, thereby satisfying one of the central tenets of statistics, and you instead decide to attribute this recorrection of the statistical universe to the coincidence of the additional hurtling orb workload. You were embarrassed for sucking and needed an excuse. But secretly, oh so secretly, you are majorly pissed that your once cushy position of thinking, sitting, and hitting has become quite anti-cushy. It's the anticush of what you expected. But what are you going to do? You "tough" it out for a year, and expect that next year, everything will be back to normal and you'll be back in that coveted, cushy position once again. But what's this? Your boss suddenly tells you that you did such a good job running, jumping, orb catching, and orb hitting the year before, that you will be responsible for ALL(!) these activities again. For the whole year! Arg! What's a guy to do!? So, you think to yourself...."Self, listen. What we need to do is pretend to get hurt while running. Then they will see that when you run, you get hurt, so you cannot run. In fact, you can't just get hurt running in a normal way say, while running after orbs. You have to get hurt in a really stupid way, so that your boss will be very, very frightened to make you spend much time running ever again." So you fake an injury to your legs while running out of the dugout. A good place to choose because leg injuries are very mysterious, and no one ever knows if your'e really hurt or how long it will take you to heal. "Good thinking self!" So, you go ahead and do that and get sent down to the minor leagues to "rehab". And when you get there you realize that you are getting paid the exact same! And there aren't big mean guys with pens and notepads and laptops writing down what you say and expecting you to actually do it, and you can drink Red Stripe in the clubhouse, and hang out in the hot tub for a long time because you are much older than all your teammates and "injured" and "need a good long soak". And then you realize that it is not such a bad gig, and maybe you should just stay there forever. And so you try. But after awhile, people start to realize that maybe even an old man should be healed by now, so you say that yeah yeah, you're leg is starting to feel a lot better. But then whoops! You hurt another part of your leg. Probably because you were overcompensating from the other part of your leg that was hurt before. Oh well! More hot tub and Red Stripe! Hooray beer!

.....I'm just sayin'.

6 comments:

Hops said...

And you even went easy on him...remember, it wasn't "running out of the dugout"...it was "skipping".

What a Nancy.

Kaiser said...

"him"? No, no. I'm not naming names. My father was blackballed from Hop Sing's because people named names.

Hops said...

It's not secret that I enjoy giving Mr. Mauer a little tough love now and again. So when The Namesake basically told him to stop scratching his vagina and get off the DL...I found it both funny and poignant.

But, I'd be a tad remiss if I didn't wonder why he hasn't turned the same vitriol onto someone you may or may not have been referring to in your post.

Kaiser said...

Amen brother. Where you at Namesake!?

Kaiser said...

P.S. I just saw on Christensen's blog that after the All-Star game in which he went 0 for 2, the Namesake was surrounded by loving reporters for much of the post-game, and proclaimed his highlight to be holding Jose Reyes to a single. That's why we love the guy.

Hops said...

That's why we love the guy batting sixth...