Remember how many people thought Darin Ruf was the goods nine months ago? Where are they now that it’s become clear that he doesn’t hit enough to overcome fielding like a baby zebra?

FTN wrote:wait, hes writing where? why?

phdave wrote:

Remember how many people thought Darin Ruf was the goods nine months ago? Where are they now that it’s become clear that he doesn’t hit enough to overcome fielding like a baby zebra?

Chula, for those of you who don’t remember, is a board game played by a species called the Wadi in an early episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. There are five players: one who sets a strategy and rolls the dice, and four others who are transported into the game and made to overcome various puzzles and physical challenges, descending down the levels of the board to home.

I know that the episode of DS9 that featured Chula, “Move Along Home,” was almost universally decried as terrible. Like, the conceit is that the Wadi are the first species the Federation made contact with and brought back through the Wormhole, so you’d think they’d be important, but they get written out after one episode. But think about the game–one person calls the strategy and literally rolls the dice, leaving the outcome not only up to his in-game players, over whom he has no direct control, but largely to chance. Those players go from one level to another, trying to go home…does this sound familiar to anyone?

Which brings me to the real point of this whole exercise. The games are similar enough that you could probably get the Wadi leader, a boisterous, charismatic, mustachioed huckster named Falow, to do color commentary on a baseball game with little to no prep time. Would this not be the best thing ever?

Going into Back to the Future, I thought the worst acting performance I’d ever see in my life would be Lea Thompson’s in Red Dawn. Boy was I wrong. I could not conceive of a universe in which Lea Thompson could be worse than she was in Red Dawn. But she’s full of surprises, like Ruben Amaro or an incontinent dog.

phdave wrote:

Chula, for those of you who don’t remember, is a board game played by a species called the Wadi in an early episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. There are five players: one who sets a strategy and rolls the dice, and four others who are transported into the game and made to overcome various puzzles and physical challenges, descending down the levels of the board to home.

I know that the episode of DS9 that featured Chula, “Move Along Home,” was almost universally decried as terrible. Like, the conceit is that the Wadi are the first species the Federation made contact with and brought back through the Wormhole, so you’d think they’d be important, but they get written out after one episode. But think about the game–one person calls the strategy and literally rolls the dice, leaving the outcome not only up to his in-game players, over whom he has no direct control, but largely to chance. Those players go from one level to another, trying to go home…does this sound familiar to anyone?

Which brings me to the real point of this whole exercise. The games are similar enough that you could probably get the Wadi leader, a boisterous, charismatic, mustachioed huckster named Falow, to do color commentary on a baseball game with little to no prep time. Would this not be the best thing ever?

An answer so cravenly, Harrison Bergeron-y populist that it makes clear, as if one wore a sign of neon lights on one’s head, and did a dance, smiling broadly and clicking your castanets, like some sort of sick, dystopian Carmen Miranda-in-Tron, that you pay only cursory attention to the state of the world as it is.

But yeah, Trout is as close to an unmovable commodity as exists, well, at least in North American sports. Maybe LeBron James, to bring him up again, or Kevin Durant, but that’s in a sport where player value is distributed like wealth in a Middle Eastern petrostate. In baseball, player value is distributed more equally. Baseball is the Sweden of sports talent distribution. And The Great Satan, Delmon Young, is the one homeless person in Gothenburg.

phdave wrote:

Going into Back to the Future, I thought the worst acting performance I’d ever see in my life would be Lea Thompson’s in Red Dawn. Boy was I wrong. I could not conceive of a universe in which Lea Thompson could be worse than she was in Red Dawn. But she’s full of surprises, like Ruben Amaro or an incontinent dog.

Let me tell you a story about how Delmon Young throws.

When I was in high school, I went to a lot of trips with my church youth group. Depending on the outing, we’d take classes or do team-building activities or do Bible study or do some kind of work in the community. But we had downtime, in which we’d play cards, or listen to music or play some sort of game.

That’s how I wound up, from ages 14 to 18 or so, playing hundreds of hours of Ultimate Frisbee, a perfect game for a bunch of teenaged boys with tons of space and time, but little capacity for organization. During those hours, I got very good at throwing the frisbee. I could go overhand, underhand, sidearm, backhand and all sorts of things that people who wear shorts and hemp jewelry and shower far too infrequently will spend hours and hours bending your ear about or demonstrating for you.

When I was in college, though, I was playing a game of Ultimate, and I got a finger caught in the lip of the disc or something, and the frisbee, which I’d intended to put 50 yards downfield, actually wound up behind me. It was a tremendous embarrassment, and since then–and this is 100 percent, absolutely true–I’ve had the yips about throwing a frisbee. Can’t do it. I’ve got Steve Blass Disease for the frisbee. Which kind of makes it more like Chad Blass disease, but you get the idea.

Anyway, when a guy who, at least in part, throws a baseball for a living, does this…

<delmonyoungmakingabadthrow.gif>

…that’s not good. You don’t want a guy trying to prevent a key run in the World Series to remind me of myself trying to throw a frisbee after I contracted the yips.

smitty wrote:When I was a kid I was real good at mumbly peg. Then one day I stabbed myself in the foot. It hurt. After that I was no good at mumbly peg.

Last night I saw Domonic Brown strike out. That means he will never get a hit again.

I'm pretty sure.