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Rangers vs. Giants World Series: The future is here
Well, welcome to the future: the San Francisco Giants (!) and Texas Rangers (!!!!) will meet in the 2010 World Series, thereby giving the first World Series title ever to one of these entities, snapping a half-century long deprivation of such, and eliminating the possibility of using either squad to represent far-flung o-so-strange science-fiction futures.
Like the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates to which BuckBokai devoted an earlier entry, the Giants and Rangers are seeking to break historically notable runs of futility. In fact, the vanquished team in 2010 goes home with the second-longest active run of World Series futility. Reads the all-time list:
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Pittsburgh Pirates’ 1960 win: A science-fictional notion
From the Synchronicity Department comes a neat little tidbit from Robert Sheckley’s Immortality Inc. (You know, the book they totally warped to make the awesomely weird Freejack.)
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Random thought re: Roger Clemens busted
So ESPN is reporting that the New York Times is reporting that Roger Clemens will reportedly be “indicted on charges of making false statements to Congress about his use of performance-enhancing drugs,” i.e., let’s face it, anabolic steroids and human growth hormones.
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Bobby Thomson, of the Shot Heard Round the World, dies at 86
Bobby Thomson, that unwitting creator of a million zillion what-if stories both published and unpublished, that subject of prose and poetry, that metaphorical slayer of poor Ralph Branca, died today at his home in Savannah, Georgia. He was 86.
Thomson played Major League Baseball for 15 years mostly with the New York Giants, going for a .270 lifetime batting average, three All-Star bids and 263 home runs plus one Shot Heard Round The World.
In its mundane three-dimensional existence on the baseball field, Thomson’s famous shot was “merely” the culmination of 154 games of war in a baseball for National League supremacy among New York City boroughs: Brooklyn vs. Manhattan. In an extra playoff game – actually, the third extra game in a best-of-three series, actually, and don’t remind Bud Selig or we’ll have another round of MLB playoffs – Thomson’s walk-off homer against the Dodgers’ Ralph Branca gave the Giants the pennant. Or, as the man said:
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What If Baseball: 1961 New York Yankees vs. 1978 Boston Red Sox
In currently going through the entire Star Trek: Deep Space Nine run, BuckBokai recently got a good excuse to spend some time at his second-favorite website, the most excellent WhatIfSports.com.
The inspiration was founded in a thought-provoking notion about 24th-century hologram technology from the fourth-season episode “For the Cause.” Jake Sisko brings baseball-loving dad Benjamin a gift of a holosuite program featuring a showdown between the 1961 New York Yankees and the 1978 Boston Red Sox.
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Moe Better Blues: Alexander Irvine’s “Agent Provocateur”
“I was Moe Berg’s biggest fan in 1940, even though he’d sort of officially retired at the end of the ’39 season. Like him, I loved baseball, and like him, I loved to read – a combination unusual among twelve-year-olds as it is in major-league clubhouses.” – from “Agent Provocateur” by Alexander Irvine
Seriously, how cool was Moe Berg? Perhaps the most incredible life-story of the 20th century never birthed as a formal biography (though an independent documentary on Berg was produced in 2007, it is apparently without distribution yet), Berg’s life was the stuff of 1940s childhood daydreaming: From playing professional major league baseball to traveling the world as a World War II secret agent was a multilingual misfit who blended in everywhere, a 13-year veteran of professional baseball who died couch-surfing in obscurity.
Now is it believable that Berg was/is a fulcrum point for the lever of the spacetime continuum itself as he was/is in Alexander Irvine’s “Agent Provocateur”? Absolutely.
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