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Happy 12th, Harmon Bokai!
BuckBokai today wishes an extremely happy birthday (and thus perhaps a San Francisco Giants win in game three of the World Series tonight; more on this below) to Harmon Gin Bokai. Young “Buck” was born on October 31, 1998 in Marina del Rey, California.
While no evidence that the Bokai Family still lives in the coastal town exists (most of the autobiographical information on Buck will be gotten by outlets such as this by way of a 2026 baseball card), it’s nice to think that the future Hall of Famer is growing up in the vicinity of Starfleet’s future headquarters.
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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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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Bobby Thomson, that unwitting creator of a million zillion what-if stories both published and unpublished, that subject of prose and poetry, that metaphorical slayer of poor Ralph Branca, died today at his home in Savannah, Georgia.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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Eight all-time great baseball teams of the future
With the second half of the Major League Baseball season starting, BuckBokai would like to take a few minutes to honor those great teams of the future, those nines whose excellence expands beyond the standard rules of the spacetime continuum far enough to earn them a reputation years before their time.
Those sports fans who can’t stand hearing anything about that game they’ve TiVoed but haven’t watched yet had better not click through for more – there are Biff Tannen-sized spoilers aplenty here.
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