Category Archives: Video

Crash McCray revisited

Posted on by
Reply

He acquired a cool nickname – “Crash” – which has stuck to this day. To commemorate the 15th anniversary in 2006, he went back to Portland for a Rodney McCray Bobblehead Day, where 2,000 dolls with a swinging fence were given away. He threw out the first pitch. McCray sent one of the figures to Hale, who displays it in his den. The right-field wall was named “McCray Alley,” though the team no longer plays there and the ballpark is a soccer stadium.

McCray enjoys the attention and is tickled that the clip plays every day at the Hall of Fame. “Not too many guys get there, in whatever form,” he says.

– Anthony McCarron, N.Y. Daily News.

Cool feature from McCarron and the Daily News catching up with former Met Rodney McCray on the 20th anniversary of his sprint through the Civic Stadium wall and into baseball blooper-reel history. Click through and read it; it’s got a reasonably happy ending — everyone involved is still healthy and working in baseball, and there’s even a meat-based donation to the United Negro College Fund.

If you’ve somehow forgotten the play, it’s this one:

The League of Extraordinary Medicine

Posted on by
Reply

Let’s pretend, for a minute, that a separate league exists. Let’s call it the Asterisk League or, better, the League of Extraordinary Medicine. Drugs are legal but regulated. Athletes get educated about the risks, long term and short, of everything they introduce into—or onto—their bodies. Fans know exactly who is taking what and tracking their performance accordingly. Labs and scientists are inexorably linked to athletes’ rise and fall. Chemist versus chemist doesn’t sound like it would make great television, but the field would quickly advance to the point were records were broken daily and feats of crazy strength became the norm. Chemist versus chemist would become superhuman versus superhuman. Broadcasts could include expert scientists in the booth describing the limits of the human body and how these chemical enhancements get around that, or don’t. The League of Extraordinary Medicine is more honest, its regulation more sensible, since outlawing drugs just does not work—we’ve got a forever War on Drugs to prove it. And our tests for drugs still aren’t very good.

– Ryan Bradley, PopSci.com.

Some tasty food for thought from PopSci. Presumably the sportswriters would have to be chemically enhanced too, lest the sanctimony become unbearable.

Anyway, it all makes me think of this ol’ SNL bit:

Fun fact

Posted on by
Reply

At an orientation event in the first week of my freshman year of college, they had some guy come and play music by sliding his moistened fingers over glasses he had arranged on a table in front of him and tuned with a turkey baster. It was mesmerizing. I watched him for like a half hour, and somewhere in there all the guys I thought I might become friends with realized I was weird and ditched me to go check out what else there was to see.

Anyway, it turns out ol’ Ben Franklin saw a similar performance in England in the middle of the 18th century, but instead of just standing there guffawing like a goon, he went home and built an instrument that improved upon the same premise. He called it the armonica, and it became popular in Europe both for its music and its purported medicinal benefits. Among others, Franz Mesmer, who gave his name to a verb I used in the second sentence of this blog post, played the armonica.

You can read much more about the fascinating story of Franklin and the armonica at Out of This Century, which came via Josh R. And you can learn why the armonica fell out of favor. In short: It makes you crazy!