Acephalous

The Internet occasionally reminds me of how different life is because of it.

I noted on Facebook that, from a statistical perspective, what makes baseball such an amazing sport is that you can watch it your entire life and still see, on a daily basis, something you’ve never seen before.  (It’s a truism, I know, but it has the benefit of actually being true.)  In this case, the something in question was watching the wonderfully named Angel Pagan hit an inside-the-park home run and initiate a triple play in the same game.  John Emerson responded with some humbug about it not being an inside-the-park grand slam, which made me remember that I had seen an inside-the-park grand slam at some time in the remote past.

I remember being six or seven years old and watching the Mets play the Cardinals in an afternoon game at Shea Stadium, and thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I can definitively say that at approximately 4:30 p.m. on 9 June 1985, I watched Terry Pendleton hit an inside-the-park grand slam off Joe Sambito in a game the Cardinals would go on to win handily.  The fact that I can verify vague memories of events that occurred twenty-five years ago astounds me in a way I sometimes forget the Internet is capable of doing.

This realization is obviously not of world-historical importance, merely a reminder that this thing whose existence we take for granted daily represents a fundamentally weird complement to human memory.  The fact that at some point in the future I can know who I rode in an elevator with on 28 December 2005 is less weird because I chose to write about riding in an elevator with Grimace.  That I can access detailed information about events I have no right remembering in detail is another matter entirely.

Hope springs eternal!

David Wright homered!  Jeff Francouer walked!  We're gonna win the World Series!*

Andy McCarthy on the moral superiority of cheaters.

Over on The Corner, Andy McCarthy unwittingly claims that Democrats are morally superior to Republicans:

I know we tire of the hypocrisy, but I really think this is remarkable. We spent the eight years through January 19, 2009, listening to Democrats complain that President Bush had purportedly caused a constitutional crisis by issuing signing statements when he signed bills into law. Democrats and Arlen Specter (now a Democrat) complained that these unenforceable, non-binding expressions of the executive’s interpretation of the laws Bush was signing were a usurpation Congress’s power to enact legislation. But now Democrats are going to abide not a mere signing statement but an executive order that purports to have the effect of legislation—in fact, has the effect of nullifying legislation that Congress is simultaneously enacting?

Democrats, he argues, were correct when they complained that signing statements were “unenforceable, non-binding expressions of the executive’s interpretation of the laws [and] a usurpation Congress’s power to enact legislation.” They were right to complain when the Bush administration appended them to legislation, but now they must defend the very principles conservatives have never had and stop President Obama from appending anything to H.R. 3590 when he signs it into law or be branded rank hypocrites. Consider this in baseball terms:

It’s the top of the first, and McCarthy and likeminded conservatives—we’ll call them the Yankees—stride to the plate with a Reebok Vector O. When the liberal pitcher complains, the umpire merely shrugs his shoulders and shouts, “Play ball!”

The pitcher opens with a wicked 12 to 6 curve over the heart of the plate. McCarthy stares at the mound in disbelief, then turns and says something to the umpire, who walks to the mound and informs the pitcher that there will be no more quote, bendy pitches, unquote.

“What?”

“You heard me,” the umpire replies. “McCarthy can’t hit anything but four-seamers, so that’s what you need to throw.”

Dumbfounded, the pitcher steps on the rubber and launches a 95 m.p.h. four-seamer down the chute. McCarthy throws his hands in the air and again complains to the umpire, who again approaches the mound.

“How is he supposed to hit a 95 m.p.h. fastball?”

“Not very well, actually, is the idea” the pitcher replies.

“I don’t want to see the gun touch anything over 80 from now on, we clear?”

“You want me to throw batting practice fastballs?”

“I don’t want you to, I’m telling you to,” the umpire says as he makes his way back to the plate.

Needless to say, by the time the liberals record three outs, the Yankees are up by twenty-seven. In the dugout, the liberals notice that the grounds crew is not only relocating the mound 50 ft. from home plate, but raising it five inches; moreover, the Yankees’s starting pitcher is heading to the mound with a jar of Vaseline and an industrial sander. When they complain, the Yankees insist that this this non-regulation mound is actually regulation, and that they’re not doctoring balls so much as fulfilling their original intent.

The liberals return to the dugout, grab a Reebok Vector O and angrily approach the batter’s box. When McCarthy sees the bat, he dashes home and pulls the umpire aside. They confer, and after a moment, the umpire tells the liberals that their aluminum monstrosity violates the spirit of the game. When they complain that the Yankees used them, McCarthy smiles and says, “But you’re supposed to be better than that.”

“Let me get this straight,” the liberals respond. “You want us to throw batting-practice fastballs, off a regulation mound, to batters holding rocket launchers while we’re in the field; but when we come to the plate, you expect us to hit doctored balls thrown off a spiked Little League mound with wooden bats, or you’re gonna call us hypocrites?”

“Pretty much.”

Were McCarthy and his fellow conservatives intellectually honest, they wouldn’t complain when the other side cheats too, but insist on everyone playing by the same rules, no matter what those rules may be.

It's like that time I hung out with Derrida and we only talked about our cats.*

I'm easing back on the Internets by trying to find the most optimistic spin on the Jason Bay signing—Dewan ranking him at -1 runs defensively wins so far—but three of the most respected baseball minds out there are silent on the issue because they're arguing about the greatest movie musicals of all time. I'm not kidding: Keith Law, Joe Posnanski and Tangotiger are currently debating the relative merits of Mamma Mia instead of telling me how I should feel about my beloved Mets signing a 31-year-old outfielder with old-player skills to a four-year deal with an easy vesting option for his age 36 season.

*True story.

"[He] was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1971, when he was 18, but affects the sardonic air of an intellectual hippie."

Just in case you thought I might have exaggerated earlier, the New York Observer preserves another of their oddly erudite conversations involving violent looks:

Those are likely to be some really awkward introductions.

In May, the Mets' color team of Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling had some fun at the expense of the Braves' struggling right fielder Jeff Francoeur.  Keith began by saying things like:

• a patient hitter is quiet at the plate
• a patient hitter waits for the ball to come to him
• a patient hitter only swings at balls he can hit
• a patient hitter is loose in the box
• a patient hitter enters a zen-like state when the pitcher starts his motion
• Jeff Francoeur is not a patient hitter

Only he didn't say "Jeff Francoeur is not a patient hitter."  He said, "Jeff Francoeur looks demonic."  The other color announcer, Ron Darling, pretended to call Hernandez out, so Keith buzzed the boys in the van for a still shot of Francoeur swinging.  They sent up this:

Are announcers with degrees in broadcast journalism better in the booth than former players?

In the early days of radio and television, baseball announcers fell into their jobs. Mel Allen, "the Voice of the Yankees," was a lawyer by trade; his partner, Red Barber, caught his break while working as a janitor at a college radio station. (A professor scheduled to read "Certain Aspects of Bovine Obstretics" never showed, so Barber picked up the microphone and read it himself.) Jimmy Dudley majored in chemistry, got drafted and, like Harry Kalas, began his broadcasting career calling intramural games in the South Pacific during WWII. Although all four of them belong to the Baseball Hall of Fame, they were amateurs.

The first great professional announcer, Vin Scully, studied broadcast journalism at Fordham. Following Scully's success on both coasts, team owners and network executives decided that games were best called by people whose sober, understated delivery betrayed an intimate knowledge of the technical limitations of their equipment. No matter where in America you turned on your radio or television in the 1960s, you were listening to a college graduate whose vocal coach had taught him to speak the smooth, unaccented English of an imaginary Middle America.

With the exception of a few token athletes, like Joe Garagiola and Bob Uecker, by the early 1970s the voices that spoke for the game weren't the voices of the game. Because the game on the field is so different from the one observed from the booth, I think it best that there be someone up there who, for example, understands in his bones that the depth of field required to keep both the pitcher and the batter (60 feet 6 inches away) in focus makes a 67 m.p.h. curveball look slow even though, were it a car, it would have exceeded the interstate speed limit in ninety-percent of the country.

I would hope that a wise former baseball player, with the richness of his playing experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion about a game situation than someone who hasn't lived the life. But I'm not so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the game. Many are so capable. Gary Cohen could only play in Soviet Russia—when he picks up a bat, it swing hims—yet he is a tremendous announcer.

However, for someone who didn't play the game to understand its nuances takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. Personal experiences influence the facts that announcers chooses to discuss. But this is not to say that only former players can understand the game. Sometimes they emphasize their own experience to the exclusion of others, as is the case with Tim McCarver, for whom baseball has not changed one iota since the day he retired in 1979, and Joe Morgan, whose greatness on the diamond is inversely proportional to his awfulness in the booth. For a former player to become a good announcer, he must extrapolate from his experiences into areas which with he is unfamiliar. Because what comes naturally to white, colleged-educated, broadcast journalism majors might not come easy to a poor kid from Oakland nicknamed "Mex."

This is why the best Supreme Court broadcast team working today consists of Gary, Keith, and Ron.

I take requests: "Remember that post you wrote about playing in the outfield and writing a dissertation? I'd love to read it again, now that I'm a week away from filing my dissertation."

(Considering the alternatives, I love the fact that this post is the one I might be remembered for.  As I noted at the time, I'd had this half-written for ages but never could quite finish it.  This post is as close to naked as I get—so much so I deleted it two seconds after I'd posted it before reversing course.  I've received emails thanking me for this post from struggling grad students in chemistry, physics, political science, geography, geology, English, Spanish, French, Russian, education, mathematics, astrophysics, statistics, philosophy, biology, molecular chemistry, history of consciousness, and dance departments.  It is, as the person who requested I repost it tonight said, an academic version of "You Are Not Alone," which would be much more awesome if it didn't analogize me into Michael Jackson.  That said, I'm more than happy to oblige this request, and apologize for the overlong introduction.  But before I get to the post itself, I should say that [1] the reason my interlocutor couldn't find this post is because my category for all things baseball is the Spanish "béisbol," and [2] if you read my post without reading Wally's comment, you've done yourself a disservice.)

Would that I had natural wit and talent enough to play baseball professionally. (Some humility would also be nice.)

Fans of good writing (which, if you're reading this, you clearly are), I would like to introduce you to Chris "Disco" Hayes.  He may be rough around the edges, but he has a sense of prose (so rare in an age when so few read) and can turn a phrase.  Not surprisingly, he has an analytic turn of mind.  But this post is about the writing, so here he is on PFPs ("pitcher's fielding practice"), which

consist of a line of pitchers waiting to walk up onto the mound to fake their pitching motion and run over to a ball that has been rolled down the third base line by a pitching coach, pick it up, and throw the ball to a lucky veteran pitcher who is stationed at first base.  After completing your turn, you go back to the end of the line and repeat.  Once you have been through enough times that you are convinced playing in games is merely a drill to prepare you for PFPs[.]

You know you're off to poor start . . .

. . . when the AP invents words to describe your pain.

Standards? Who needs them? Or, Thomas Urquhart & That Which Is Infinitely Superior to Cricket.

Teaching composition exclusively leads to (1) a greater appreciation for the pedestrian complexity of correctly subordinated clauses and (2) a bone-tiredness for the unmerited praise of student peer reviews.  As someone with a penchant for paragraph-length sentences, I find (1) wholly salutary; but (2) irks me endlessly.  Why?  In one of my undergraduate History of the English Language course, the professor handed out slips of paper on which he had written a single sentence and told everyone to decipher what it meant, because he wanted us to present the sentence and the paraphrase to the class in ten minutes.  My sentence read:

Another thing there is that fixeth a grievous scandal upon that nation in matter of philargyrie, or love of money, and it is this: There hath been in London, and repairing to it, for these many years together, a knot of Scotish bankers, collybists, or coine-coursers, of traffickers in merchandise to and againe, and of men of other professions, who by hook and crook, fas et nefas, slight and might, (all being as fish their net could catch), having feathered their nests to some purpose, look so idolatrously upon their Dagon of wealth, and so closely, (like the earth’s dull center), hug all unto themselves, that for no respect of vertue, honour, kindred, patriotism, or whatever else, (be it never so recommendable), will they depart from so much as one single peny, whose emission doth not, without any hazard of loss, in a very short time superlucrate beyond all conscience an additionall increase to the heap of that stock which they so much adore; which churlish and tenacious humor hath made many that were not acquainted with any else of that country, to imagine all their compatriots infected with the same leprosie of a wretched peevishness, whereof those quomodocunquizing clusterfists and rapacious varlets have given of late such cannibal-like proofs, by their inhumanity and obdurate carriage towards some, (whose shoe-strings they are not worthy to unty), that were it not that a more able pen than mine will assuredly not faile to jerk them on all sides, in case, by their better demeanour for the future, they endeavour not to wipe off the blot wherewith their native country, by their sordid avarice and miserable baseness, hath been so foully stained, I would at this very instant blaze them out in their names and surnames, notwithstanding the vizard of Presbyterian zeal wherewith they maske themselves, that like so many wolves, foxes, or Athenian Timons, they might in all times coming be debarred the benefit of any honest conversation.

That would be from the EKΣKYBAΛAYPON of Thomas Urquhart, best known for his translations of Rabelais.* In Urquhart, Rabelais found less a translator than a kindred spirit; but in Urquhart’s prose, I found an unparaphraseable wall of words, before which I stood befuddled but impressed.  Granted, I should have been impressed, so the analogy to peer reviews is imperfect; but my comprehension and subsequent paraphrase of Urquhart amounted to what I abhor in peer reviews: salivation at the sight of a dependent clause containing multiple polysyllabes and a “Good!” slapped in the margins—as if knowing big words and including them complex sentences means someone’s saying anything meaningful.  But now that I teach composition exclusively, I see similar instances of unmerited praise everywhere:

When most former major leaguers write memoirs, you wonder why they bothered; with Ron Darling—Yale graduate, former New York Met and Oakland A, and current Mets broadcaster—you wonder why it took him so long. What other former athlete could write a sentence like this even with assistance from a professional writer (Daniel Paisner): “This right here [his legendary college pitching duel against St. Johns star Frank Viola**] was one of the great epiphanies for me as a competitive athlete, only it took a while for it to resonate.” Most former pitchers can’t resonate even with help.

Just so you know, my love of béisbol knows no limits; moreover, my love of the Mets generally, and Ron Darling in particular—both as a player and announcer—is unimpeachable.  But for the San Fransisco Chronicle to praise a Yale graduate who double-majored in French and Southeast Asian history and who speaks both Chinese and French fluently—to praise him (if it was him and not his co-writer) for using the words “epiphany” and “resonate” makes me want to quodlibetificate into demission this clusterheaded intelligentry, the miserable baseness of whose expectations ought to debar them from the profession of letters. 

(x-posted.)

---

*But who should be remembered for titling the second volume of his Logopandecteision; or an Introduction to the Universal Language thus: Chrestasebeia; or, Impious Dealing of Creditors Wherein the Severity of the Creditors of the Author’s Family is Desired to Be Removed, as a Main Impediment to the Production of this Universal Language, and Publication of Other No Less Considerable Treatises.

**The bracketed link takes you to 95 percent of Roger Angell’s “The Web of the Game,” a contender for the best essay about baseball ever written.

A Modernist Lineup (Paraphrastically Heretical Brooksian Version)

(Because the number of people who will understand the references to modernism and baseball number in the high single digits.)

The prototypical leadoff hitter should radiate self-importance.  He has one job and one job only: to get on base.  He has one style and one style only: ostentatious scrappiness.  Leading off the for modernists is Ernest "Papa" Hemingway.

If our shortstop must be a Derek Jeter clone, I can think of no one better than Joseph "The Con" Conrad: criminally overrated and not nearly so versatile as his ardent supporters insists.  His once merely poor range has so deteriorated people point to where he is and exclaim: "There he will be!"  But if you need someone selfish to ground selflessly out to second, "The Con" will move the runner along.  Slot him in the #2 spot.

Ignoring the sage advice offered by The Book because it is only written in one language, our three-hole will be manned by the greatest hitter world literature has ever known.  This transplanted Irishman mashes from all sides of the plate.  One minute he counsels.  The next he does this.  He is the only player to hit for the cycle in seventeen languages.  Batting third and playing every position on the field (but mainly first): James "Stephen Hero" Joyce.

Batting fourth and patrolling left field to the pounding pulsation of his own alliterative drum is our other once-in-a-generation genius: Ezra Being Ezra!  (He''ll bat cleanup until it suits him otherwise then be traded to another nation.)

In the fifth slot is our "Three True Outcomes" specialist.  With him it's either French, English or Nonsense.  Remember this name because he will go on manning the hot corner for years to come: Samuel "Come In" Beckett!

Occupying our "second leadoff spot" and platooning at second are F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.  (Whichever one is upright come gametime gets the start.)  Their range may be limited but they turn a mean double play.   

Virginia Woolf roams center field and bats seventh.  She covers more ground in a sentence than Willie Mays did in a day and makes it look so easy.

Framing pitches behind the plate is the incomparably erudite H.D.  She frames the plate so convincingly a generation of umpires have deferred to her strike zone.  Like most cerebral catchers, her own output suffers from a severe case of "analysis paralysis."

Our ace on the mound is mercurial southpaw T.S. Eliot.  Inscrutable but somehow effective, Eliot averages six brilliant innings before converting to Church of England and lulling teammates and opposition alike into a death-like sleep.

In sum:

Hemingway, rf
Conrad, ss
Joyce, 1b
Pound, lf
Beckett, 3b
The Fitzgeralds, 2b
Woolf, cf
H.D., c
Eliot, p

Uncalled for

(x-posted)

I would appreciate it if everyone would hate on:

1. Mr. Bady for sharing this.
2. Mr. Manuel and Mr. McCain for making it possible.

Iconic PDA TDIH FWIW, OK?

(x-posted.)

On this day in 1927, a man whose Wikipedia entry was edited, via cell, from Minute Maid Park in the home half of the seventh was born.  Television crews didn’t capture the edit, but they did capture the man himself as he waved feebly to the crowd of 38,602 baseball fans who applauded the infamous V-J Day celebrant on the occasion of his 81st birthday.  How do I know?  I was there.  As luck would have it, not only was I there, I was seated next to a blogger. You’d think this was planned — Scott leaves house, “accidentally” meets blogger, bores wife with insider baseball for hours — but it wasn’t. Honest.  But I digress.

The octogenarian in question, Glenn McDuffie, has convinced forensic artists and lie detectors he should remembered as the sailor who stopped to kiss a stranger on his way to his girlfriend’s apartment.*  How his girlfriend, Ardith Bloomfield of 555 Crown Street felt about his iconic act of infidelity isn’t only lost to history, but McDuffie too: he went to sea and never saw her again.** McDuffie’s not the only person to claim the mantle of Great American Osculator.  He’s not even named as a potential candidate in the Life’s 1980 attempt to ferret the identities of the infamous kisser and kissee.

When you think about it, it’s only fitting he celebrated his birthday at major sporting event, since major sporting events celebrate kissing for a minute or two every game.***  His kiss, however, has the benefit of inadvertant artfullness:

Eisenstaedt’s photo is a perfect Renaissance perspective, with the foreground directly on the lower part of the bowtie, with big buildings converging diagonally toward the vanishing point, and a giant sign with a paternal figure promoting Ruppert Beer right on the point. This sailor and this nurse are surrounded by big buildings, by silver trolley tracks, by neon signs, and by the sky, but also by an assortment of other people. About twenty feet away there is a second sailor (and, in some croppings, a third), smiling on the couple. Another comment is suggested by the huge neon sign just to their right, which advertises BOND, then America’s biggest ready-made clothing store [...] The sign that proclaims the bond between this primal couple also highlights the more complex bonds that hold together the city, the country, maybe even the world. The other people in the picture are participants in the crowd’s festivities, but also, like ourselves, spectators of the couple’s embrace. They are both wearing uniforms, which mark them as “public servants” and separate them from the multitude of civilians (like ourselves) who surround them and whom they serve. His uniform is black, hers white. The contrast between them, sharpened by black-and-white film, heightens the clinch that binds them together.

And the man responsible for this quintessential American photograph?  A German Jewish refugee named Alfred Eisenstaedt whose previous claim to fame was a portrait of Goebbels the Nazi Propaganda Minister only found unflattering after he learned Eisenstaedt was Jewish.  Because before, I mean, I think we’d all hit that.****

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*Only F. Lee Bailey remains skeptical.  “If you honestly believe something you won’t flunk a polygraph,” the man who orchestrated O.J. Simpson’s defense told ABC news in 2007.  Shortly after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, he “stopped [Simpson's polygraph test] because it was not going well.”  Seems Simpson didn’t honestly believe in his innocence in June 1994.  (Nor since, for that matter.)

**Also lost to history: Ebbets Field.  The Jackie Robinson Apartments — artfully, if a bit ominously, framed by yours truly courtesy of Google Street View — now occupy that block.

***Just like the video, today’s “Kiss Cam” featured a marriage proposal.  It went better than this one, but maybe only barely: a quick chaste peck, a man on his knee, a woman’s face screwed as if scalded, then the stadium PA blared “SHE SAID YES!” and the fancy digital scoreboard cut to a shot of the clunky, retro scoreboard flashing “SHE SAID YES!”  I suspect tears, recriminations, then years of therapy for all involved.

****In the face with a shovel until it whimpered.  Then some more.

Farewell Piazza, New York Catcher

The home-brew video leaves much to desire—complete with a bad, but creative, misread of "well he may" as "Willie May," which cluelessness I chalk up to the British being, well, British—but the song is catchy and apropos on this, the day the man himself retired, so I slap it up anyway:

The Entire Eastern Seaboard Is The New Black

I can't think of any other reason Bill Schroeder and Brian Anderson of FSN Wisconsin spent ten minutes discussing how articulate Chesapeake, Virgina native David Wright is.  As in:

"What surprises you when he talks is how articulate this young man is.  You just don't expect it."

"You're telling me this kid skipped college?  I know college graduates who aren't half as well-spoken."

"The thing you have to love about Wright is that he's always smiling that big smile of his.  He's always happy to doing his job."

Does everyone looks black when you come from Wisconsin?  I'm reminded of a passage from Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901):

In order to give the visitors, ere they left Wellington New York, a pleasing impression of Southern Eastern customs, and particularly of the joyous, happy-go-lucky disposition of the Southern Eastern darky and his entire contentment with existing conditions, it was decided by the hotel management to treat them, on the last night of their visit, to a little diversion, in the shape of a genuine negro cakewalk baseball game.

El Finale del Béisbol; or, Thanks for the Tears, Tom Glavine, I Needed a Good—Wait, What?

Real Men—the manly ones—never revealed the number 5 stenciled on their back as they cradled their head in their hands this afternoon.

Real Men—the manly ones—never cradled their head in their hands this afternoon so no one would see them choke back tears.

Real Men—the manly ones—never wrote this post while choking back tears, because Real Men stopped crying hours ago.

(As for us—the emasculated ones—we cling to the hope Dioses del Béisbol will prevent pessimism from becoming prophecy.)

I'll Be Damned

Remember that lunatic who sang-song that nonsensical phrase into my head last month? 

Turns out it wasn't "nonsense" so much as "prophecy." 

According to National Geographic News, there is a hole in the sky.  And it's gaping:

Three (Grossly Self-Important) Degrees of Separation; or, My "Role" in Glavine's 300th Win

(Note lest I seem vain: the talent of your teammates in no way reflects upon your own.)

If the Mets' bullpen had only blown the game last Tuesday, dayenu.*

If Alfonso Soriano had only pulled up lame last night, dayenu.

If Lou Pinella had only inserted Mike Fontenot to replace him, dayenu.

If Mike Fontenot had only gotten an at bat against Tom Glavine, dayenu.

That Mike Fontenot was the final out in Tom Glavine's 300th win, well, that's definitive proof of His plan. 

I mean, anyone could've been that final out, but in His infinite wisdom, He decided to let a guy I turned double plays with for a year in Legion be the final out in the 300th victory of the nominal ace of my beloved Mets. 

Dayenu, certainly, dayenu ... but big ups to Him upon High for making this night all the sweeter for me.  I suppose I owe him one.  Maybe I won't take his name in vain for the next twenty-four hours.

Maybe.

*For all you goyim, "dayenu" means "it would have been enough."

On Earworms

Earlier in the week, Jonathan Mayhew asked whether "earworms" were a purely musical phenomenon, or whether they applied to poetry as well.  The answer, I think, is that earworms are a product of intonation.  Someone says or sings something compellingly, and it echoes around your skull for the next couple of hours/days/weeks/months/years.  For example:

Someone who's attended all the Mets-Brewers games at Milwaukee's Miller Park and sits somewhere near the Fox Sports Net Wisconsin stadium microphone keeps yelling the same nonsensical phrase ... and now it's stuck in my head:

Announcer #1: And Reyes steps to the plate.

Announcer #2: This kid is fast.  I'm talking, the most exciting player in baseball.

Random Fan Near Stadium Microphone: THERE IS A HOLE!

Announcer #1: First pitch to Reyes is a ball.

Random Fan Near Stadium Microphone: IN THE SKY!

Announcer #2: He wants to set Reyes up with a change away.

Random Fan Near Stadium Microphone: THERE IS A HOLE!

Announcer #1: That's in there for a strike.

Random Fan Near Stadium Microphone: IN THE SKY!

I know, I know.  There's a hole in the sky.  I got it.  The way this random fan chants is almost melodic, like Yeats reading "Innisfree," and wouldn't you know it, I find myself near-humming his insanity now.  Between sentences both written and read, there's now a hole, in the sky.  Any more of this and those who think I lost it earlier will be proven correct.