No baseball games are guaranteed to end in a timely fashion. At least if you are a quarterback or a point guard and you’re having a bad game, it is sure to end in an hour. However, if you’re a pitcher and you’re having a bad game it could last until tomorrow. Just ask the seven pitchers on our baseball team who gave up a combined 35 runs this week in a game against Virginia Tech; we’re sure they wished they were staring down 300-pound defensive tackles rather than Tech’s aluminum.
All pitchers go through stretches in which they can’t even strike out Paula Jones, let alone Chipper. Good pitchers forget the time they gave up the game-winning grand slam, walked that .130 hitter or lost a game on an error because if they don’t, then the same things will happen the next day.
So therefore it seems that the best pro pitcher of all time would have been Guy Pierce in Memento, someone who has a short memory. As a result, the guy with probably the shortest memory in the history of the world must be 45-year-old Dodgers’ relief pitcher Jesse Orosco. Orosco was there for not only Reds pitcher Jose Rijo’s first start in seven years last Sunday against the Cubs, but also for Rijo’s first start ever in 1984. Orosco has been pitching since 1979, meaning he has been on the mound for more years than the age of most undergrads at Georgetown, and he still is throwing well enough to hold a 2.08 ERA. A note to the wise: Never pick Jesse Orosco in your death pool, but don’t count on him to remember your birthday either …
Also, seeing as it is the last issue before the summer, we at the Sermon feel that time has come to make some long term predictions. In football, the Washington Redskins Pro Bowl linebacker triumvirate Jessie Armstead, LaVar Arrington and Jeremiah Trotter will become so popular in D.C. that they will announce their candidacy for the upcoming mayoral election. However, current D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams will convince them to drop out of the race by purchasing matching bow ties for all three. In the NBA, the Pistons will upset the Lakers in the NBA finals after Lakers center Shaquille O’Neal misses the entire series due to an assault outside a L.A. nightclub by someone who looks strangely like former Pistons bad-boy Bill Laimbeer. And finally, in baseball, freewheeling Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks will offer to trade slugger Alex Rodriguez to the Dodgers for Jesse Orosco, and then promptly clone Orosco so that he won’t have to worry about his awful pitching staff until 2025.
