Renaissance Man

My name is Ron Washington, skipper of the Arlington, Tex., baseball club. I chose to remove starter C.J. Wilson because I peddled subprime mortgage securities and wanted to maximize the downfall and damage to the economy. Just kidding, but c’mon man.

Ron, you should join the board of governors of the Federal Reserve and bail out bankers so they can give each other bonuses to pay the salaries of pinstripers. No. I remember every detail. You wore red, white and blue, the Huns of Steinbrenner wore gray while Nolan Ryan slumped in his seat.

The firemen of the Rangers turned out to be the arson squad. They threw heat all right, bathed in gasoline that sent the empire staters to an improbable come from behind victory over the Texan freedom fighters, now caught in the headlights of inevitable golf dates a week from now. Remember the Alamo, fellows.

Sometimes when we try to be renaissance men, we eat our seed corn and then wonder where our next meal is going to come from. “Life is much more successfully looked at through a single window, after all,” Nick Carraway says in “The Great Gatsby.” That it is, old sport, as Gatsby himself might have said.

Looking out our window, a single window for entertainment purposes only, we see Wisconsin over Ohio State; Nebraska over Texas; Nevada vs. Hawaii over 75. Meanwhile, Boise State’s young men will not remain No. 1 in the BCS standings. They just don’t play enough tough teams down the road.

If these prognostications are less than Nostrodamus-like, you can yank our scholarship.

How to Succeed in Entertainment without really Trying

Mr. Halladay of the Philadelphia ball club is a failure. He allowed a single runner to reach with a base on balls (BB on your score card). Surely, he had a fitful night’s sleep, realizing he had faced 28 batsmen, retiring a mere 27. Oh, the torment!

Darting splitters, cutters, sliders, curve balls were to no avail against the redoubtable Jay Bruce of the Red Legs, who shrewdly took first base from the flawed moundsman, who should seek help from PA (Perfectos Anonymous). Why, a vision of grandiosity is a sign of serious mental illness and should be addressed immediately by a qualified professional. Talk him down from the ledge, Doc.

Mr. Lee of the Dallas club stifled the Floridians, and the Pinstripers managed to squeeze the crème-filled center out of the Twinkies.

In other words, we went 0 for 3 in our pursuit of entertainment in this sporting life. However, another Florida bunch, the rogue Knights of Orlando, cut a swath through the fizzling Blazers of Birmingham, giving us entertainment in the scholar-athlete realm.

Take Pavano and the Twin Cities (the head of the Mississippi River is nearby, we believe) over Pettite and the bridge-bound Bronx (no thonx). Also, Lincecum of the city by the bay against Lowe of Scarlet O’Hara’s territory. Also, Wilson of the Lone Star state over Shields of the scary underwater critters of another bay.

Meanwhile, the bond market is sending a message. Yields keep falling. Which means economic growth is fragile and stocks have little upside from here. Use the mattress and take the soon-to-be Big 10 Nebraska Cornhuskers minus 11 over Kansas State, for entertainment purposes only.

If We Had to Choose Just One Day

You can’t tell people how to feel. But you can tell them OU 28-Texas 20 and God is on his throne. You can tell them order has returned to the universe. You can tell them good conquers evil. You can tell them the Athens of the plains has vanquished Sparta. You can tell them Boomer Sooner and sing the OU Chant!

O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A
Our chant rolls on and on.
Thousands strong join heart and song
In Alma Mater’s praise
Of campus beautiful by day and night
Of colors proudly gleaming red and white
‘Neath a western sky, OU’s chant will never die
Live on University.

OK (pun intended), enough of the crimson and cream, but if we had to choose just one day to last our whole life through, it would surely be that Saturday, the day that we met the enemy and the enemy was ours. Or is the enemy us, as Walt Kelly’s Pogo opined in the funny pages, lo those many years ago?

We recently turned 25 years old and thought that turning 60 in one year was a “Cruel Twist of Fate,” as we used to put in the eyebrow of a headline. However, we also used to put in “Man Cheats Fate.” We’ll take the latter over “Headless Man Found in ... Bar.” We’ll leave it to your imagination.

This sporting life is for entertainment purposes only, but, since youth springs eternal, look for Texas (Rangers, not emasculated steers) to best Cincinnati in the World Series. Get in now while the gettin’s good (for entertainment purposes only).

Sell the Yankees tonight. We have a sibling who is a Twins fan and reminds us that the Twinkies have flourished without Justin Morneau. Pinstriper C.C. Sabbathia doesn’t wear his cap correctly and his derriere is wider than the pitching rubber. No brainer.

OU’s chant will never die. Take ‘em every week, for entertainment purposes only.

The Dead

Ever since the world began, God decreed that old men must die even if he were Methuselah, who managed to make it to 969.

One guy, crowned by some as the Voice of God, did not find a cure for cancer. His contribution to this vale of tears in 99 years was announcing the name and numbers of batsmen appearing at the plate of a stadium in the Bronx.

The other guy was an 80-year-old rich boor who never hit a curve ball and was twice banned from baseball. Scott Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American lives. But, as a friend of ours pointed out to us, this observation is false. He became in death the beloved Boss. The rich are different from you and me.

Now, we’re no saints. Some, hopefully, will shed tears and others will harrumph at our demise and perhaps some will come to our service to see us planted in the ground awaiting the second coming and the roses on home plate.

But let’s get serious. We all are destined to go where the Voice of God and the Boss are assigned to. We only have 750,000 years in purgatory before we meet them.

And our beloved Alouettes failed to cover the spread (for entertainment purposes only), costing us much entertainment. Stick with them while we’re still here and out of purgatory.