“Get off my lawn!”
“Poured a caramel, amber, clear color with five fingers of khaki, frothy head, which settled nicely. Lots of bubbles streaming up from the bottom of the glass. Sporadic spots of lacing along the sides of the glass. Average-to-above average retention on the top all the way down.”
Beer reviews have always tickled me. I enjoy the attention to detail and the ability to pick out the minutiae. Denny McLain was never a person that I fancied as a beer review kind of guy. In fact, if he was going to give a beer review it might sound more like the below quote:
“Its best ice cold, has a good looking creamy pour, and after the first 2 who gives a damn about character anyway.”
McLain enjoyed the adulation and trappings of being a 30 game winner and also endured 6 years of prison for embezzlement, mail fraud and conspiracy. Life is but a dream. At some point in our lives we all must confront these four word sentences…why am I here? Where am I going? What does it mean? I think McClain deserves admiration for sending these thoughts straight to hell, pulling out his balls and giving life the finger.
Sometimes over-thinking can be the bane of your existence. I just recently read a wonderful theory regarding the asteroid that landed in Mexico some 66 million years ago, in essence, wiping out 80 percent of the life on earth. The theory states that if the asteroid had landed 5 minutes earlier or 5 minutes later or even had a slightly different trajectory (we’re talking feet here) the dinosaurs would most certainly still rule the earth giving mammals no opportunity to thrive. You wouldn’t exist. The crap computer that I am typing on now wouldn’t exist. This was confounding to me because I had laid in my bed at times (listening to Depeche Mode….just kidding.) trying to wrap my head around the astronomical odds off surviving during the sperm/egg process and now the chances of being “me” were so large I would have to write the number down from here and the moon and back over a trillion times. (This is a made-up equation by the way…as you may or may not know…I am no scientist.)
Of course, at this moment in time most people in the sanctimonious world of baseball blogging are scratching their heads thinking, “what the fuck is this guy talking about?”– their hubris keeping them from thinking about not much more than grown men swinging wood, playing with balls and over-the-top vomitous nostalgia. It probably took you longer to read this essay than the time McClain was with the Athletics–all of 5 horribly pitched games towards the end of his career in 1972. That’s what the fuck I’m talking about.
