




Wednesday, 19 May 2010

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.





Joe Sambito. Wow. I'd completely forgotten about him. I sometimes wish I could forget that
Pendelton is the Braves hitting coach. Closest I came to that was watching Dale Murphy get
tagged out at the plate on what would have been an inside-the-park slam.
 Posted by: Chuck | Wednesday, 19 May 2010 at 06:16 PM 


He pitched for the Astros before he came to the Mets, stayed for '85, then he pitched for
the Red Sox against the Mets in '86 World Series. I remember him being ineffective, and as it
turns out, he was . Now that I remember him, which I didn't before, I remember him as
being the pitcher who'd pitched for 1) the team the Mets faced to get to the '86 Series and 2)
the one they faced in it. I didn't remember that I remember that, but now that I do, I do.
Memory, as Gertrude Stein would say, is funny.
Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 19 May 2010 at 06:27 PM


Apparently the drug use, sexual excess, and weird UCI experiences haven't softened your
brain yet.

What's really bothersome, though, is when you only remember things from your distant
past. 

My grandpa was alert till the end, but when I last saw him at age 92 everything he wanted to
talk about was 70 years in the past.

Posted by: John Emerson | Wednesday, 19 May 2010 at 07:02 PM


A guess, but perhaps your grandfather's life at 22 was more interesting than the ensuing 70
yrs. 

 Posted by: M. Bouffant | Wednesday, 19 May 2010 at 08:54 PM


You know what makes this post great? No stinking cricket.
 Posted by: tomemos | Wednesday, 19 May 2010 at 09:04 PM 



Yeah, I remember Sambito from the Astros (when the Braves were in the old NL West because it
made sense to have a team 3,000 miles from most of their division rivals). Solid pitcher for a
while. But burned out toward the end. Apparently, he is a player's representative now.
 Posted by: Chuck | Thursday, 20 May 2010 at 12:14 PM 

 >Prosthetic memory. Posted by: Endy | Thursday, 20 May 2010 at
02:35 PM 



I like to read about others watching baseball more than I like to watch baseball by a factor
of nine. Having given up on watching the actual sport, mention of baseball now only sparks
memories of The Old Man and the Sea and the old time baseball writers. It is true that at the
end of time, the old time baseball writers will be hailed as the very best writers, as they
had access to an event that was susceptible to beautiful writing, but horrendous to watch in
person. Plus, they smoked a prodigious quantity of cigarettes. 

nota bene: An overdue library book is a crime against Humanities. 
 Posted by: THE LIBRARY | Friday, 21 May 2010 at 11:17 PM





