Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 30 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.
Today’s book is Sports Illustrated: Baseball; Four decades of Sports Illustrated’s finest writing on America’s favorite pastime. This one would have been best saved for April Fool’s Day, but the page numbers wouldn’t have worked. This is from The Curious Case of Sidd Finch by George Plimpton from April 1, 1985.
Meanwhile, the Mets are trying other ways to get Finch into a more positive frame of mind about baseball. Inquiries among American lamaseries (there are more than 100 Buddhist societies in the U.S.) have been quietly initiated in the hope of finding monks or priests who are serious baseball fans and who might persuade Finch that the two religions (Buddhism and baseball) are compatible. One plan is to get him into a movie theater to see The Natural, the mystical film about baseball, starring Robert Redford. Another film suggested is the baseball classic It Happens Every Spring, starring Ray Milland as a chemist who, by chance, discovers a compound that avoids wood; when applied to a baseball in the film, it makes Milland as effective a pitcher as Finch is in real life.
Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.
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