Remember when Paul Newman ate 50 hard-boiled eggs in Cool Hand Luke? It was an amazing feat, a show of both literal and figurative intestinal fortitude. Well, today Jose Bautista just ate his metaphor-corrected 40th hard-boiled egg, an even more amazing feat than Newman’s because a) Newman himself didn’t actually eat 50 hard-boiled eggs, and b) Jose Bautista hit 50 homeruns.
The downgrade in Bautista’s performance, from 50 dingers to 40 eaten hard-boiled eggs, is an admittedly unfortunate reduction of his accomplishment but necessary if we want to use the 50 hard-boiled eggs that Newman ate as a representation of Roger Maris’ 61 homeruns in a similar, real-world-but-not-really-it’s-only-baseball context, which I’m sure we would all agree we absolutely do. Furthermore, despite the various lapses in logic inherent in this metaphor (incongruities of time, distinction between fictional and authentic achievements, using 61 as a benchmark for purely subjective reasons, misapplying the Luke-as-martyr myth of a 40-year-old film to the number of moonshots a certain Toronto Blue Jay hit over the summer), Bautista hadn’t ever eaten more than 10 hard-boiled eggs in an hour, or hit more than 16 jacks in a season, before this prodigious outburst of hardboiled eaten-egg homeruns.
Bautista’s success, like Newman’s, was an incredible triumph of endurance, physical capability and particularly fortune, for just as Paul Newman back-pocketed whatever misgivings he might have had of actually rupturing his belly (it was a movie), so too did Jose Bautista brush aside his fear of cholesterol (changeups) because they were just feeding him fastballs, all year. I mean, wouldn’t you? Dude had 59 homers coming in… total. Over 500 games. Seriously.
Next up: my dissertation on Ichiro Suzuki’s streak of 10 consecutive 200-hit seasons and its resemblance to both the Peloponnesian War and a ham sandwich.
[Post-season post-addendum: Bautista ended up with a Mantlean 54 poppers, which works out to 48 eaten hard-boiled eggs (or 47.8, technically, but you’d have to think that Jose would’ve just metaphorically chomped through that last bite of metaphorical egg), bringing me back to my original estimation of 50 homers = 41 - not 40 - hard-boiled eaten egg homeruns. This is one of the downsides to employing a calculator filthy with rabies: bad, gamy conclusions.]
No comments:
Post a Comment
xoxo