Mars Rover “Curiosity”
Admit it. You stayed up to watch the Mars rover, Mars Curiosity, land on the red planet. To heck with the physical and emotional repercussions of starting Monday sleep deprived. When NASA has a $2.5 billion rover tweeting its trip across the solar system, those TPS reports can wait. After all, we are talking must-see tv writ large. In baseball terms most people may understand, NASA just threw a baseball hundreds of millions of miles at home plate which happens to be just 96 miles wide, and the rocket surgeons placed the ball right on the 3rd base corner of the plate. St-eeee-rike.
Of course, the plate happened to be moving at something like 24.077 km/s, and takes 779.96 days to orbit the sun, but we will take what we can get. Hitting a moving target makes the rover project a bit more like the feat of throwing a called strike with Bob Davidson or Joe West behind the dish. Nibbling on the edge won’t do. The rover had to be throw right down the pipe with the universe’s largest 12-6 uncle Charlie. If the geniuses at NASA can do all this with a 1-ton rover, just imagine what they could do for MLB.
Consider that a NASA project team possesses the collective intellectual firepower to prepare for thousands of potential eventualities, and they delivered a robust, polished, and highly technical final product to spec. Bud Selig has trouble figuring out how to get 15 teams in each league. Put NASA in charge, and consider the possibilities.
- Maybe the NASA baseball engineers can explain to Terry Francona, Orel Hershiser, and Dan Shulman of ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball team that Vince Coleman did NOT play for the 1982 World Series champion Cardinals. Coleman actually began his MLB career almost 3 years later. This would not be such an egregious mistake, but Coleman was a contemporary of Hershiser who played from 1983-2000.
- Perhaps the “official review” of a potential home run ball could just involve a quick look on the jumbotron. Carlos Beltran hit one on Saturday night that clearly hit beyond the outfield wall and came back into the field of play. Unfortunately, the umpires were probably the last 4 people in the stadium to make this determination. The important thing to remember in this instance? The closes umpire to the play waddled in the direction of the ball with all the intensity of Jonathan Broxton leaving a buffet. Tectonic plates and glaciers move with greater rapidity. So, instead of getting the call on the field correct, the umpires all gathered together to huddle en masse around a monitor to determine whether or not Beltran would get to complete the most time-consuming trip around the bases all season.
- Again, let the folks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have a shot at getting baseball players to leave smokeless tobacco in the clubhouse. After all, the banning tobacco advertising on television basically gets circumvented when kids see baseball players put a pinch/wad between their respective cheeks and gums. Free advertising without all the fuss of dealing with a marketing campaign is like giving the tobacco giants a free pass to kid world. Smokeless tobacco products are banned from stadiums for the peasantry, so maybe a JPL scientist can explain the rationale of allowing players on the field to use the infield as a giant spittoon. Maybe the answer involves Tang in non-soluble form as a substitute.
- While the telemetry and pre-flight people are working on the devil in the details, maybe someone good with remote audio/video equipment can work with MLB on eliminating televised full-frontal crotch grabs, the “dirt cam”, and microphones attached to players, coaches, and bases. Some things need not be seen and heard by all. Leave something to the imagination, please.
Then again, it probably makes far too much sense to put the nerds and geeks in charge of baseball. Besides, we would not want the 5th tiebreaker for the 2nd wild card to come down to a game of “rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock”.
