GOD HATES A COWARD

PRETTY GOOD, EPISODE 18

Joe Sprinz, a 37-year-old minor league catcher, is no stranger to this lack of progression.

Today is August 3rd, 1939, and Joe is occupying a baseball diamond. He is 16 seasons into what will ultimately be a 23-season career as a professional baseball player.

By the end of it, he’ll appear in 2,224 games. 2,223 of those are minor league games, just 21 of them are major league games. He’ll never really break through because while he’s a great teammate and excellent catcher defensively, he just can’t hit that well. Joe, therefore, is a minor league lifer.

Is this a pointless career? Well, not to us. Surely not to him, right? He made a living playing baseball; that’s the dream. But if you were to ask our ancestors about this arrangement, they might be more than a little bit annoyed.

We have spent somewhere around 200,000 years as anatomically modern human beings. We’ve spent the last couple hundred of those years in the era of industrialization and the last 12,000 or so in an age of agriculture that actually has allowed us to sit and stay put and think of weird, stupid stuff to do. But across the preceding 90% of this cosmic journey, we’ve had little to no energy we could afford to waste on screwing around for its own sake.

For almost every single one of us, every meaningful venture was in direct service of our continued survival. Imagine trying to explain the life of Joe Sprinz to our forebears. He isn’t hunting, gathering, cooking, making clothes, or building shelter. He isn’t even conducting any kind of religious ritual that might curry God’s favor.

Instead, he catches a little ball and he runs around on a square. He does this all day. The rest of us give him all the food, clothing, and shelter he needs in exchange for him doing this all day.

What would our distant ancestors make of that? Their constraints were unforgiving and absolute. They spent almost all of these 200,000 years staring at the seas that bury our land and split our world apart, unable to alter them, staring up at the sky, categorically unable to reach it, roaming the land but too preoccupied with migrating across it, forging from it, and laboring over it to really enjoy it.

Joe, standing just barely on the far side of this line, finds himself in a brand new world in which we can suddenly do all these things. Thanks to the wealth of technological advances at our disposal, we can and do occupy the sky, reshape the waters and enjoy the land. And as we’ll see today, these ventures often take the most pointless forms imaginable.

On this day in 1939, Joe has a very unimportant job to do. His job is to catch a baseball.

A couple thousand people are spectating from the bleachers, but he is standing on this field all by himself. He pounds his mitt as his eyes track baseball number one.

This baseball is streaking through the air at approximately 145 miles per hour. If mathematicians from the University of California are to be believed, that would be about 40 miles per hour faster than any human being has ever thrown one and about 20 miles per hour faster than any batted ball on record. Needless to say, this ball was neither hit nor thrown. It soon becomes clear to Joe that it’s well outta reach and he is not gonna be able to snag it. Maybe that’s a good thing. The ball obliterates itself into the bleachers. Fortunately, this part of the stands is empty.

“Jesus,” a teammate offers unhelpfully.

These players have hit, thrown, and caught uncountable baseballs throughout their lives and have never ever seen a baseball fly like that. More are coming and Joe is terrified. Suddenly, it makes a lot of sense that he’s out there all by himself.

This brand-new, increasingly pointless world might just take a little bit of getting used to.