When I worked in news I’d tell aspiring journalists that the one thing guaranteed to get them a job in news is knowing how to find, order, buy and deliver food, anywhere, anytime. Students always laughed, but I was never really kidding. Need to feed cameramen stuck on a roof in Havana shooting live shots for 12 hours without a break? Better know how to find a restaurant that can do take-out, and how to coerce them into delivery. Sitting on the side of a highway awaiting a Virginia State Police press conference hours after a shooting but right before the Evening News? The right pizza place will deliver to a pin drop.

This part of my job always made me giggle, and I thought television was unique in the way it forced very qualified, very well-paid individuals, oftentimes in very glamorous places, to worry about and do absurd things. Do you know how much time I spent asking hotel front desks to check the wattage on their in-room blow dryers for me? Or how to remove a security tag from a blazer using a flat-head screw driver, smuggled through a magnetometer?

It turns out there are absurdities in every job. Or, at least in my second career, too. Two data points only. I get it. But I can’t be the only one who tends toward the farcical.

Case in point: I just wrote eight paragraphs about our mascot’s name. Those eight words are not nearly as ludicrous as the eight grafs I contrived. He’s a baseball-head character wearing a giant helmet and goofy goggles. And soon he’ll have his very own press release.

He already has his own traveling kit, including a special cloth bag for his very expensive belt buckle. His shoes and gloves cost more than my wedding dress.

So I guess he probably deserves a press release.

Uncategorized baseball career