Wally Gets a Nickname

[Continued from 3-8-10]

Pastor Randall Nathan, (Retard) was in the stands yesterday afternoon at Ed Smith Stadium in Sarasota. Wally Wagler had persuaded Rev. Nathan to accompany him to the Baltimore Orioles spring training fantasy camp, to pose as his father when he registered. They are the same age, which is well above the upper age limit of 55 for the camp.

The regiistration girl [about 40, but a "girl" to men the age of Wally and Randall] looked at Wally and his pink beard and hair and said to Randall, "He's really your son?" "Yes," replied Randall, "but he looks older because he's lived a really hard life. He's such a disappointment to his mother." The registration girl nodded sagely, as though she understood the life of a disappointed mother.

As a kid, Wally played first base, a natural position for a tall, slow guy. His hero was "Marvelous Marv" Throneberry, aka, "Dr. Strangeglove," who played, more or less, usually less, on the original Mets, the team of which manager Casey Stengle asked, "Can't anybody here play this game?" So it was his 1962 "Marvelous Marv" Louisville Slugger that Wally put on his shoulder and shuffled to the batter's box, to face Warden Lucky, the wild young lefthander from Kansas.

Rev. Nathan was in the front row, on the shady side of the stadium, looking for the prize in his Cracker Jack, when Wally dug into the batter's box. Warden Lucky had been showing off as he warmed up, buzzing his 105 mph fastball into the oversized mitt of catcher, "No Palm" Palmer.

Rev. Nathan wasn't worried about Wally getting hit by a pitch. Warden Lucky was under strick instructions to throw only his changeup, and on the outside corner. After all, the point of having him pitch in the fantasy camp was to work on his control. Randall Nathan, however, had not counted on Wally's chaw.

Many fantasy leaguers chew tobacco, to emulate their heroes. Wally, on the other hand, eschews tobacco. He felt out of place, however, without a chaw in his jaw as he went to the plate, so he popped in a big hunk of persimmon pulp. Then two unanticipated things happened. First, Warden Lucky forgot he was no longer warming up, and he threw the first pitch into the plate at 102.3 mph on the radar gun. That wasn't really a problem, because it was heading straight down the pipe, right over home plate. But just as Warden Lucky turned the ball loose, a persimmon seed got stuck in Wally's throat. He spat it out. It collided with the ball. A 102.3 mph fastball is no match for a persimmon seed. The ball veered hard left, right toward Wally's head.

After the crash, Wally just stood there. He had been too old and slow to duck, and when he heard the crack of the helmet, he thought it was the crack of the bat. He assumed he had swung and gotten lucky. So he just stood there, until the helmet fell off his pink-haired head in two pieces. He scanned the outfield, wondering where he had hit the ball. "Dude!" said "No Palm" Palmer, mightily impressed by Wally's ability to stand firm against Warden Lucky's fastball. "You da man!"

That inspired Wally Wagler. He had never been "da man" before. He leveled his Marvelous Marv Louisville Slugger over the plate and yelled, "Can't you throw any faster than that?"

Cal Ripken, Jr. was in the dugout. He began to yell, "No! No! No...," but Warden Lucky had already taken the challenge. He went into his full windup. He threw the ball. That was when Wally finally realized the former pitch had hit him, because that was when he really saw the ball. It was literally as big as a volleyball. The pitch that hit him had done something to his eyes.

That was when he remebered the lecture by Physics Prof P. Irish Smith. Wally and Randall belong to a life-long learning group for the elderly who are still smart enough to learn but not smart enough to look up stuff on the internet instead of paying tuition at the university. It's called GEE, for Great Exciting Expectations. The younger students call it GEEzers. P. Irish Smith had once lectured them on the mechanics of a pitched ball. Wally remembered exactly what he had said, about how you could tell where a ball would go by the way the seams rotated. Wally knew. He closed his eyes and swung his bat as hard as he could at the spot where he knew the ball would cross the plate. There was the crack of the bat, and then the outfielders were running hard, until they came to the fence.

"Can't you throw any faster than that?" yelled Wally.

For thirty minutes Warden Lucky, the wild young lefthander from Kansas, threw faster and faster. For thirty minutes, Wally Wagler read the rotation, closed his eyes, and swung. For thirty minutes, the outfielders just stood at the fence and watched as the balls flew over their heads.

"He's wasting all of our baseballs," grouched perennial hermudgeon Earl Weaver, fantasy camp manager, Hall of Famer, and former Orioles manager.

Thus the legend of "Waste 'Em Wally" Wagler was born.