Fear and Awe in Phoenix

I went to the USA-Mexico WBC game last week, and while it was a rough day for the boys in the red, white and blue, it was decidedly fun for the overwhelmingly pro-Mexico crowd that was packed into Chase Field. The din as the final out grew closer pitch-by-pitch was ear-splitting from my vantage point five rows from the very top of the stadium, and that was with maybe 25,000 people left (almost all of whom were rooting for the baseball incarnation of El Tri). You'd have thought Mexico had just won a gold medal when Jimmy Rollins bounced out to first to end it. But that's all beside the point.

Anyway, the reason I'm writing - Giancarlo Stanton. The man is 6'5", 245 pounds. Absolute freak of a human specimen. I foolishly and a bit absentmindedly showed up to the stadium about an hour before the first pitch, and so was disappointed to have missed Team USA's batting practice - more specifically, Stanton's batting practice. This is because what The Player Formerly Known as Mike Stanton can do to a baseball is absolutely terrifying.

MJ and Baseball, or How Hitting .202 is Considered a Success and Double-A is Better Than Triple-A

I happened to flip on First Take the other morning. It's a real rarity these days for me to "embrace debate," but I was feeling particularly bored with the eleventh Lakers story of the previous 15 minutes on SportsCenter, or at least it seemed like it had been that many (side note: Jay Pharoah as Stephen A. talking about the Lakers on SNL was magnificent). Anyways, Skip and Stephen A. (and Steelers receiver Antonio Brown, wearing a bow tie and what looked like a classy straw hat) were dealing with the question "Jordan v. LeBron: Who's a better athlete?" For my money, it's LeBron, simply because he's a 6'8", 260-lb. manimal who can run the floor like a point guard - but as I'm not getting paid to disagree with somebody on national TV, what does my opinion matter? Skip took MJ, Stephen A. took King James, I forget who Brown took because I was too busy laughing at his ridiculous outfit, and the yelling commenced.

Then Skip veered off into a potentially interesting line of thought, but ruined it by saying two things in defense of his argument that immediately sounded completely ludicrous to me.