Halloween will soon be upon us, and we’ll get lots of videos of animals eating pumpkin. You see it here first, with animals nomming pumpkins last year at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. The YouTube notes:
Several of the animals at Brookfield Zoo near Chicago enjoyed Halloween treats on Friday. They included the western lowland gorillas; Hani, one of the sloth bears; the Rodrigues fruit bats; a carpet python; and the pygmy hippos. (Oct. 20 [2017])
The hippo is the best!
And a remarkable (and accidental) catch by a pitcher:
Rays pitcher Jake Faria relied on incredible reflexes to make an unbelievable catch of a screaming line drive hit by Aaron Judge. “I threw my hands up to get my head out of the way, and the ball went into my glove,” Faria said. “[I’ve] never seen anything that hard coming at my face before.”
I believe that was strictly a defensive move in baseball.
Yes, that’s what the guy said. He was trying to protect his head.
Agreed on the hippo; like bobbing for apples on a giant scale.
I liked the fruit bats!
“Look what I found!” as they say on the old ball diamond after such catches.
Baseball is a dangerous sport, particularly for batters, who face balls thrown up to 160kph/100mph, and pitchers, who occasionally have balls hit back at them even harder. That was a scary situation. Aaron Judge is a giant and must be one of the strongest players in the game.
What I can’t abide is pitchers throwing intentionally at batters. I hope that if I were a pitcher who’d been instructed to throw at an innocent batter, simply because the rival pitcher had thrown at one of my team’s batters, I’d refuse.
Here’s a little hippo story from my teaching days. In the 70s I took around 140 14yo boys to the Auckland Zoo. First stop on our circuit was the hippo pit: the sign said “no feeding the hippo”. Even so the hippo hopefully exposed its huge throat to the boys crowding around. In disgust(?) at the lack of food the hippo rotated 180deg so his rear end was not a metre from the front row of boys with others thronging behind. To mark territory hippos eject feces explosively while at the same time furiously ‘wagging’ their tail to enhance the scatter. The front row of boys, unable to escape because of those pressing from behind, received the full blast of this nauseous ejecta.
A great day in the life of a biology teacher!
The boys’parents must have lamented the fact that this was something about hippo behaviour that was not taught strictly theoretically, in the classroom only.
Indeed! That was something to see!
And smell.
There was a great young southpaw pitcher in the 1950s (our host may recall the name from his childhood) by the name of Herb Score who got hit flush in the face by a line-drive off the bat of the Yankees’ Gil McDougald. Damn near killed him. He eventually made a coupla comebacks, and knocked around the bigs for s few more seasons, but his career never really recovered.
Went on, though, to become “the Voice of the Cleveland Indians” on radio for decades. Listening to him call ballgames was as much a part of the summers of my youth as scraped knees and wienie roasts.
“[I’ve] never seen anything that hard coming at my face before.”
Come on, dude. This is baseball. You’re not supposed to be throwing softballs like this.
FYI –
“LOLcat Bible: In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez an da Erfs n stuffs”
On Amazon –
“LOLcat Bible: In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez an da Erfs n stuffs”
(wordpress doesn’t like a link?)
My cat’s a huge fan of pumpkin thanks to the vet’s suggestion that I include it in his diet to help his.. uh.. kitty business.
“[I’ve] never seen anything that hard coming at my face before.”
– said the actress to the Bishop.
(Sorry, couldn’t help myself).
That catch was mostly luck.
(Re: the baseball clip) Another datum for the stuff on “miracles”?