So Long and Thanks for All the Fish: A Douglas Adams Review of Game 156

White Sox win 12-7 and (barring a miracle) bid adieu to U.S. Cellular field for 2006.

As the 2006 home season goes the way of the dinosaurs, blood-letting and car-phones the size of small countries, the home team gives the home patrons love, honor and one last victory on the pitch.

(To completely plagarize) I'm Ford Prefect from the planet Betelgeuse Seven, and I'll take you thru yesterday's match using my Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy boxscore and match results. For those uninitiated ones, I'm an alien living in the land of the Brits, and my towel is at your beck and call.

Your match started plainly enough with much ado about nothing until the yound lad, Brian Anderson, smashed a ball to the patron-seating section just outside the field of play.

(During my first 15 years of existence on this planet in the land of fish-n-chips, this game of baseball you play has taken on curious manifestations. One, called 'Cricket', is played world-wide in countries both more and less populous than your United States, but with much less fanfare. Strangley enough, the origins of this game seem to recalled in the cinematic feature, 2001: A Space Odyessy, where a group of primates use primative battering items such as sticks to fend off a gigantic black monolith. In an odd bit of irony, the musical group The Who would detail a kinder, gentler monolith on the outer sheath of its record, Who's Next. But I digress...)

The mostly harmless Jim Thome would later drive in a run during that same inning, as you call it, of play, and the rout was on.

All in all, six participants for the players residing in the hamlet of Chicago collected rbis including 4 for Juan Uribe on a grand slam (who doesn't seem to understand the spoke language and might think of investing in a babel-fish, but has a curious body interaction with one character called Dye where they grab hands and shake all over like they just finished drinking a Galactic Brainbuster), and 4 for one Paul Konerko (who thought he'd give the spectators a special treat by delivering two balls to confines outside the playing field.

The men who marshalled the game, or as you call them, the starting pitchers (wouldn't throwers be a more appropriate name for their position?) wouldn't finish the game as Frederico Garcia seemed to be summonded by Trillian in all her womanly wiles somewhere under the environs of the place most of the players sat. (Now Trillian is NOT mostly harmless.) The opposing team's starting pitcher, Ryan Feierabend, is actually a distant cousin of Zaphod Beeblebrox's which would explain the White Sox ability to hit the snot outta the ball he pitched.

To summerize, the baseball game on this US Cellular Field in this hamlet of Chicago, Illinois, in this country of the United States of America, on this planet Earth in this galaxy called the Milky Way was quite an entertaining show. In fact the delegation of Intergalactic Space Travellers has called an emergency meeting to discuss the merits of this game, and whether or not Earth should be bulldozed by the Vogon Space Moving Corporation to make room for a new ultra-modern space highway. Maybe they can save this one space on earth and the dolphins can eat their fish elsewhere. My depressed but quasi-intellegent robot, Marvin, wishes the White Sox well this off-season.

Awards Time-------------------------

Bad Ozzie Move of the Game: His name is Neal Cotts. (His resemblence to Arthur Dent is astounding. And they have more in comman than that. Dent masquarades as an actor; Cotts masquarades as a pitcher.)

Good Ozzie Move of the Game: I found Scott Podsednik stowed away on my spaceship, Heart of Gold. Ozzie Guillen is a genius. Slartibastfast will love meeting Pods; he has a thing for fjords.

Plays of the Game: I'm gonna point out two consecutive plays (and no, they're not the back-to-back homeruns)...Josh Fields takes a bases-loaded walk which would give Juan Uribe a chance to use his always-apparent homerun swing to hit a grand slam putting the game outta reach. (The hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional race on the planet Earth, mice, found Juan's trot to be the second answer to the Ultimate Question of Life -- the first answer being 42 -- and hence the injunction of the destruction of Earth.)

Big Ups of the Game: To celebrate, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is having happy-hour in these players names: Juan Uribe, Jermaine Dye, Brian Anderson, Joe Crede (30 HRs!) and Freddy Garcia.

And my White Sox Player of the Game (or your new President of the Galaxy) is...




Paul Konerko (12)




Don't Panic: Sox Record 87-69

PS: My Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy just updated again. Now under the entry 'Earth' it says, "Mostly Harmless. (And try the brawts at US Cellular Field. They're to die for.)"