I primarily use the Twitter Like button as a bookmarking tool for interesting-seeming articles. Recently, I had some time to go through a bunch of the tweets I liked and read the corresponding articles. These included great pieces from The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh on baseball’s economics, and the foremother of sabermetrics, Sherri Nichols. And Ringer-colleague, Katie Baker’s fascinating profile of Alex Rodriguez. They also included the excellent article about Los Angeles Dodgers General Manager, Farhan Zaidi’s fantasy football dynasty by Andy McCullough of the Los Angeles Times. Alan Sepinwall’s piece on ignoring the fear of missing out on new-peak-TV and embracing old favourites. A series of great review/interview pieces on Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s excellent documentary on the Vietnam War. A thorough takedown of the shoddy work by famous ‘food scientist’ Brian Wansink by Stephanie Lee at Buzzfeed News, and brilliant statistician, Andrew Gelman’s commentary on the matter, specifically about how science and data analysis should be conducted. Oh, and I can’t leave out this remarkable essay about how Facebook is terrible.
There are probably others that I should be directing people toward, but those in the previous paragraph are the ones for which I made a note to mention. But they are not even my reason for this post. Rather, this silly little post is due to a tweet from the New England Patriots that was mixed in amongst the mess of tweets/articles I have liked over the last few years:
Check this out - Brady & @45PedroMartinez just did a little batting practice at Fenway: pic.twitter.com/ddCtQ1qxGP
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) April 13, 2015
As the tweet states, that is Pedro Martinez throwing a bit of batting practice for Tom Brady! Be still my heart.
These guys are legends in Boston and in their respective sports. What a cool thing to have happen. Brady takes some good hacks, perhaps harder than Pedro was expecting given the reaction. Brady can handle a bat, he was actually drafted by the Montreal Expos in 1995, but passed on the opportunity to continue his football career – a decision that seems to have worked out ok for him.
Anyway, I wanted to note my re-stumbling onto this great moment.