The 2007 Wobbling Doughnut Awards

It’s mid-July and the annual All-Star game is over, so what better time to present the 2007 Major League Baseball Wobbling Doughnut Awards! Yes, this year has produced a fine crop of overweight players who for one shining moment blissfully forgot they were painfully slow, and, in trying to stretch a single into a double, were thrown out by a country mile in front of thirty thousand stadium spectators and millions at home who could only watch with one eye open, red-faced with embarrassment! Yes, for as long as baseball has been played, there’s been something truly special about the blend of pathos and comedy that ensues in those five seconds when a fat dude, emboldened by a hard line drive into the gap, utterly loses track of his own God-given limitations, only to be reminded of his irrevocable nature when he’s tagged out ten feet shy of the base he so yearns for, lucky to even glimpse it through a pair of high-powered binoculars. The lucky winners are:

Jim Thome, Chicago White Sox vs. Toronto Blue Jays, May 5
Baseball Digest says: “Watching Thome stumble, sway, and jelly roll his way toward second base in a woeful attempt to beat Vernon Wells’s throw from center field was like observing a wheelbarrow full of warm vanilla pudding inching toward the ocean under its own power in a laborious attempt at suicide with dignity. The charade ended quickly, thank God, yet it seemed to go on forever and ever. We can still hear Thome’s self-esteem crying in the night, left for dead on the base path where he so cruelly abandoned it in pursuit of a nonsensical dream that simply dried up like a girthy raisin in the sun.”

Dmitri Young, Washington Nationals vs. Pittsburgh Pirates, June 18
Sports Illustrated says: “The look on Young’s face as he rounded first in the pathetic belief that his bouncing blubbery butt could possibly reach second, and then as he came to the realization that the laws of physics and reason had made a fool of his Chunky Bar self once again, calls to mind the agonized visages of Oedipus, Thomas More, and Richard the Third in their crowning moments of pain, but at least those doomed icons will never have to know the devastation of getting slapped right in the face by Freddy Sanchez’s mitt, completely obscuring Young’s view of the faraway base that his jiggly, incompetent body so briefly, and so sadly, believed might become his own.”

Bengie Molina, San Francisco Giants vs. San Diego Padres, April 27
The Yale Quarterly Review of Current Affairs says: “This historic train wreck was especially gratifying, as it involved the harmonious merging of waning skills between a stupefyingly slow runner and a legendarily lumpy pitcher (David Wells). After watching this play, which actually involved Wells booting a grounder with his enormous right foot and trying to chase it down while Molina developed crazy ideas about taking second on the error, we now know what it’s like to watch an oil slick and ten tons of maple syrup go head to head in a footrace through the tall, impenetrable grasses of the African savannah. In the dark, if we close our eyes, we imagine we can still hear the sloshing sounds of those two rotund gas balloons that call themselves athletes blobbing around the diamond like lima beans pushed around a skillet filled with plum sauce, and the ticking of an unseen clock marking off the moments before the ball and Molina’s pride finally converged, mercifully ending a grisly spectacle which left both men exhausted, embarrassed, and, if possible, five pounds heavier. Around the globe, mathematicians are still calculating how Molina somehow wound up lying face down in the dirt farther away from second base than when he began his fat journey from home plate. We salute you, sir---Don Quixote himself, had he also been a tremendously bloated and aging catcher, could not have developed grander, or more insane, ambitions of notching a two-bagger.”