We were starting to wonder the other day what the heck happened to formerly-frequent commenter Brandon. And then out of the blue he sent us an e-mail explaining his absence (new job) and offered up this little ditty about Michael Cuddyer and his magic habits. It’s a Friday. Why not just run with it? Also: reminder that YouTube Sunday is definitely on. Send your links! They will be posted! Become famous! Get random phone calls from women who have been in Playboy! OK, Brandon:

Michael Cuddyer is something of a brilliant magician. Apparently he’s got close to 45 minutes of top-notch sleight of hand material; he has amazed his teammates during spring training with his textbook trickery.

This leads to a question: does this information make you like Cuddyer more, or less?

On the one hand, having such an innocent hobby (one shared with Dunder-Mifflin’s Michael Scott, it stands mentioning) makes Cuddy seem more human, more of a regular guy, a stand-up sort of fellow with whimsical interests. Doing magic is eminently more relatable than some of the more common hobbies enjoyed by professional athletes, like collecting jets or diving into pools of gold medallions.

On the other hand … come on, man; magic? If it wasn’t for role-playing games and fantasy movies, magic would be the nerdiest of all adult diversions. We’ve all read the recent University of Illinois study that found no one who has perfected a magic trick has ever gotten lucky. That’s common knowledge.

Cuddyer may be “normal,” but so am I, and so are you, and everyone around us is normal as well. Do we really want the athletes on our beloved sports franchises to be someone we could easily envision joining us at our lame parties and sitting in the cubicles next to ours, discussing recent innovations of wrinkle-free slacks? The heroes of yesteryear, your Joe Namaths and Ted Williams and Eddie Gaedels, would have slapped the taste out Cuddyer’s mouth for his inherent geekiness. Have our standards been lowered to a point that an admitted dork like Cuddyer — he didn’t even try to hide his shameful hobby! It’s as if he isn’t embarrassed at all! — can remain in the general public’s good graces?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 11:41 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.