He Died As He Lived: Grasping For A Useless Thing

Tonight in Texas, my A's lost a 6-0 game where Rich Harden got pounded, and no one is going to remember a damn thing about it. Instead, they'll be all over the following moment, where Josh Hamilton killed a guy in front of his kid. Well, there were extenuating circumstances, but still. I don't own Hamilton on my roto team this year, so string him up. Video at the link, and on the off chance that you don't want to see a guy fall to his eventual death, that's what happens.

Now, if you aren't seeing a breathtakingly lucrative wrongful death lawsuit coming out of this, you aren't living in America in 2011. The idea that there is a big dumb gap with a 14-foot drop, deep enough to kill a man after an accidental fall, is just ripe for the plucking. And considering that the Rangers have relatively deep pockets these days, with last year's AL Championship and this year's new cable contract... and the fact that the man leaves behind a kid who actually watched this happen is just all kinds of sad.

But on some level -- a dark, nasty, sad level -- I just can't feel too powerfully awful about this. Tonight, we lost a Rangers fan, a guy that was yelling at Hamilton for a freaking ball, a guy that was ready to endanger himself for a $4 object that was going to sit in his home for the rest of his life. We have not, in all likelihood, lost a Mensa candidate. We can all move on, really. And maybe not kill ourselves for freaking baseballs. It's just not that useful of a thing to put our your gravestone, really.