I’ve been prevented from posting on national politics, the clash of civilizations, and other Matters of Moment by a series of writing deadlines and family crises–the kids all started school this week, and the calamities have run from the announcement by our kindergartner that she had no intention of returning to school ever again to our ninth-grader’s sudden discovery that he had forgotten to purchase a “graphics calculator,” whatever that might be—but let no obstacle stand in the way of a post about Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections, the brilliant and absurd new book by Rev. George Rutler.
After posting about Coincidentally yesterday, I discovered that I’d underlined a week’s worth of passages.
So here is Day Two–and an item intended to buck up the Yankees (who, after losing to Detroit this evening by an astounding 16 to zero, could certainly use it).
The odds must be eight trillion-to-one that any two contemporary Major League baseball players, having pitched perfect games, will be found to have attended the same high school. Don Larsen pitched his for the Yankees on and October afternoon in 1956 against the Brooklyn Dodgers, and David Wells pitched his for the Yankees against the Minnesota Twins on a May afternoon in 1998. Both graduated from Point Loma High School in San Diego, Larsen in 1947 and Wells in 1982. In the realm of probabilities, this is more striking than the configuration by which Julius Caesar took 1855 Gauls captive in 55 B.C. for work in the Roman marches, while in 1855 A.D. aluminum sold at $55 per pound.