Sporting lore has it that Vince Lombardi so believed in his "Packers sweep" that he didn't care if the opposition knew it was coming; they were powerless to stop it, so long as the execution was perfect. And this, naturally enough, brings us to Trevor Rosenthal's four-seam fastball.
From the following action-news GIFs, one gets the sense that Arizona 's Paul Goldschmidt on Wednesday night probably knew what Rosenthal was going to offer up but was nonetheless unable to do very much about it.
So let us relive what can best be described as a "three-pitch pants-ing" ...
That would be strike one, and that would be, oh, four mph slower than Rosenthal's best fireball.
Strike two. The new boss? You'll recognize him as the old boss.
This is when a hitter scolds the limits of his own physiology. Or perhaps whispers prayers for a slider.
Strike three. The extra mph was surely a cruel flourish.
As ever, stupid equipment is stupid.
To be fair, Goldschmidt went a strong 3-for-8 with a homer on the night, and his D-backs prevailed in 16 innings. But, as Connie Mack once said, "Everyone in this game at one point or another looks silly enough to have a series of GIFs made of their indignities and posted to a Web-based repository for such things."
