Baseball Players And Their Muppet Twins: An Exploration

Bored sports fans are a volatile thing. Placate us with games, throw some claustrophobic draft ritual or desultory trade rumors at us, drop us off on some fantasy platform or other and we'll probably be okay. Take the games away, even for a few days, and give us nothing but the Home Run Derby, the long honking soul-farts of Skip Bayless, and the dang ESPY's and we will get weird. Not necessarily irritable or angry or worse-than-usual, but strange.

Ordinarily I would just speak for myself, here, because I know this to be true for me. I know that because, at the very stroke of midnight on Wednesday, I tweeted this pair of images, for no good reason at all other than my boredom and fascination with the glowering, peering-imperiously-into-your-very-soul portrait stylings of tube-headed Dodgers co-ace Zack Greinke.

pic.twitter.com/kZ6YWlAdLw
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) July 16, 2015

I don't know. I mean, I know why I did it—because I was bored, am an idiot, and wanted to make a stupid noise on the internet—but I don't know why I bothered. And here is where we get to the first-person plural.

My friend Dan responded to it. I retweeted that. And then followed a more than hour-long eruption of people—ones I know and ones I don't—blasting out baseball/Muppet comparisons that had clearly been simmering in their minds for some time. There was something like an unbroken hour of this going on, and I have the timeline to prove it.

@JoseFranco_ @david_j_roth pic.twitter.com/tcd2l3zsA7
— arod is back baby (@atbobb) July 16, 2015

This is, I've always thought, something like what Twitter is for, which might explain some of Twitter's problems making money. But if you need a justification for its existence, and a reason to hope it never goes away or grows up, this would be it—a bunch of adult-to-adultish humans who have clearly spent moments in their waking lives thinking about how much Nick Swisher looks like Elmo finally stepping up to the plate and saying so. Thanks to all who participated—for being brave, for being bored, and for thinking about which Muppet looks the most like Dan Quisenberry, really thinking about it. And special thanks to @ctatplay for Storifying the proceedings.