Caught Stealing

By The Common Man

This story comes to us from former MLB reliever, OG blogger, and Twitter superstar CJ Nitkowski, who heard it from Tom Paciorek.  It's about how Rick Dempsey and Robin Yount's older brother, Larry (who would get injured warming up for his first MLB game, and never play again, which is another awesome story) played Little League together and went to the Little League World Series.  Their team, as it turned out, was being coached by a professional bank robber. 

TCM can't find the original June 30, 2002 article in the Baltimore Sun online archives, but Mr. Nitkowski pointed The Common Man to this reprint here, and here's a snippet:

Too Many Questions! Too Many Questions!

By The Common Man

This story, that Mike Leake is going to ask to be enrolled in a first-offender program that could lead to his record being expunged leads to so many questions:


If his record's expunged, does this mean we're all supposed to forget it and can never bring it up again?

What if we do?

If it's expunged, did it ever happen?

Will we all remember something that never happened?

What, then, does this say about the nature of memory, and the nature of fact, and the nature of existence itself?

Can any of us be winked out of existence, when our records and memories of us cease to be?

What exactly are we, if not the embryos of memories that will someday die?
We exist, dammit!  We exist!  We have thoughts and fears and dreams!  We are real!


Also, more practical questions:

What good does this do, is he ever going to need to have another job where this will come up?

Even if he does need another job, and has to go through a background check, what employer is not going to do a cursory Google search and not come up with this?

When his prospective employer finds out about said arrest and asks him about it, what can he possibly say? With all the info out there, it's not like he can say "It was all one big misunderstanding."

So what, exactly, is the point?

Oh, right, he's probably paying his lawyer by the hour.  Stupid lawyers. (Hi Bill!)