Go Shorty!

Tim Collins has no business being in Major League Baseball.  Collins is listed between 5'5” and 5'7”.  He's the first Major League pitcher within three inches of my height since Mortimer “Stretch” McGillicuddy for the old Troy Haymakers in 1879.  

His whole life people must have chuckled at his dream.  I remember as a pocket-sized ten year old lamenting to my aunt that I would never get to be a professional athlete.  She said, completely seriously, that I could be a jockey.  That advice, in retrospect, was unhelpful (I'm way too fat to be a jockey now!), but it's probably similar to things Collins heard all his life.   

The remarkable thing about Collins is how exponentially more difficult it is for a guy his height to make it, as compared to a taller guy.  Remember how little effort Randy Johnson used to put into throwing the ball 100 miles and hour? It's all about the leverage that a 6'11” man with simian limbs gets as opposed to a pint-sized man with T-Rex arms like Collins or me.  

A few years back at my family reunion, I was talking to my cousin-in-law's nephew.  At the time he was on a basketball scholarship to a Division I school; the man is 7 feet tall.  He told me how he was walking around campus one day when the baseball coach approached him and offered him a spot as a pitcher on the team, without having seen him play; this guy had played baseball before, but it wasn't exactly his sport.  But he's a 7-footer, he has torque, and without much effort he has a 95 mile-an-hour fastball.  As easy as it is for my cousin-in-law's nephew to throw the ball 95, is how difficult it is for Tim Collins. 

And that's why I love him.  And kind of hate him too.  I was never going to be tall; it just wasn't in my genes.  My grandfather was 5'4”; his brother was 5'7”.  They called him “The Big Guy” (not a joke, and not sarcastically).  While both my brothers, who hover around 6',inherited traits from my mom's side of the family, I'm quite clearly a Cairney.  And long ago (about two weeks ago to be precise) I accepted that.  I'm a short man, no woman over 5'8” will ever be interested in me, I'll someday marry a girl shorter than me, and we'll have tiny children.  Natural selection is trying to get rid of me, I'm fine with that. 

I also accepted long ago that a career in pro sports was never in the cards.  But Tim Collins bluffed his way there.  David, slinging the ball at Goliath, and striking him out six times every nine innings.  If he's not the hero of every undersized boy in America, he ought to be.