Ask any genuine baseball man: you can’t win unless you’re strong up the middle. Without a decent catcher, a solid double-play combination, and a hotshot centerfielder, you may as well pack up the Cracker Jacks and hand out the forfeits, because you ain’t going noplace. It’s like when I was managing the Burlingame Dixies back in the old Four-I League – we had this real tall kid at short, couldn’ta been older than 16, but six-six if he was an inch. I tell you, that kid snatched up the ground balls like they were candy at a parade. It was like having the Great Wall of China between second and third, only smaller and less Asian. Nothing got past this kid.

Come to think of it, he was a lot like this Boston Acoustics CRC 2-Way Center Channel Speaker. With a 1-inch Kortec tweeter and dual active/passive 4-1/2 inch mid/bass drivers, it’s voiced to match all other CR speakers. It makes your home theatre as solid up the middle as my old Dixies squad – until the kid bumped his head getting onto the tour bus right before the last game of the season, against the Ferris City Mudworms. Knocked him clean out. We thought we were gonna have to forfeit.

But then my bench coach, old Gut Tolliver, noticed something funny in the Four-I League bylaws: by default, each team's mascot is officially on the playing roster as long as he remains in costume. Old Gut said it had something to do with travel costs back in the day – rostered players used to get cheap tickets on Greyhound. So we sent our mascot, General Stoneball, out to shortstop and the ump yelled “play ball”. Of course, the General kept tripping over his sword, and losing track of pop flies – no peripheral vision in that big costume head, you see. The Mudworms won the pennant, and the Dixies’ owner fired me the next day. If only that kid had been as durable as the sturdy, internally-braced cabinet of the Boston Acoustics CRC 2-Way Center Channel Speaker.

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