QUESTION: Why are there no ambidextrous baseball pitchers who "switch-pitch"?
ANSWER: For those of you who haven't wasted your life thinking about sports, this might not seem like a great question. But it is. Baseball is full of tricky hitters who can bat from either side of the plate, but no pitchers with a corresponding craft.Switch-hitting reflects a geometrical fact about pitching. A right-handed pitcher throws a curve ball that breaks right-to-left. If you are a right-handed batter, the ball may sail directly toward your face and then, as you reflexively leap backward onto your behind, the ball will dip and curve across the plate for a strike. But a switch-hitter, when facing a right-handed pitcher, will go stand on the other side of the plate and bat left-handed. For a lefty pitcher, he'll bat right-handed. Back and forth. This also gives the batter a slightly better angle on the ball as it travels to the plate - there's more of a third dimension to the movement of the ball across his field of vision.
So then: Why shouldn't an ambidextrous pitcher foil the switch-hitters by switch-pitching? Think of it: The batter plans to bat left-handed against what he thinks is a right-handed pitcher. The pitcher then switches the ball to his left hand. The batter jumps to the right side of the plate, etc. The pitcher jerks around and starts to throw right-handed, the batter leaps, etc.
Fact is, it's been done. Maybe not like that, exactly, but close enough.
According to baseball historian Lloyd Johnson, the feat has been accomplished at least five times. First, there was Tony Mullane of Louisville, who baffled Baltimore by switch-pitching in a game in 1882. In 1884, Larry Corcoran of Chicago was the only pitcher left on the staff in a long game, but he had a sore right arm. He pitched with his left and didn't do so well. In 1888, Louisville's Ice Box Chamberlain was leading Kansas City 18-6, so he pitched the 8th and 9th innings left-handed. Next came Paul Richards of Muskogee, in a minor league game in 1928. In the most recent case on record, Bert "Campy" Campaneris, later a famed shortstop, pitched both left-handed and right-handed for Daytona Beach in the Florida State League in 1962.
But these are basically one-time stunts. There's a practical problem: Pitching effectively, with major-league competence, is a complex skill. It's hard enough with one arm. With two, it is nearly impossible. Secondly, it would be hard to keep both arms "warm," as athletes put it. Let's say you pitched with your right arm against five consecutive right-handed batters. Your left arm wouldn't be loose enough to throw a fastball 90 miles an hour.
Finally, what about the glove? Baseball prohibits a player from having more than one glove on the field (the rule was passed a few years back after catcher Clay Dalrymple of the Philadelphia Phillies kept a fielder's glove Velcroed to the back of his belt, for making plays on runners sliding into home plate).
There is a Boston Red Sox pitcher named Greg Harris who is ambidextrous and has been vowing for years to switch-pitch. The rumor is, he even has a trick glove that can be twisted around to serve either the right or left hand. But Marty Springstead, Major League Baseball Supervisor of Umpires, says the glove probably wouldn't meet the exacting regulations of the rule book, even if it could catch flies. Which reminds us . . .
QUESTION: Why are flies attracted to dung?
ANSWER: A pile of poop is a fly's idea of a singles bar. The guys go to scope out the babes. The females are looking for a place to lay their eggs, and a perfect spot is a moist, malodorous meadow muffin. Flies simplify their lives greatly by meeting and mating in the same place that they raise their maggots.
Dung is also loaded with nutritious bacteria. Maggots love the stuff. The bacteria account for about half the weight of a typical cowpie (same with human feces), and give it the characteristic odor and coloration. Adult flies also are prone to drying out, so they often lick the dung for moisture. But, contrary to common belief, they don't eat it. That would be gross.
QUESTION: Why doesn't the ocean get more and more disgustingly salty as a result of whatever that process is that made it salty in the first place?
ANSWER: The ocean is salty because rivers erode the salt out of rocks and wash it into the sea. That's way oversimplified, but good enough for this crowd. So why doesn't the ocean get saltier and saltier over time? After all, ocean water keeps evaporating, raining back onto the continents, eroding some more, and so on.
In fact, the ocean has had just about the same level of saltiness for a billion years, according to University of Miami marine geologist Garrett Brass. It doesn't change much because of the various salt flats on the coasts of such hot places like the Persian Gulf. The tide rolls in, the Sun beats down on the shallows, the water evaporates, and soon all that is left is a thick crust of salt. The ocean is thus de-salted. There aren't many naturally occurring salt flats, but then there's not that much salt coming into the ocean via streams and rivers, either.
QUESTION: Why is there so much water on Earth to begin with?
ANSWER: Comets. They are dirty snowballs. When the Solar System formed, there were gobs of comets, which contain not only frozen water but also frozen carbon dioxide and frozen ammonia and stuff like that. The comets pummeled the planets, but only on Earth was it the right temperature to let water stick around as a liquid. Venus, nearer the Sun, for example, was so hot that the water evaporated into the atmosphere, and then sunlight broke it down into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen, and then the hydrogen escaped into space, because it does that, and the oxygen oxidized the rocks on the surface, which is probably why in the one photograph of Venus' surface taken by the Russians with an unmanned probe, it looks red. It's rusty.