“Slog to Rigor Mortis” is a reference to comments made by Effectively Wild co-host Sam Miller in Episode 551. The comments stemmed from a discussion Sam, Ben, and Zachary Levine were having about the current structure of the MLB playoffs and the inherent unpredictability in the system. Zachary was frustrated that the best teams had been eliminated so quickly and offered a proposal for how MLB could ensure that the World Series Champion each year was one of the top four regular season teams.
Sam disagreed that the point of the playoffs, or baseball as a whole, was to decide the best team at the end of the season. He offered the following thoughts:
The point of this entire enterprise is to entertain us with baseball games. The point of it is not to decide who is the best team. The illusion that that is what we’re doing has long been a powerful draw to sports. But it is ultimately not the point. There is no scenario where the universe will care or remember who the best team was out of this collection of collections. It only matters inasmuch as we create this illusion that it matters. If you lose even the illusion, then it becomes problematic. But the point is not to have the illusion; the point is to entertain people and make them forget that we are all dying right in front of each other — that this is just this horrible, rotten slog to rigor mortis, that we are going to lose everybody we know, that we are going to lose everything we have and the only way to distract ourselves is by separating our day into distractions.
The quote was selected for use on Effectively Wild t-shirts and mugs available in the Banished to the Pen Team Shop.
Other references[]
Passing references to baseball as a distraction from our own mortality crop up not infrequently on the show from the co-hosts as well as from listeners/emailers.
- In response to Ian Kinsler striking out on a 4-2 count, as discussed in Episode 1213, Ben Lindbergh wrote an article about plate appearances which continued after the fourth ball. In the article, he notes, "Every four-ball non-walk reminds us that the sports we watch are based on arbitrary rules concocted by fallible humans, which in turn forces us to confront the fact that we’re all desperately attempting to distract ourselves from the knowledge that life is a brief and insignificant spiral down the drain."