Hey, I can't pitch like Satchel Paige. Hell, I can't even pitch like Jimmy Page. But I'll tell you one thing. The Macon Turdburglars are the worst team on earth. I saw them "play" the Grand Junction Shuttlecocks last night and it was a spectacle that made me ashamed to be a man, let alone a Maconite.

Minor league baseball has often been reviled in popular culture, long considered a playground for the uncoordinated, the home of stumbling, oafish, slow-witted ballplayers of questionable athletic talent who are cursed with an unfounded determination. And it's true: you've come to the wrong place if you want to see slick-fielding supermen who sometimes turn double plays and hardly ever step out of their own jock straps when swinging for a home run. But minor league baseball has always held a unique charm for its fans: It's really cheap. Like sneaking generic cookies into the second-run theater cheap. Like finishing off a warm beer that somebody left sitting on top of the trashcan cheap. So penny-clenching baseball fans have come to expect a lower level of play in exchange for the cut-rate admissions they're playing, and they accept it. Up to a point. Well beyond that point lie the Macon Turdburglars, who are so stupefyingly inept that attending one of their games should count as community service in the eyes of the court.

The game I attended last night was about par for the season. In the third inning,Manyon Durbing, the shortstop for the Shuttlecocks, hit a grounder into the outfield. A routine single, should they have been playing the Little Oak Oakies or the Sacramento Rehab Saints. It ended up being an inside-the-park homerun, because the TB's left fielder, J.B. Frisco, couldn't find the ball. I'm serious, it rolled out there and Frisco lost sight of it when he was distracted by a plane flying overhead, and then it was just gone. Durbing kept running around the bases, thinking he might be able to score some extra runs all by himself. This got the rest of the team excited and guys came pouring out of the dugout and ran around the bases behind Durbing, in case there was some kind of scoring loophole involved in losing the ball in fair territory.

The ump stopped Manyon after his third time around because he was afraid the kid would have a heat stroke. By that time this happened, the Shuttlecocks had scored 54 runs on the ground ball and Frisco still hadn't found it. He wandered around the outfield for a while with his hands on his hips, looking at the ground kind of funny, and had peeked in his glove in case it had rolled up in there on a lark. He squatted down and checked the ground for gopher holes, and glanced up into the sky a few times. After a while he jogged off into the dugout to take a leak, then came back and looked for the ball some more. After about a half an hour the ump declared it a ghost ball and the section of shallow left field between second and third was roped off and blessed by a man carrying a snake.

After a call from the official scorer to a radio call-in show, Durbing's hit was ruled a ducentasedecle, the first ever 216 base hit in the history of professional baseball.The Shuttlecocks ended up winning the game 53-1, since they had a run taken away for gloating in the eighth inning. Macon's lone run was scored by right fielder Scooter Busch, who was hit by a pitch on his way to the on-deck circle. He was hit by three more pitches while on the basepaths, and though the Turdburglars were grateful for the run, they suspected that some of the pitches may not have been unintentional.

Aficionados of minor league baseball history (and you know who you are, Ted and Virgil) often point to the Laughlin Cookie Eaters as the worst team in Minor League history. Direct comparisons are moot, since the Cookie Eaters went the way of the dodo long ago, but I have little doubt that should they ever have gone toe-to-toe with the Macon Turdburglars, the TBs would have taught them a hard lesson about what it really means to suck. And if I hadn't been banned from the stadium for life after hitting the TB's mascot with a roll of quarters, I'd be down there demanding my 85 cents back right now.

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