This Home Plate umpire is calling a wide strike zone for Ohio, and a narrow strike zone for Oregon He needs to be consistant

This Home Plate umpire is calling a wide strike zone for Ohio, and a narrow strike zone for Oregon He needs to be consistant

Haven't you ever seen a photo of Babe Ruth?

You could have also posted a picture of prince fielder, who currently leads the NL with 39 dingers and has about the same exact build as this lake oswego thunderball.

they won! 6-1.

Isn't there a better way to spice up this blog entry without a photo of a fat kid doesn't appear to be on the Lake Oswego team, and then pretending it's not just a grab for low laughs by tacking a completely irrelevant paragraph on the end there. The kid in that photo looks like he's in the midst of a moment of glory. Posting the photo for laughs here - because ha, ha, he's fat, see? - is snide and unnecessary, and considering the kid is probably eleven and wouldn't have the means to defend himself against a bunch of hipster journalists (and I use the term hipster as lovingly as possible) strikes a bullying tone. There may be an argument somewhere out there about kids these days, they're so fat because they just don't get up off the couch - but the argument is overplayed and not Mercury material - and this kid? Is an athlete. And he's a real person at a fragile age. Objectifying him like this is tacky and undeserved.

You can do better than this, Mercury.

As a former fat kid who played Little League, much like Reid Penney (the kid in the picture who is actually the star player for Lake Oswego's team, not just some random image I found online), I am offended that you are offended.

If you wanted fat jokes, I can give you fat jokes, but instead I made reference to how a kid's weight is very often a huge (no pun intended) advantage in Little League. I also made one weight joke, but it was at professional baseball pitcher David Wells' expense.

So there.

To see more of Reid in action: http://sports.yahoo.com/top/photo?slug=ac5a7c8b429d45c497c11b71919b9ecd.llws_oregon_massachusetts_baseball_pagp102&prov=ap

I was a former fat kid on a Little League team, and could hit the cover off the ball. (Isn't that a picture of him crushing a home run in a previous game?)

Oh, Prince Fielder is a good example. His father, Cecil, wasn't too shabby either. Frank Thomas is still going strong at 40, just passing 500 home runs. Boog Powell, Greg Luzinski, Tony Gwynn, and Kirby Puckett also didn't resemble emo boys.