Well, this started by looking for what defines a dinosaur, because I can never remember how we separate those from other creatures who lived at their time, but I typoed so let’s talk about what defies them.
Carl Everett.
Carl Everett defies dinosaurs.
Look. There are a lot of people who don’t believe in dinosaurs out there. I bet if you gave me six minutes, a pen, and access to the active president in 2018, we could get tweets about dinosaurs not existing. I’m sure plenty of other baseball players don’t believe in dinosaurs. But who went so far as to defy them? Carl Everett did. The quote, from Sports Illustrated in 2000:
“God created the sun, the stars, the heavens and the earth, and then made Adam and Eve,” Everett said last Friday, before the Red Sox lost two of three in Atlanta. “The Bible never says anything about dinosaurs. You can’t say there were dinosaurs when you never saw them. Someone actually saw Adam and Eve. No one ever saw a Tyrannosaurus rex.”
The logic is strong. Irrefutable, some might argue. Not me, but some! Also, one paragraph earlier Carl Everett had said “You can run on (Atlanta’s starting pitchers) all day,” which is probably why Tom Verducci included that bit about the Red Sox losing the series. Verducci was probably pissed because Everett didn’t believe in dinosaurs. Maybe big-j journos haven’t been libs this whole time. Maybe they’ve just been trying to defend the honor of our storied giants (and smaller animals).
2000 was a big Red Sox season for me. I was five, Nomar Garciaparra wore number five, my mom was letting me play computer games so my brother taught me how to play Hardball 5 and had me play as the Red Sox, where after experiencing Tim Wakefield I made him show me how to give all Red Sox pitchers a knuckleball (this led to me becoming a Red Sox fan and later a Red Sox sympathizer, which ultimately led to the Joe Kelly facet of this blog, so thank Nomar and my brother and Tim Wakefield and American studio MindSpan for that). Also, my brothers and my dad had to sit me down and tell me that one of my favorite team’s players was denying (and defying) the existence of dinosaurs. I think I handled it pretty well. I really liked to pretend I was a dinosaur, at the time, so I had a pretty clear angle for recourse against old Carl if I ever saw him on the street. I, pretending I was an Ornithomimus because those were the most humanoid, would simply steal and eat his eggs.
