Legend has it that Gregory’s mother made a mean doughnut with some of her son’s spices. The only problem was the middle of the doughnuts didn’t always cook all the way through. Mrs. Gregory filled the center with walnuts or hazelnuts to compensate, but one day her son – perhaps in a moment of anti-walnut rage – took a pepper tin and punched it through the center. Thus the doughnut hole came to be.

Really though, Captain Gregory was only carrying out the will of thermodynamics when he got rid of that gooey center once and for all. See, it wasn’t Mrs. Gregory’s fault that she couldn’t get the center of her olykoeks to cook as fast as the rest. It has to do with the very nature of heat.

 “The one thing you can count on in life is that there is a first baseman and a shortstop and a catcher, and they are right where they were last month… Baseball positions are anchors in a shifting world, and to have given the most indefinite names to the personnel at these most dependable positions is to have made brilliant use of comic irony” – Frank Deford, “Spring Has Sprung”. Sports illustrated. April 10, 1978

Good comedy and good baseball are high art. And to evoke both beautifully in the same sentence is almost too much for me to bear. The above quote is from an excellent anthology called simply Great Baseball Writing. It’s obviously about the Abbott & Costello skit “Who’s On First.”