Major League

In Baseball, Americans have a concept of a Starting Rotation, which is to say that [leaning rather heavily on Wikipedia for this]a starting pitcher in baseball usually rests three or four days after pitching a game, before pitching another (Baseball teams can play three or four games on consecutive days). Therefore, most professional baseball teams have four or five starting pitchers on their rosters. These pitchers, and the sequence in which they pitch, is known as the rotation. In modern baseball, a five-man rotation is most common.

And I’ve always applied this idea of a set starting rotation in my mind when it comes to the weeknight Taps staff.

So before what happened, happened, my starting rotation was π on a Monday [as you no doubt know, π is the mathematical symbol for Pi which is at once a mathematical constant and both an irrational and transcendental number and therefore of central importance to everything, even though you can’t see it! – I have to say, I’m rather pleased with that, and have no idea where it came from as I’m mainly completely innumerate], Deon on a Tuesday, Jade on a Wednesday and then a mixture of people on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

And I was happy with that starting rotation. It threw real heat. Each of the starters brought something unique to their respective evenings.

And all was well in the garden of The Taps.

Settled and understood.

Content.

And then Jade went and got herself a proper job (which we were all happy for her about), but we were able to go straight to the Bullpen (which is the area where relief pitchers warm up before entering the game) and we were able to call on the big guns – and in came Gareth to take over the Wednesday.

Sure it was different, but it was still all cool.

I adjusted. I settled down.

I was once more content

π Mondays, Deon Tuesdays, Gareth Wednesday.

And then into the garden of the The Taps came a snake, and...well we all know how that story ends.

And so the starting rotation was shuffled once more, we went into the Bullpen and for a while the Mondays and Wednesdays were covered on an ad hoc basis by the Bullpen, until eventually Chelsie was drafted in and Gareth went back into the regular starting rotation such that we had:

Gareth Monday, Deon Tuesday (oh, the anchor which is Deon, our pillar of consistency throughout), Gareth Wednesday.

And once again we settled down.

Now, I write all of this because yesterday Charlie worked the Monday night (yes, that’s right. All of that.  It was interesting, don’t complain)

And yesterday was notable for two things, first that we spent half the evening listening to famous film scores (really loudly) – The Magnificent Seven, The Big Country, Star Wars, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather etc etc.

And second that we invented a brand new game.

Basically the aim of the game is to design a scene and then from that scene extrapolate a movie idea.

And the way it works is by picking three people, one prop and then a single line of Direction for them to improvise.

So for example:

Charlie starts: Edward Norton:

Richard: Christian Bale

[At this point you try and think about what you can do with these two guys. They’re both tremendous high powered actors who can chew scenery with the best of them, but who do you throw in to add in to create an interesting story/drama? You could throw in another high powered actor, but then what do you have? Three blokes in a room and what? A bank heists or something? Ok, you could do that, but it’s frankly boring].

Charlie: Jason Bateman – now this makes things interesting.  Jason Bateman’s an everyman and clearly no match in charisma for the other two, so you start to think about the prop and what’s going on.

Richard: A phone

Direction: Bateman is a hostage who slowly plays Bale and Norton off against one another.

That’s it.

Now, no it’s not the Godfather or anything – or super imaginative and clever, but it’s not a horrendous idea.

And that’s basically how the game works. The point being to actively try to paint yourself into difficult positions (by picking for, instance, implausible combinations for the first two actors, e.g. Denzel Washington and Martin Freeman) so that you have to then think imaginatively about how, with which third actor, and with which prop and direction, you can come up with something at least reasonably plausible and workable.

Anyway, that’s what we did last night.