14 Oct Joey bats, Joey flips

Carson Cistull of Fangraphs reaches back to to Homer for the most erudite commentary on Bautista’s epic blast:

Because Homer provides little in the way of psychological commentary and also because Achilles isn’t a real person, it’s hard to know precisely how the latter feels during Book XXI of the Iliad while avenging the death of Patroclus by filling the River Scamander with so many Trojan dead that the river itself is compelled to assume human form and reprimand the hero, as follows:

“Achilles… My fair waters are now filled with corpses, nor can I find any channel by which I may pour myself into the sea for I am choked with dead, and yet you go on mercilessly slaying. I am in despair… trouble me no further.”

As I say, it’s difficult to understand precisely what sort of redemptive pleasure Achilles experiences during that episode — but also less difficult, now, for those of us who have witnessed Jose Bautista (first) homering and (then) hurling his bat into whatever lays beyond the eternal mise en scene.

Brilliant! Homer on homer, you might say. What a crazy game. What a magnificent moment.