Surely, you’ve heard and used the word “analogy” many times before, but John Kruk has now made everyone think of it a little differently.
Sunday afternoon, Trea Turner was at the plate for the Philadelphia Phillies against righty starter Chase Burns during their 3-1 win over the Cincinnati Reds. Naturally, Kruk was talking about Kyle Schwarber’s newfound success against left-handed pitchers during the at-bat.
“Schwarber was asking about hitting off lefties that throw hard, forget who told me this, but he said, ‘the only way you can go up there is you got to be prepared to die.’ Yep,” Kruk told play-by-play voice Tom McCarthy and co-analyst Cole Hamels. “You gotta be prepared to die, wow. Not that we condone death on the baseball field, but…just an analogy.”
“You know what the first four letters of analogy are though,” Kruk said to the tune of chuckles from the booth. “Shouldn’t have said that.”
Kruk knows a thing or two about staring death in the face while trying to hit off a tough lefty, see his at-bat against Randy Johnson in the 1993 All-Star Game. We don’t know, however, what Kruk knows about the first four letters of the word analogy, with the beloved Phillies analyst ending the conversation there.
The best thing about this clip is the fact that it has nothing to do with the at-bat. Kruk went from a Turner-Burns at-bat, to a Schwarber story, to an analogy, to anal, all on his own. And nobody who is used to hearing Kruk in the Phillies broadcast booth was surprised by any of it.