I have a certain fascination with people who choose to become very good at obscure things – actually, the word is envy. I envy them. I always think of Zack Hample. Zack has decided to become the best in the world at catching baseballs. Was he masked up behind home plate, trying to catch sliders from Shohei Ohtani last season? No. No because he is not a player in the MLB. Instead Zack has mastered catching baseballs as a spectator, from the stands. He has a YouTube channel with 660,000 subscribers where he talks about tactics like where he stands, how he moves when a ball is in the air, and other topics no one else has even taken the time to consider. His output is clear, he’s collected 12,000 MLB Baseballs. Twelve-Thousand. He caught Alex Rodriguez’s 3,000th hit. He caught Mike Trout’s first home run. If you google “Baseball catching guy” Google will happily serve you a bunch of articles about Zack because there’s no one else doing this. These kinds of obsessions are what the Guinness Book of World Records was built on.
What kind of person does this? Who chooses something so random and inglorious to invest time and energy into?
That’s where the envy comes in. It would be very easy to make fun of Zack, a man with 12,000 baseballs sitting in his basement, and many do. But, he’s found a purpose and he’s good at it. He’s successful at something totally original. There’s something alluring to me about being the best at something, even something a bit ridiculous. There are people who work their entire lives to become the 5,376th best flute player, but Zack is number 1. With all the routineness and scale of life with 8.1 billion others, finalizing a true specialty seems to me to be a gift.
This mindset can be taken to the extreme. One of the most bizarre TikTok trends I’ve seen takes this premise and parodies it. They’ll show something completely nonsensical and offer the audience the ‘first viewing ever’ of that happening. An example might be taking a 1994 VHS copy of The Little Mermaid an completely submerging it in a tub of whipped cream – the caption being “you’re the first to ever see a 1994 VHS copy of The Little Mermaid in a tub of whipped cream.” I must’ve seen dozens of these, including the one below.
The comments play along, often adding to the joke by implying it wasn’t the first time – “Bro wasn’t at Tony’s housewarming in 2006.” – that kind of thing. While obviously parody, these are getting at a similar effect, a reach for some kind of uniqueness and specialty. Going where other’s haven’t, but also where others haven’t even thought to. Often, doing something new or to a new extreme is romanticized. When asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, mountain climber George Mallory famously said “because it’s there.” But, so is the tub of whipped cream, George. Is someone going for the cave diving depth record really all that different than what Zack Hample does? It seems both are trying to fill that void of wanting to distinguish themselves, even if it’s seemingly pointless. One surrounds itself in romantic auras, and the other steals baseballs from children at MLB games. They’re totally different in how we judge them, otherwise they’re the same in premise.
Bro wasn’t at Edmund’s in ’53
Adam Sandler and Brendan Fraser were doing a promotion for a movie on Variety about a year ago, and Brandon, underwhelmed with the questions he had been provided to ask Adam, took the liberty of rapid-fire answering them himself. Most of the questions as well as the answers were just that, underwhelming. The kind of “what was it like working with ______?” questions that involve no critical thinking to compose, nor to answer. There was an exception – not to the provided questions, those all sucked, but rather in how Brendan answered.
The Question was:
“Is it fun for you to play underdogs?”
Brendan answered the question by attacking the premise.
“He doesn’t play underdogs, he plays champions that are overlooked”
Adams response on set was similar to mine at home, “OOOOHHH”. I adore this concept, the overlooked champion. Not least because there really are overlooked champions all the time in all sorts of areas. You probably know some. The writer Michael Lewis has built a career out of highlighting just a few of these occasions where incredible innovators, clever thinkers, and athletes are overlooked for irrelevant reasons. I love a book like Moneyball because it highlights the opportunity that exists out there.
We live in a world that pitches itself as a perfect meritocracy, and even though everyone including children can see that it’s deeply flawed, it’s hard not to believe that if you’re not having measurable acclaim it’s because you’re not good enough. We’re a very self-critical species in that way, sometimes fairly, often not. But things like those goofy Adam Sandler movies, Michael Lewis books, and Zack Hample remind me that humans are flawed as assessing champions. We give too much credit where it’s not due and not enough when it is. We look at all the wrong things when understanding others, we don’t consider circumstances, we too quickly agree to groupthink, were riddled with confirmation bias, and so on. Our ‘meritocracy’ society is no more than these biases amplified. So when Adam Sandler plays a hockey player who is amazing at golf but completely overlooked, I think: hey, maybe I’m being overlooked too.
So — whether it’s because you’re overlooked for irrelevant reasons, or because popular society has decided your endeavor isn’t worth glorifying, I hope you keep at it. It’s cool to be a specialist, to know go where no one has gone in big or small ways, and to care about things others glance over. Our content delivery systems heavily encourage the conglomeration of ideas, I try to make my own exceptions to that when I can and I think you should too.
Colin