Empyreal Environs

EE: So, Lance, what we try and do with the weekly Friday columns is bring to the audience topics that may interest them, such as developments in engineering, medicine, or other technologies, and couch it in terms of a major league baseball player’s experience. With your degree in engineering from Rice, we think you would be ideal to replace Dave.

Berkman: Your timing on this is outstanding. While I was on the disabled list, I started on a project to redesign Minute Maid Park’s monstrosity in center field, Tal’s Hill.

EE: That’s an idea whose time has come.

Berkman: You may have seen me make some incredible plays on that incline when I played center, but I tell you, it totally compromised the health of my knees. In fact, I believe that hill is the reason I was put on the DL.

EE: I thought it was because you were playing flag football in the offseason?

Berkman: That may have also been a contributing factor, but the primary cause is the stress placed on my body from having to navigate that difficult terrain.

EE: I could definitely see this Tal’s Hill thing being a column.

Berkman: A column? Like, one single post? No way. This would be at least a 12-week project.

EE: We like to be exhaustive, but 12 weeks on a single topic seems like overkill.

Berkman: And that 12-week estimate, that’s an overly optimistic timeframe, frankly. I could have easily said 20 weeks. So, here’s how I would map it out: the first 5 weeks would cover demolishing the current hill, the next 5 would be presenting the 5 different combinations of clay, dirt, and turf I have devised, the next 5 would be the installation of the selected field stratum, and finally, a 5-week evaluation of the new field performance.

EE: I need to interject here that our readers expect a certain depth as well as breadth in the Friday columns. For example, Dave would write about knee biomechanics one week and the entropic end of existence as we know it the next.

Berkman: This always happened to us engineers. We’re forced to come up with a solution to a pressing problem and not given the proper time and resources to successfully execute it. There’s just one reason why I’d rather be playing in the bigs than actually putting my degree to use. It would just be wasted on unaware project managers. Or content editors, in this case.

EE: You also have $85M other reasons that you signed for just this past March.

Berkman: There’s no denying that. Anyway, I’d be interested as long as I can fully document the Tal’s Hill project.

EE: I’ll run this past the other staff members. Thanks for your time, Lance.

Every Friday, Dave McCarty used to join us to discuss a topic of interest to him and probably no one else but the author of this site. Since he was designated for assignment recently and will mostly like retire, EE is in the process of finding a replacement. Help....