Wordplay

 And now, on the cusp of August, we interrupt the long slog of the baseball season for some ... fun.

Ever heard of Jason Benetti?

He's the play-by-play voice of the Detroit Tigers, and like everyone this time of year he and the Tigers are desperate for something, anything, to break up the monotony. This is especially true if you're the Tigers, who are 52-57 and 14 games out of first in the AL Central. In other words, they're not going anywhere, especially after offloading their ace pitcher Jack Flaherty at the trade deadline yesterday.

And so ...

What to do, what do.

I know! Let's give Jason a bunch of random words and see if he can get them all into his broadcast!

Which is just what the Tigers did yesterday. 

The words they gave him, according to the website Awful Announcing, included "funkytown", "yellowtail", "Fortnite", "pineapples" and "perpendicular."

God bless the man, he managed to use all of them. And apparently made it sound legit.

Reminds me of all the times my former sister-in-law and her best friend, both of whom were schoolteachers, used to pick a word for me to slip into my column for the next day. Most of the time I remembered to do it; a lot of times, miraculously, I made it sound legit. But Benetti and the Tigers have taken that several stratospheres beyond.

I salute them. Go, you perpendicular pineapples, you.