Let Me Fire The Phillie Phanatic's Hot Dog Cannon

a simple request

Hello and welcome to another baseball season. I love baseball season. I love baseball itself, honestly. I love the idea of a sport where one guy whips a ball as hard as he can and then another guy tries to mash the hell out of it with a big stick and then a bunch of other guys have to run around and chase it. There’s something so pure about that. Life can be really complicated sometimes. You have bills to pay and health issues to navigate and various conflicts that require various compromises that result in various levels of discomfort. It’s nice to know baseball is still out there keeping things simple. Throw ball, smash ball, chase ball. It’s kind of beautiful, really.

Also, there are hot dogs. Hot dogs are a very important part of baseball. You go to a game, you get a hot dog, you watch some throwing and mashing and running. Everyone around you has a hot dog, too. Literally thousands of people just sitting there hammering hot dogs outside on a summer day. There are not many other situations in life where this happens, where you and 40,000 people get together in one building to eat hot dogs together. This is also beautiful in a way.

My favorite baseball team, the Philadelphia Phillies, has found a way to make all of this even more special. Their mascot, the Phillie Phanatic, a Muppet-adjacent fuzzy green alien who has a mischievous personality and does not wear pants, has a hot dog cannon. It is a cannon that is shaped like a hot dog and shoots fully cooked hot dogs at a high rate of speed. It is mounted to the back of some sort of John Deere landscaping vehicle. The Phanatic rides around on the back of this vehicle and launches hot dogs into the crowd between innings. It is my favorite thing in the whole entire world.

I want to fire the hot dog cannon so bad.

Let me fire the hot dog cannon.

Let me fire the hot dog cannon.

Will it help if I make a case? Will it help if I make a list of three reasons typed out in bold with an explanation under each heading? Will that convince whoever is in charge of the hot dog cannon — I’m assuming the Phanatic??? — to let me fire it? Because I can do that. Here, look…

1. I really want to

It is hard to put into words how much I want to fire this hot dog cannon. I want to push the button and send a hot dog hurtling into the sky. I want to rapid-fire like six of them the way the fireworks people do when they’re popping off the big finale. (DOOF DOOF DOOFDOOFDOOF DOOF.) I want to lock eyes with someone in the crowd and see that they want me to send a hot dog flying through the air toward them and then I want to do that thing where I point one finger at them as an “I got you, buddy” and then I want to aim the hot dog cannon toward them and then and shoot one straight into their hands. Imagine how satisfying that would feel. Imagine how powerful it would feel. Waves of electricity flooding your veins like a god who has just harnessed the power of lightning. But instead of lightning, it’s hot dogs. The god of hot dogs.

I want to be the god of hot dogs.

2. I would be good at it

There is no doubt in my mind. You just have to push a button. I am incredible at pushing buttons. Most of my life is pushing buttons. I am disabled — C4 spinal cord injury, power wheelchair, the whole deal — and I push buttons all day. I push buttons on my chair. I push buttons on my computer. I push buttons on the minivan I drive with a joystick and a touchscreen. Reasonable arguments can be made that no one is more qualified than I am to push the button that operates the hot dog cannon.

I understand there could be some complications here. I’m not sure my chair could get onto the hot dog cannon vehicle. I don’t know what kind of accessibility issues we’re looking at. But I do know that it has to be possible somehow. Maybe we can mount the hot dog cannon to my chair. Maybe I can hold a very long stick and push the button with that. Maybe we can set up a series of elaborate levers and pulleys where I push one button and it triggers a Rube Goldberg apparatus that ends with another button getting pushed later. People, we invented a cannon that shoots hot dogs. We can figure out anything if we put our minds to it.

3. They let Jayson Stark use the hot dog cannon

This is true. He wrote a whole article about it a while ago. I bring this part up for a few reasons:

• There is precedent here

• I can write an article about it if it will help grease the wheels

• No offense to Jayson Stark, who is a wonderful baseball writer and probably a nice guy, but why the hell is he allowed to fire the hot dog cannon if I’m not?

Come on.

Think about it.

Think about letting me fire the hot dog cannon.

Thank you.