Ole Miss Phenom Shortstop Out For Season After Breaking Foot In Freak Ping Pong Accident

Jared Borislow8 years ago

College baseball is a milquetoast sport that I think isn’t worth watching before tournament time. Outside of Ole Miss home games, that is. Only those rowdy Rebels can make something as boring and borderline meaningless as college baseball worth watching, and only beer showers could be the vehicle.

From beer showers to hitting the showers (or, as Dave Ruff put it, “Hotty Toddy Check Out This Dumbass”), Ole Miss shortstop Grae Kessinger won’t be suiting up for the Rebels the rest of the season because of his lackluster skills at a far more interesting and intense sport than baseball: ping pong.

This is a decently significant loss for the Rebs. Kessinger was a high school All-American whose grandfather is hailed by some as “one of the most outstanding fielding shortstops in the history of the sport.” Kessinger’s batting average was a dogshit .175 through 154 at bats before he got crossed over on the table tennis court, but he’s said to be an impeccable defender (offense wins games, defense wins championships, being good at only one makes you a sub-par baseball player) whose loss could hurt the Rebs.

As the consensus second best ping pong player in the office (before I traded in my paddle skills late last year for the Golden Tee Golf trackball), I have some thoughts on this injury: dude’s a ping pong scrub. If you have to move your feet enough while ponging to the extent that breaking your foot becomes possible, you aren’t very good at table tennis (or “The Lord’s Sport” as it’s become known). If you know what you’re doing, you can stand with your feet firmly planted and still win a game of ping pong handily as your perfectly-placed shots cause your opponent to frantically scramble around the room like mail room Charlie Kelly manically trying to figure out mail conspiracies. Your ping pong goal should be to have your play be indistinguishable from that of the wall that’s formed by folding a ping pong table in half.

If you can’t take the heat, put down the paddle..

Image via YouTube