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Rotisserie chicken devours rotisserie baseball

Charles HartleyThe other night I came home from a long day being Sammy Sportface. My wife told me she left me for dinner a full-bodied rotisserie chicken.

A question hit me: Why do they call it rotisserie chicken? It sounds like chicken for Minor League baseball players, those who aren't good enough to make it to the pros. The pros eat T-Bone steak and get all the A1 Sauce they want. The Minor Leaguers don't get A1 sauce for their chicken.

Money devours everyone.

For decades I have been puzzled about the meaning of the word rotisserie. It conjures images of flowers. I thought: A rotisserie chicken sounds like a petunia chicken. This was senseless. Many things don't make sense. Sammy Sportface is a living example.

Here's one theory for us to weigh: Maybe petunia seeds spawn both flowers and chickens. Given nature's history dating back hundreds of millions of years, this is plausible. Surely you know that a caterpillar, unless it gets stepped on while a caterpillar, gets busy with metamorphosis and becomes a butterfly.

Of all of life's mysteries, there is none greater than how and why a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. It would be reasonable for a caterpillar to transmogrify into a snake because they are both slithery and wet. This would be natural evolution at work. But a caterpillar turning into a butterfly is like a poodle plunging into metamorphosis and becoming a seagull.

A rotisserie chicken looks like any other chicken. Sporting legs and a plump abdomen, it reminds you of Thanksgiving when you stare at the full body of a turkey. But it's smaller. If there are rotisserie turkeys, Instagram me a color photo. I'll share it with my family next Thanksgiving.

While eating the flowery chicken, I thought of how confusing life is. This is prime example: Years ago I heard of something called rotisserie baseball. The name turned me off. Baseball is baseball and calling it something else bastardized America's game.

I have never viewed myself as a pansy. Rather, I fancy myself an All-Pro NFL tight end - picture Rob Gronkowski - who transitions into sports blogging ignominiously. Rotisserie baseball sounds bush league. Even now I don't know what it is.

My suspicion is it's a kissing cousin of fantasy football. Both are stale creamed corn laced with fungus.

Sammy Sportface doesn't live in the world of fantasy. He believes only one thing is true: By running through the streets of Philadelphia at 4 a.m, after drinking a glass of raw eggs, Rocky Balboa became the heavyweight champion of the world.

What's real is real.

Fantasy is for fatuous flamingoes. Rotisserie baseball is a rotten rhododendron.

We all need to deal with the truth, not wish for what could be. Like Halfway Hilarity, the creation of rotisserie baseball and fantasy football have turned out to be bad ideas that should be heaved onto the scrap heap of American failures.

Everything you do has an opportunity cost. You can learn more about this concept in a college economics class. In that same class you would learn that rotisserie baseball has a flawed business model, which is that it is stupid. Making matters worse, it has a public relations problem: Sammy Sportface perceives it to be a low-rent chicken baseball league. When you confuse the public, especially Sammy, your business is in trouble.

Rotisserie baseball suffers from the same problem.

"The word rotisserie should be struck from the English language," said Sammy Sportface this morning during his weekly call with his rotisserie league pals. "Just like the name Sammy Sportface, rotisserie doesn't mean anything. It doesn't resonate. It has to go. Sammy says so."

- Charles Hartley

Charles Hartley is a freelance writer who has had more than 1,000 articles published in a wide range of media outlets focused on humor, sports, business, technology and consumers. He has earned master's degrees in journalism and business administration and a bachelor's degree in English and communications.

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