If a tree falls in the forest...

Here's a weird one. It's from Rob Neyer, who I think is an excellent baseball writer, going a little abstract on us in the intro of a column that we can't read without Insider:

I want to see [pre-1960s baseball games] in color, though. And I want to see what really happened, as opposed to what somebody later wrote that somebody told him happened. Which is why I sometimes fantasize about traveling backward in time. You want to stop World War II before it starts, or save your grandfather from a grisly death that would cancel your very existence?

Stop right there. If your grandfather had died before procreating, thereby nullifying your existence, neither would he be a grandfather, nor would you be, well, alive. So even if we had time travel capabilities, you would not be able to utilize said time travel by virtue of not existing. Unless we're talking about the existence of alternate universes and the ability to bridge them in addition to traveling through time...

Ugh, this is too much so early in the day. But I think it might be a great plot for Back to the Future IV: Marty dies when Doc goes back to 1938 to watch Dizzy Dean pitch in person and misses a foul ball that nails Marty's grandpa, who's sitting behind Doc, and kills him. When Doc returns to the present, he finds that he has a different assistant, a hot young dame, and abandons his immediate plan to go back and save Marty's grandpa and instead spends the rest of his days watching old timey baseball with Rob Neyer.





Now that's a movie!