Cub manager Lee Elia‘s 1983 tirade is one of my favorite moments in baseball history. After an early season blowout where the day-baseball fans of Wrigley Field went off on the team, Elia went off on them. Every reporter in Chicago caught the rant on tape, and it was so blistering that it became public. In those days, all we had was cassette-to-cassette copying, so its proliferation was relatively underground until YouTube was invented.
Now there are video tributes that play along with the audio, but NuttySportsVideos.com has kicked it up many notches when they put Lee Elia’s words to a robot voice. Now his admonishments about people not working or being stupid sound much more critical and disapproving coming from a mechanical manager with a computer for a brain. When he says “print it” to the reporters of the future, will they know what he means? Listening to the robot become emotional about the Dodgers and the other teams brought to mind Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.”
Asimov was a genius. Lee Elia’s words sound a lot more threatening coming from a robot (but it’s still hilarious).
