YOUTUBE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND:

Catching up with the Baseball Boogie (Jim Caple, 5/20/09, ESPN)

Orel Hershiser broke Don Drysdale's scoreless innings streak record in 1988, and he did so in dramatic fashion by throwing 10 scoreless innings in his final start of the season. Could I find any of his 59 scoreless innings on YouTube? No. Hershiser won three games (and saved another the day after pitching seven innings) in the 1988 postseason, threw two complete-game victories in that World Series and was on the mound to retire the final batter in the Game 5 clincher. Could I find those games on YouTube? No. He won 204 games in his career, pitched in six postseasons and won a Cy Young award. Could I find any of that on YouTube? No.

But his singing and dancing performance in the 1986 Dodgers' tragically humiliating "Baseball Boogie"? Oh, yes. That's on YouTube, out there for everyone in the world to pull up, view, snicker at, ridicule, share, and then do what everyone else has done (all of them certain they are the only one to come up with the idea): show it to Hershiser as a painful reminder of just how awesome the '80s were.

"Great. Thanks a lot," Hershiser said when I told him I was writing about the video. "Why would you want to do that me? ... Let's not promote this video. This could be a nice thing. I'm sitting in Yankee Stadium, getting ready for a game and you're bringing that up?"