This Slumber Party is Adjourned

Please forgive the delay in getting to this topic, because we’ve been meaning to weight in on it for days, ever since it surfaced as a national story that has sparked debate and controversy all across the landscape of Planet Sport.

And no, we are not alluding to the insensitive remarks recently spewed by radio host Don Imus.

The topic we want to talk about is the advertisement that features Blue Jays’ DH Frank Thomas getting into a pillow fight with two young boys.

In the original version of the ad, Big Frank walks into the bedroom of two boys who are supposed to be his sons. Upon spotting the two youths standing on the bed clubbing away at one another with pillows, Thomas informs them that they’re supposed to be in bed, which prompts the larger of the two to take a retaliatory swing at Frank with his pillow.

After the pillow hits him with a dull thud and clearly doesn’t even cause him to flinch, The Big Hurt responds, “Oh yeah?”, grabbing the pillow from the boy’s hand and blasting him in the chest with it, sending him soaring off the bed onto the floor as feathers fly everywhere.

We’re not sure, but we think this is meant to be an analogy for Frank Thomas’ prodigious home run power – i.e., if he can launch a kid four feet, just think how far he can hit a baseball. (Admittedly not the most hilarious premise, but it’s an entertaining 30 seconds nonetheless.)

However, authorities from the Canadian Tightwad Association for the De-interestingification of Television have deemed that the original ad sent the wrong message, and in the revised version (which we cannot find online but frankly would prefer not to watch anyways), Frank still bludgeons the child with the pillow but he doesn’t go flying off the bed.

And this updated message makes perfect sense – namely, that it’s okay for 6-5, 275-pound men to hit kids with pillows as hard as they possibly can as a means of getting them to go to sleep, so long as the attack does not knock the child off the bed. If it drills him in the head, giving him a brutal headache, that's fine. Just keep him on the bed.

We’re actually in the process of putting the finishing touches on our own personal remix of the ad in the OCC editing chamber. In the newest version, the sheer force of Frank Thomas’ pillow swing decapitates the child and sends his severed head soaring out the window, only to land 410 feet later on the far side of the backyard fence.

In our esteemed opinion, this version is far more baseball appropriate.