I was very excited to get my copy of Ben Reiter’s Astroball, which chronicles the Astros rise from the being the worst team baseball to the best. After all, Reiter was the brain child behind the prophetic June 13, 2014 Sports Illustrated cover featuring the image of then-rookie George Springer and proclaiming “YOUR 2017 WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS”. The previous three seasons, the Astros become the only team in MLB history to lose over 100 games seemed ludicrous. The Astros, of course, won the 2017 World Series with Springer honored as the series MVP.

I eagerly opened up the book and starred with amazement, disbelief, and shock at the epigraph.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
– H. P. Lovecraft, “Call of Cthulhu”

Yes, THAT Lovecraft. The one whose seminal works inform much of modern horror and science fiction.

That certainly was far from the first book that I’ve read that offered an HPL quote but certainly my first such occurrence in a baseball history.

Weird stuff.

Weird Tales – February 1928 with the first publication of “The Call of Cthulhu” by H. P. Lovecraft

The second quote was almost as surpring.

“A mix isn’t done ‘til I feel it in my gut.”
– Dr. Dre

Both quotes are apropos to the subject.

Astroball definitely moves to the top of to be read pile.