RoboCop Throws Out The First Pitch At A Detroit Tigers Game
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Yesterday was officially RoboCop Day in the Motor City. If you’re going to have a celebration of anything, that’s a pretty worthwhile reason to party, though I doubt people got the day off work. The date marked the unveiling of a crowdfunded statue of Detroit’s favorite son—okay, that’s probably not entirely true, Mo Town has its share of notable celebrities, entrepreneurs, and politicians. And sure, it’s pretty rad to have a giant bronze statue of the cybernetic crime fighter decorate your town, but the city also commemorated the day by having that part-machine/part-man himself throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a Detroit Tigers baseball game.
Yeah, that’s right, a fictional robotic police officer threw out the first pitch as the Tigers took on the Toronto Blue Jays. However, his presence wasn’t a harbinger of good things, as the home team went down in defeat to their visitors from the Great White North by a score of 5 to 3. In the Tigers defense, the Jays are currently one of the hottest teams in baseball.
It doesn’t help matters that it wasn’t much of a pitch to begin with. You’d think that with that much hardware, not to mention a sophisticated targeting system, he would be able to pull off something more impressive, but alas, that is not the case. He not only failed to deliver a strike, but he bounced the ball off the ground in front of the waiting catcher. Then again, he’s designed to punch through walls and shoot people in the brainpan when necessary, so we’ll forgive him for not being able to throw a competent fastball. We’ll have the team of scientists who developed him get to work on a new program and set of mission parameters, and with RoboCop in the starting rotation, the Tigers should be the team to beat in the American League Central this season.
Still, you’d think he would at least have the capability to at least lob a grenade through a window or something similar should the case arrise. But hey, he still fared a hell of a lot better than 50 Cent did at a recent New York Mets game.
While having RoboCop throw out the first pitch is an awesome move, they even played his theme music over the loudspeaker, would it have killed them to have Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 original do the honor? In reality, as cool as this sounds in theory, it’s just a marketing ploy to coincide with the DVD/Blu-Ray/VOD/Home Video release of Jose Padilha’s recent reboot of the tech-noir classic. Maybe it’s me, but I just don’t see the residents of Detroit, who continually see their city depicted by the media as a kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland, getting quite as excited by slick, tactical black model of RoboCop as they would for the brushed chrome of the original.
