The best minor league baseball team in the country should be lauded for its consistency. Apart from obnoxiously rare 19 run outbursts over offensively poor pitching teams, the Sacramento River Cats win each game the same way — quality pitching and timely hitting.

One morning last June my summer slumber was interrupted by a phone call at the ungodly hour of 11 a.m. I presumed it to be some sort of emergency. Maybe my friend Jack was in jail for socking Sasha Vujacic in the face. Maybe my buddy Dane was trampled at a party by a swarm of beautiful women who had mistaken him for John Mayer. Maybe my cousin Jed had been invited into the VIP lounge at the Tryst in Vegas by Mickael Pietrus and needed me to set his DVR.

Remember that scene in the Indie masterpiece “Oldboy” when Oh Dae-su finally gets out of his prison, roams the streets for the first time in 15 years, and sees a group of teenage hoodlums hanging out in the basin? After 15 years of solitary training in a cramped room, a manually drawn image on the wall as his sparring partner, Oh Dae-su was craving the opportunity to satiate his curiosity: How would fighting skills harnessed opposite a concrete wall translate into pragmatic reality, against real people who will really fight back?