HERE'S A NAME you haven't heard in a long time – Satchel Paige the Pitcher – and here's why: the lanky righty started to love Thai food so much he couldn't stand to be an American and moved to Thailand. After a year or two there, living out in the country and throwing rocks at chickens all day, he built up his arm strength to where he thought he could come back to the States for a week or two and throw some innings. Which he did, two games in a row, and now he's back home in Thailand building up his arm strength again by throwing rocks at chickens.

Rocks are hard. Much as I love Satchel Paige the Pitcher, I also love chickens, so I can't condone his particular rehabilitation regimen. On the other hand, you have to allow for cultural differences, and maybe Thai pitcher-chicken farmers don't have access to watermelon rinds, corn cobs, stale tortilla chips from Can-cun, or any of the other, softer delicacies that my American chickens just love being beaned by.

Well, you can't argue with results, as the great poet Eli Whitney once said, paraphrasing I-forget-who's misquote of the famous cliché (and, in a roundabout way, nailing the chicken right on the head, so to speak). Satchel Paige the Pitcher threw his heart out right along with his arm. He threw with the relative velocity and charisma of his namesake, and if we lost both games by margins that would make the St. Louis Rams blush, it wasn't his fault any more than it was, say, mine. I had the extreme pleasure of catching almost all of his innings.

Win or lose, there are no one else's innings I'd rather catch, if for no other reason than because you get to use all your fingers calling pitches. Satchel Paige the Pitcher throws a fastball, curve, change, split-finger, knuckler, and of course, a sidearm two-seam boomerang wattle-waxer, which he isn't too shy to use when the situation calls for "a little beak music," as us chicken farmers call it.

Wattle-waxer notwithstanding, the most devastating thing about facing Satch, as a batter, is he's capable of throwing any one of those pitches for a strike (wattle-waxer notwithstanding) in any count. Capable meaning it could happen; however, for reasons known only to him (if that), it usually doesn't. So, since there are no bases on balls in pickup baseball, you might have to stand in there for 20 minutes to a half-hour before finally reaching on an error. Or in some cases, out of sheer fear, striking out and either sitting down or running to find a pay phone and call your mom to tell her you love her.

I'm exaggerating. We lost Satch's second game something like 19-13 (whereas the Rams routinely score in the 30s), and I pitched as many of those innings as he did – and committed at least two of our team's 84 errors myself. Afterward, me and him and Punk (who'd played on the winning team) thought we'd saunter down Lombard Street in search of somewhere cheap to drown our sorrows and celebrate.

New Yorker's Buffalo Wings. The "house of delicious food," whose logo features a tough, dirty-looking chef with big, hairy, tattooed arms holding a frying pan with a protesting little chicken in it. About time a logo tells it like it is.

I got Buffalo wings (six-something for 13 of them), Punk got a burger, and Satchel Paige the Pitcher got fish 'n' chips. All of which was well and good and cheap enough, but the main attraction, for my money, was the homemade potato chips that came with the wings.

The french fries Satch and Punk got with their stuff were also fresh-cut and delicious. Then the other highlight was Punk's strawberry milkshake, which I guess he felt he deserved, being a winner.

Speaking of winners, be sure to take home a take-home menu. It's a real heart-warmer, and already has provided hours of enjoyable reading material. Two of my favorite passages:

"We Name Our Restaurant a Buffalo Wing Place However We Serve Great Home-Style-Cooking Breakfast and Fresh Gourmet Coffee 'The Peerless Coffee' All Days."

And: "QUALITY IS WHY OUR SANDWICHES ARE SO GOOD!!"

Yeah, that's right, and a Buffalo Wing Place However We Serve Great Home-Style-Cooking Breakfast etc. is clean, friendly, and cheerful in a plasticky way, and in spite of its badass logo. Oh, and in spite of a maddeningly on-the-fritz television up on the wall in the corner, which went THUMP! THUMP THUMP! every nine seconds. Now there's a thing to throw rocks at, Satch.