The Crown is BACK!

Which is unfortunate since I forgot to do a 119-hour marathon of everything from the previous season I've forgotten 😬. And it's gonna be a little weird, since this will be the first season after the deaths of both Hr & Hm.

What I would like to know however is what's it like being in the PREVIOUS cast, and now you get to watch whoever the actor is that is taking over the character. You've done your job beautifully, maybe won a bunch of awards and now you get to sit back and watch someone else sweat it out.

In his all-time classic Ball Four, Jim Bouton described this feeling as being the winning pitcher from the night before, and during the next day's game getting to just put your tootsies up and enjoy the evening, no worries at all. He called it "the cool of the evening", and I wonder if that's what the previous actor's think about when they settle in to watch the first episode after themselves.

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn't you point out a story with a similar but much funnier example of the sentiment, but not really, involving Willie Mays who just happens to be the subject of a brand new documentary out right now on HBO?"

Sigh. YES, faithful readers, yes I did:

4) Willie's famous catch in the 1954 World Series off Vic Wertz led to one of the greatest lines ever. Left-handed Don Liddle was brought in only to pitch to Wertz, a left-hander. After giving up a ball that would have been a mammoth home run in any park but was turned into a double play thanks to maybe the single greatest catch in baseball history, he casually flipped the ball to Marv Grissom, walking on the mound to relive him, and said, "Well, I got my man." :)