Couldn't you just put a fat guy in front of the net?

It’s a question that goes through my mind every time someone scores a goal on the Minnesota Wild and if you watch hockey you’ve thought of it at least once. Why don’t they just get a really husky guy out there who could sit in front of the goal and block every single shot?

Don’t write this off as a stupid question, similar stunts are not without major league precedent.

There are some moments in sports where spirit of the game is violated regularly to great and acceptable affect. If you’re down by two points in the final moments of a basketball game then you intentionally foul to force the shot and turnover and give yourself a chance. If that blitzer is going to knock down the quarterback for a loss of 15 yards and possibly a knee injury then you hold him and take the penalty. These are acceptable violations of written rules.

Except we aren’t talking about written rules, we’re talking about acceptable standards of play, but again, it’s not like this kind of violation never happens in major league sports.

Though I wasn’t alive in 1951 to see it, the story of Eddie Gaedel’s major league debut is one of the great baseball legends.

Gaedel was a American dwarf–they weren’t as concerned with political correctness in 1951. On Aug. 17 of that year, Gaedel donned a St. Louis Browns uniform and stepped up to the plate, filling a small corner of the batting box with his unimposing 3’7” 65 lb. frame.

It was a bit of a joke, his number was 1/8 and he had popped out of a cake between games of a double-header, but he had a valid contract.

It’s already hard for major league pitchers to hit a standard strike zone, and Gaedel’s zone was only a few inches.
Needless to say he was walked and got a pinch runner upon reaching first base. The Browns went on to lose the game 6-2.

That’s a great story, but let’s get back to the matter at hand. Why doesn’t some hockey team hire an obese man to just sit in the goal?

I suppose it starts with the simple fact that hockey is a good deal more violent than baseball has ever been. While baseball sees the occasional bench clearing brawl or struck batter charging the pitcher it just doesn't have the raw ferocity like body checking and hockey fights.

Even great baseball moments like Robin Ventura charging the pitching legend Nolan Ryan–Ryan, 46, headlocked Ventura, 26, and hammered him with his right arm which was capable of fastballs exceeding 100 mph– have almost nothing on par with the standard of violence in a Minnesota Wild game moments after Derek Boogaard gets put in.

What would rogue players do to an opposing team who they felt was violating the spirit of the game.

Equipment constraints could also be a problem. Where would a team find pads to cover a goalie of such proportions that he could adequately cover a 4x6 net?

It is also the policy of the NHL to screen for health problems with a standard physical. Could someone with that kind of girth ever be described as physically fit to play a sport? I would put that in the realm of improbable and unlikely but not necessarily impossible.

Considering that Walter Hudson, at 1197 lbs.. might just barely have filled the net with his world record 9’11” waist, it’s going to take a lot of dieting–in the reverse of the conventional sense–to reach anywhere near that size. Since Hudson died in 1991 he’s not about to walk out on the ice even if he could get onto the ice through a doorway.

So let’s go through the particulars: vengeful opposing players, lacking appropriate padding, hardly able to move.

What we’re essentially talking about here is strapping–he would probably have to be tied to the crossbar in order to stand–an inordinately husky masochist in the goal and letting angry players slap hard rubber pucks toward him at speeds close to 100 mph.

I’m guessing he’d be in one of two places after the game. the emergency room or the county morgue. Either way he’s not going to be attending a press conference to tell us all how it went.

It’s not that the question is stupid–like my girlfriend told me–it’s just that most people don’t think through the consequences.