If the 12-foot skeleton were a real person, would it be good at sports?

It's the middle of October, and things are getting festive in my neighborhood. There's artful arrangmenets of gourds piled up on porches, dried cornstalks tied to mailboxes, and all manner of spooky stuff heralding the approach of Halloween. Fake spiderwebs hung on hedges. Styrofoam tombstones lined up in yards. Bedsheet-ghosts, inflatable goblins and monsters, animatronic banshees–it's a suburban spectacle of the mildly-macabre.

And then, of course, there's the giant skeleton.

Ever since they hit the scene five years ago, I've coveted the the 12-foot Home Depot skeletons.

They're deeply pointless and yet absolutely essential to the season, a delightful exercise in ostentatious osteology that I pine for but simply cannot justify spending hundreds of dollars on. (Not that I haven't thought about it.)

As I covetously eyed a neighbor's Skelly while walking the dog the other day, a question occurred to me, and it's been nagging at me ever since.

If that 12-foot tall skeleton were from a real person, would that person be good at sports?

It's a valid question. If we are willing to accept the concept of a 12-foot-tall skeleton, then we must also accept the premise of a 12-foot-tall human. Once we have accepted that, we would invariably expect them to play sports, as we often do when presented with an especially tall person.

Let's review their case.

ADVANTAGES:

A 12-foot tall person is going to be very strong relative to normal people. They will have a long stride, a long reach, and an immense weight. (The square-cube law suggests that a six-foot-tall, 200-lb athlete would scale up to a 1600-lb bulk at twelve feet tall. That's big.) They would easily be able to reach and throw over normal-sized athletes, and would be very difficult to stop physically.

DISADVANTAGES:

We can only assume that the massive size would correlate to an increase in injuries, something I term the Greg Oden Corollary. They would also present logistical challenges for their teams in term of equipment/uniforms, travel (how are they going to fit on the team plane?), nutrition and simply fitting through the tunnels at the stadium. Also, there's a possibility that some sports leagues would simply ban them from playing for safety reasons, even though there's nothing in the rule book that says a 12-foot future skeleton cannot play basketball.

It's a mixed bag, but scouts are definitely going to be interested.

So, what sports would this giant be best at?

Basketball

This is the most obvious choice, right? They would redefine the game in a way that no one since Wilt Chamberlain has. They would be able to dunk flat-footed and block basically any shot.

On the flipside, they would presumably be slow, inhibit ball movement, and be prone to accidentally incurring flagrant fouls when they crush another player.

Football

If Brock Osweiler could cobble together a seven-year NFL career solely on the basis of being really tall, then teams would be salivating to turn our guy into a quarterback. He could simply throw right over the line, and would require eight players to properly tackle.

That said, teams nearly enacted a rule to ban the Philadelphia Eagles' "Tush Push" play, and that's just pushing a guy into the endzone. They would absolutely find a way to ban the giant or severely restrict his natural advantages.

Baseball

Being huge might allow our hypothetical monster to hit gigantic home runs while swinging a 120-ounce bat, but they would also have the largest strike zone in history. Hitting a baseball is the hardest skill to teach in sports, and there's no guarantee that our hoped-for King-Sized Aaron Judge wouldn't turn out to just be an Unusually Large Russell Branyan.

Pitching presents a more compelling option; Randy Johnson terrified batters for 22 seasons, and he was the closest we've come yet to seeing a 12-foot skeleton play professional sports.

That said, modern medicine simply isn't set up to perform Tommy John surgery on an elbow this large, and I fear the Even Bigger Unit would flame out in the minors.

Olympic Sports

Weightlifting? Maybe, but that's a long way to lift.

Rowing? They'd have an incredible stroke length, but I'd worry about the weight balance in the canoe.

There's some intriguing possibilities in Track and Field, as I bet they could huck a shotput or hammer really far. Ultimately, though, I'm putting my bet on swimming. Michael Phelps trained extremely hard and was coached well, but largely succeeded on the merits of being a Long Human Dolphin.

I think that a 12-foot skeleton, with the proper coaching and also human flesh and skin and stuff, could become the greatest Olympic swimmer of all time.

What's your thoughts?

Surely there's something I'm missing here.

While you think about that, I should probably get today's newsletter going.

Friends, it's Friday at The Action Cookbook Newsletter!

I'm getting deep into the cozy vibes of fall today, as I take on both a soup and a baking project, mix up a corny cocktail, put on some gentle country cover songs, and more!

It's Friday. Let's roll them bones.

There are no new ideas in soup

At the outset of this month, I declared my intention to observe October as "Crocktober", a celebration of it getting just consistently cool enough to regularly cook one-pot meals in the Dutch oven, slow-cooker, pressure cooker and various other crock-type vessels. I made a chili-like stew two weeks ago, and a coney-dog sauce last week.

This week, though, it's time for soup.