“Does a Progressive Sausage Dream of Clouds?”

“Hey we have to move to the cloud.”

“Why do you , Abe Froehman*, Sausage King of Chicago need to be on the cloud?”

“Because everyone’s doing it and I don’t like to be left behind.”

“Do you even know what the cloud is?”

“No, but it sounds cool and we need to be progressive.”

“Um, yea. You’re a sausage king. To be progressive you would have to come out with a line of vegetarian sausage.”

“You mean a sausage with no meat?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the point?”

“I feel the same about you being on the cloud.”

“Ok, I give up. You’re my tech guru. What is the cloud?”

“Computer Servers on a network that store data.”

“No lightning or thunder? That’s underwhelming. How is that cool?

“Well, it’s not really.”

“Then why is everyone doing it?”

“Well, it’s being used by apps to store data and make the data easily available to other platforms?”

“English please?”.

“You can use an app on your computer and your phone and the app would have access to the same data from either.”

“An app, I don’t have one of those”.

“No Captain Obvious , you don’t”

“Maybe I should get one.”

“What would your app do?”

“How about a sausage race?”

“I assume that would be a game.”

“Of course”.

“How would that help business?”

“Advertising, The player could choose from our inventory which sausage types would race. It would also introduce them to our product line.”

“That’s not bad but who would they race against? The computer ? That’s only a two sausage race.”

“Hmm, how about make it one of those online things. The player could choose which sausage they want to be. You know, the sausage they most identify with.”

“I’m not sure about the sausage empathy bit but a social app where you play against others on the internet is not a bad idea. There may be a problem though.”

“What’s that? ”

“Major League Baseball?”

“The app is not going to broadcast the accounts of a game with-out their advised written consent.”

“No but the Milwaukee Brewers have a sausage race during the seventh inning stretch. MLB may lay claim to the sausage race.”

“Hmm, could we sponsor that? It would be a great tie in with the app.”

“It’s already sponsored by one of your competitors.”

“Hmm, They have baseball in Japan don’t they?”

“Um, yes. Why?”

“I bet they don’t have a sausage race sponsored by one of our competitors?”

“Thats a safe bet. Sausages don’t do well in japan.”

“It would be a great way for us to roll out my new product idea.”

“Oh, and what would that be?”

“Suishigages”

“You might be better off with the vegetarian idea.”

“Soysages?”

“Surprisingly enough, that is taken.”

“Suishigages it is and I have another idea for a sausage based trivia app.”

“We need to get you a non sausage-based hobby.”

Authors Note: As far as I know “Suishigages” and “Soysages” are not the property of MLB.

*A shout out to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The movie will be celebrating its 30th birthday next year but the actual 30th anniversary of his day off happened June 5th of this year. That was determined by the people at Baseball Prospectus by using the players names and numbers and process of elimination.