April, 2000. I am excited to start my first season as the Blue Jays beat writer for the National Post. I love baseball, and I have a scar on my head from Toronto’s 1993 World Series celebrations. (A story for another time.) But I am wrong for the job. It requires good choices.
In the middle of every game, a kid came onto the field with something called the Hot Dog Blaster. It was like a bazooka that fired hot dogs wrapped in tinfoil into the crowd. A T-shirt cannon, but for meat products. Did this plan have flaws? Friends, mayhap it did.
One night, the Jays are hosting the Angels. The press box at SkyDome is quite high, directly behind home plate. I’m sort of staring into space when I’m startled by a loud BANG. I look up—UP!—and my eyes catch the fragmenting remains of a hot dog, rocketing into orbit. 
The kid fires another one. BANG. This fucking thing was like a mortar shell. Chunks of it went into the upper deck. He fires again, unaware that hot dogs aren’t designed to travel at the speed of sound—BANG—and an empty bun flaps by me like a bird that’s been shot out of the sky.
I look down at the crowd. The Hindenburg might as well be crashing down on their heads. People who only seconds before were hoping for a hot dog are now just hoping to survive. They’re tripping over stairs, pushing the elderly out of the way. I can still hear their screams.
BANG. There’s another wiener, exploding into pieces. BANG. Someone takes an all-beef missile to the chest. It was like the baby carriage scene in The Untouchables: a slow-motion horror, but with flying meat instead of bullets. Imagine fireworks made of hot dogs. Exactly that.
The kid detonates a dozen hot dogs—BANG BANG BANG—before he finally stops. I survey the wreckage—people holding one another, children crying over their fallen parents—and can’t shake the image of that first doomed wiener: like Icarus, yearning toward a killing sun.
It’s early, but I make the bold, in hindsight debatable decision that my game story will be about the hot dogs. I start writing. Then some shit happens. The score is, like, 16-10. There’s an on-field brawl. But I hold fast: my readers will be getting a story about flying franks.
I file. My editor is like: What the hell is this? But there’s no time to change it. The story runs. I show up at the park the next day, and the older beat guys start ROASTING me. “Hey kid, did you see that there was a game last night? People might have liked to know the score.”
I’m sweating. My editor calls. Am I in trouble? No! He’s English, with an English hatred of baseball and nose for the absurd. He wants me to write a follow. I conduct very serious interviews with the Jays and Schneiders, the meat sponsor, about their lethal hot-dog howitzer.
Actual quotes: “Unfortunately," the Jays rep says, "I guess the power of the carbon-dioxide canister was too heavy for the hot dogs." (“I guess?”) “I heard about the incident,” the Schneiders guy says. “But I have assurances that we won’t see any more exploding hot dogs.”
Then I spot Sarah, my then-girlfriend’s militantly vegetarian sister, who just happens to be at that night’s game. I ask her about the previous night’s airborne assault. “If I get sprayed with meat, I’m suing SkyDome,” she says. I move to leave, but Sarah’s on a roll.
“What if I had my mouth open and a piece of hot dog landed in my mouth?” she asks. “I can’t even walk by a hot dog stand without gagging. Imagine being sprayed with wiener shrapnel. I would have died.” I write up my story. My editor is delighted. The hot dog saga is over.
Little do I know, “wiener shrapnel” is about to enter the national lexicon. These are the early days of the Internet, and that story is my first experience of going viral. It goes EVERYWHERE. The Blue Jays accuse me of piping Sarah’s quotes. The other beat guys are incredulous.
“Blue Jay officials avoid another frankfurter fiasco,” becomes my signature piece. I soon leave the job, because I really was not right for it. But I learned lessons I never forgot: Be honest about who you are, and what you were born to be. No hot dog was ever meant to fly.
