Spring training is very long. It’s over a month of meaningless games where the prime objective is to figure out who will be the 4th outfielder and make sure everyone doesn’t burn themselves out by the time the real games start. After the first week and the excitement of discussing who got fat or not wears off, it really just becomes about avoiding catastrophic injuries. There’s a lot of downtime which sometimes results in tomfoolery. Apparently one of the ways many killed time was by perfecting their Tim Kurkjian impressions. It’s simple really, perhaps no one on TV is easier to parody than Kurkjian and with the WWL parading him around the spring training sites it felt natural that the players would share them.

Well, now we have our 4th Kurkjian impression that has been aired. It comes the way of Cubs pitcher Ryan Dempster who you probably know more for his outstanding Harry Caray impressions rather than his pitching. In this clip, Dempster runs the gamut by giving us both Caray and Kurkjian.

The quick transition from Caray to Kurkjian and the more subtle impression are impressive. So impressed is Curt Schilling that he proclaims that Dempster will become a “folk hero” for that. Ohhhkayyy.

At the end it gets tacky. ESPN is now promoting #Kurkjianing on twitter and made up a contest about it. So, we’ll definitely see more because ESPN now wants more of it. This upsets me because apparently I learned that I’m somewhat of a Kurkjian impression hipster and liked the organic feel of the first ones when they were just doing it for the love of it and not just for some corporate contest.

Oh well. I’ll still gladly take these over players speaking in cliches about spring training games everytime.