I'm sure by now most people are familiar with many of the various types of Google searches. News. Images. Blogs. All sorts of fun options. One of the lesser known of these options however, is the Google Patent Search. Go ahead, click the link. I promise you, it is hours of useless fun seeing what kind of crazy stuff people have patented. So for fun I plucked around for a bit and found a few lets say, odd sports related inventions from the past few years. Enjoy.
No-Hang Basketball Net: This is an urgently needed invention. Thousands of dunkers are hurt every year by submitting to the temptation of hanging on the net. Putting a dreamcatcher on the hoop will stop those whipper-snappers for sure.
Baseball Bat Urn: Dissapointed that you can't scatter your loved one's ashes on Wrigley Field? Do the next best thing: stick em in a bat! Maybe this is what Sammy Sosa was using a few years back...
Football Launcher: Worried that your overweight child will never play sports because he has no friends? Never fear! The football trebuchet is here! Now little Johnny will never need anyone else to play catch.
Laser Beam Home Plate So you think the ump is blind eh? Well, even the worst of umps won't miss a call with the help of the laser beam home plate. The lasers mark whether or not the ball was over the plate, so even Bruce Froemming can get a call right every once in a while.
Propeller Powered Football: There is absolutely no way that putting a football with an electric propeller in the hands of children will result in injury. No possible way.
Inflatable Baseball Glove: The inflatable baseball glove is designed so that people can have something to catch foul balls and homeruns without having to bring along that pesky "real baseball glove". Those things are so inconvienent. I for one, would much rather have a glove that I have to blow up to use, and might pop whenever I catch something. Far superior.
Football-Basketball: I for one thought of this wonderful game years and years ago. Evidently watching the film BaseketBall motivated this aspiring young inventor to combine the skill and competitive spirit of two of the world's favorite sports into....something dumb.
Sliding Jacket: This one speaks for itself: "An object of the invention is to prevent entry of sand on a ground into a portion between an outside face of a lower portion of a jacket body of a jacket for baseball and an inside face near a waist belt of bottoms for baseball at the moment of headfirst sliding" Yeah, that is annoying now that I think about it.
Retractable Bat: If you have a kid on your Little League team that just refuses to choke up on the bat when you tell him to, then this is just the bat for you. Or, if for some reason you want to sneak around with an easily concealed baseball bat...