"Joey, have you ever been in a cockpit before?"

I really want to give a big hand to those of you who choose to travel by airplane. If you're not getting bumped off a flight you hold a ticket for, you're flying on the plane and the door flies off midair, or another plane flies two feet above you because an air traffic controller was playing with his Gameboy...

Or, you could be flying on the charter plane carrying the hapless Colorado Rockies ballclub from Denver to Toronto when the Rockies hitting coach Hensley Meulens climbed into the pilot's seat and began playing like he was flying the doggone plane.

It is against federal regulations for unauthorized people to be on the flight deck, but there they were last month, flying to Canada at 35,000 feet with this Meulens joking around at the controls.

There is a video floating around showing him saying to a person in uniform in the next seat, “Flying the plane, here to Toronto.” 

 “I’m going to land the plane tonight. So relax,” he says. He then reaches toward the flight controls and pretends to take hold, saying, “I just press this button ... and it goes down.”

Meulens played baseball, not particularly well, for a few years, here in the Major Leagues and the minors, and abroad. He speaks five languages, but is not able to say, "I am an a trained and qualified airplane pilot" in any of them. Whatever the people in charge of the flight that night last month were thinking is wrong. 

The bad part of that sort of wrongness is that it can lead to awful consequences for other people through no fault of their own. 

There is a line that separates funny movies from stupid things real people really do. Jet airliners are not a good place to cross that line.