We hear often about athletes being in "the zone," a place of simultaneously heightened awareness and ecstatic unawareness in which the entire world telescopes down to the task at hand. The game demands this sort of focus, because it is so supremely difficult and because the margins are so narrow. For a player on those margins, like Cubs outfielder Chris Coghlan, this sublime narrowness matters maybe even more. The game is not as easy for him as it is for his genius-level peers, and so he must be in that place where everything is quiet and binary and high-definition if he's going to keep playing baseball for a living. So let's go ahead and assume that Coghlan was In The Zone when, in front of the Party City Deck and God and everybody, he performed the most drastic act of testicular adjustment ever seen on a baseball field after stealing second base against the Mets.Is this a big claim, especially given that outfielder Steve Finley touched his garbage as part of a ritual he performed between every pitch? It absolutely is. But look at what Coghlan is doing to his stuff, there. Observe the knee bend. The slight bounce that follows. The faraway look in his eyes. A person can watch a week's worth of Mets games and not see balls receive this much hard contact. To Chris Coghlan, we can only say thanks. Thank you for showing us what is possible in this field of endeavor, and thank you for taking us with you into your, uh, zone.