Home plate is a flat, pentagonal, white slab of rubber embedded flush in the ground.
It could not be otherwise, with large, heavily muscled athletes careening around an enclosed rink as they fight for a bone-hard slab of rubber travelling at speeds of up to 90 miles an hour.
This show presents more of those playfully Minimalist pieces, which, with their wavering outlines and thick sides, look as if they were cut from slabs of colored rubber.
Equally intriguing, if less convincingly used, are the amber cushionlike slabs of smoked rubber fresh from the Malaysian jungle -- Rachael Whiteread in the raw.
Bought 11 years ago because they matched my gym kit – shameful, but I was young – close inspection revealed the soles had practically perished, meaning I was slamming my heels, and therefore knees, into unforgiving slabs of hard rubber.
The pilot squeezes into a tiny space above a bulkhead made of fiberglass-aluminum honeycomb and then straps himself against a slab of foam rubber -- the kind sold in cheap mattress stores.
On the back, however, there's a slab of extra rubber with a button on one side.
Geophysicist and co-author Ross Stein, also of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, likens the process to taking a square slab of stiff rubber and making three unconnected cuts into it in the shape of a Z.
Other subjects include shards of forest-green glass, slabs of ripped black rubber, vats of alkaline batteries, lolling tongues of white latex foam, disembodied LCD screens, piles of cracked windshields, a nest of chopped telephone cables, steaming indoor compost heaps that evoke the set of "Cats," and a flattened red car.
