It’s a cake! A Seattle Mariners cake!

I suspect a piping bag was used!

Let us pair this delicious Duncan Hines foodstuff with a quote from Franz Kafka!

“One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.”

What if the cake is poisoned! Turns out, it matters not.

It is not irony, but rather some version of meaningful coincidence, that Rob Deer — who distinguished himself as a ballplayer for his commitment to the three true outcomes — that Deer’s options for offseason employment (at least ca. 1987) would so obviously have just one possible outcome.

The author has reason to believe (which is to say, he probably read it in the New Yorker once) that it’s a not uncommon practice among certain Buddhist monks for them (i.e. these same monks) to spend hours meditating upon the reality of their own future deaths — with a view, one supposes, towards demystifying same.

A much less common, but entirely similar, practice is to meditate on the death of young Brooklyn outfielder Al Thake, who drowned less than a month before his 23rd birthday while fishing in New York Harbor in 1872.

His obituaries, presented below, appear to be the oldest extant ones among professional base-ballists.

For example, from the Brooklyn Eagle (September 2nd, 1872):

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As most of you may heard, MLB is planning on doing away with the fake-to-third-throw-to-first move, or at least calling it a balk.

Max Scherzer, the owner of such a move, can no longer legally use it on the baseball field. This does not mean however, that he can give it up. Nay, he must use it to express himself in some venue, where it is allowed. He has discovered that it is not only tolerated, but in fact celebrated in various da clubs. Observe:

In yet another hallmark of the present author’s questionable decision-making skills and political acumen, I present to you the third in a likely three-part series on the procurement and evaluation of a collection of unknown baseball cards. Today’s episode: a 4,000-count monster box purchased for ten dollars at a local baseball card store. Surely, such baldfaced oneupsmanship of our Fearless Leader will not go unpunished, and my 5,000-word chapter about Pete O’Brien for the upcoming NotGraphs: The Book book has been all but doomed. Still, I am willing to martyr myself and my sportswriting career prospects for you, dear reader, as I share with you a voyage almost as magical as reading a book, only not quite.

The box in question:

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It began when young Mickey Blaszczyk of Portage Park stumbled upon a baby cat. He kept it. His father, a subcontractor of vast body odor, once found the baby cat curled up in his work pants. Rather than identify this as one of the moments of haphazard beauty that sustains us, Mickey Blaszczyk’s father and his meaty hands took it as an affront. This baby cat is anti-union, he thought. I’m getting rid of it, he told Mickey. He flushed it down the toilet.

The cat — soon to forget his given name of Mittens Blaszczyk — found that the sewers of Chicago nourished him beyond his wildest imaginings. A relentless diet of activated sludge and ward-heeler’s turds helped him defy the growth charts of every sewer-dwelling cat pediatrician whom he encountered. And he encountered many. Because of his size, visiting alligators from New York — themselves of unthinkable depths and breadths — changed his name from “Mittens Blaszczyk” to “Bewhiskered Colossus Whopping.”

Eventually, Bewhiskered Colossus Whopping grew too large for the infrastructure in place and cracked through the asphalt at the already nightmarish Fullerton-Damen-Clybourn intersection, sewer lines wrapped around his neck like sewer lines around the neck of a giant cat. Police were summoned. They lobbed grenades at him, singed his fur with flamethrowers and assailed him with shoulder-mounted missile launchers. America declared nuclear war against Bewhiskered Colossus Whopping, and Irish-Catholics prayed to Satan that he would be be murdered by big lightning. It was all to no effect.

Bewhiskered Colossus Whopping meowed at them, and the sound of that meowing crumbled capital improvements at far-off universities where legacy admissions hoped every phone call brought news of a grandfather’s death. While it sounded like merest meows to those who survived the hearing of it, what Bewhiskered Colossus Whopping was saying was this: “As a show of defiance, I shall hold an illegal dice game at Wrigley Field.”

And that is what Bewhiskered Colossus Whopping did.

As for Mickey Blaszczyk, he died.

We took sabermetrics to the streets this week, and tried it out with concerts. But the ‘readily available’ or ‘replacement-level’ concert is woefully hard to define. Beer? Not so much. Go to your local bodega and look at the beer aisle and you have easy candidates for replacement-level beer. And so baseball’s WAR framework can easily be applied to suds.

Beers. Above. Replacement.

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In a manner of speaking, one of these kids isn’t like the others. That said, owing to a serious lack of fundamental play, Tom Emanski would be furious with all of them.

Credit to my real-live mentor David Dunbar for reminding me that this was a thing.

Latvia

Ahoy, lusty wanderers! Since setting out some weeks ago on my bold and gastronomically reckless circumnavigation of the baseballing world, I have endured great hardship, engaged in hilarious and poignant miscommunication, and witnessed America’s pastime thriving in the least likely of settings. In a felt-lined yurt in the heart of the Gobi I sipped fermented mare’s milk and debated lineup optimization; on a rice barge on the Malabar coast I swapped hot-stove rumors over the roar of the monsoon; amidst flower-strewn meadows on the high slopes of the Karakoram I gasped my way through pickup games, the cheerful taunts of the Tibetans ringing in my wind-whipped ears. Step by arduous step I conquered Asia, and now I find myself on the grey shores of the Baltic, where baseball has a rich history.

According to scholar Josh Chetwynd:

Latvia had a brief flirtation with baseball in 1920, according to the October 10th edition of the New York Times that year. The paper recounted a game in Riga featuring members of the American Red Cross Commission of Western Russia and the Baltic States that garnered high-level political attention. “During the third inning,” the paper wrote, “the Prime Minister of Latvia drove onto the field. [The fielding team] whooped with joy, thinking that here was a worthy player to match [the other club’s star]. Instead, the Minister-President took our first baseman away with him.”

With such deep roots in the sport, it’s no surprise to find baseball still thriving in this land of zithers and pierogis. The nation’s amateur league, the Latvian Baseball Federation, consists of eight clubs with such names as (if my translation is correct) the Valmiera Cartridges, the Miami Devilbats, and the Legends of Light. The official website of the LBF includes a helpful and thorough overview of the history of baseball, as well as its professional format in the United States:

“World Series” is the MLB finals, where competing teams have passed the play-off round. Although the name sounds like that should participate in the tournament teams not only from America, it is not. Americans think that the team that produced the MLB championship, produced the world’s strongest team title. Admittedly, however, they are true.

The site also features an excellent tutorial on the rules of baseball, with some of the better explanatory graphics I have seen:

As to the particular character of the game as it is played in Latvia, I can perhaps best convey it with a typical snippet of action from a recent game recap:

Perhaps the outcome of the game was the key Moot Arthur Knopkena shot in the air to catch Andra Gutman addition to some fly-ball figure of Christ, at a time when there was a similar outcome of the game and the kick nenoķeršanas would bring in several points.

The Latvians’ firm grasp on the fundamentals of the sport, and their obvious natural creativity on the diamond, have not, it seems, translated into great success on the global stage. In qualifications for the 2012 European Championship, the Latvian national team finished last in their group, losing all four of their games while being outscored 57-8. One particularly disappointing outing saw the team rather thoroughly outclassed by the Belgians, giving up 17 runs in five innings, while committing four errors, going completely hitless at the plate, and striking out eight times in 16 at-bats. Though this country seems to face long odds in living up to its proud baseball heritage, the spirit of its people remains undiminished, as the following picture affirms. Join me in wishing a hearty Veiksmi! to the good folks of Latvia — and join me, at some highly uncertain later date, for the next chapter of my suspense-filled journey — Around the Horn!