Milwaukee’s Brewers once shared a league with the Tigers of Detroit. They don’t any more, but sometimes, under cover of night, they still play each other in the darkened streets of the American Midwest. Third-generation Poles part their bungalow curtains and watch, and they smell bad as they watch.

Across all such contests, whether sanctioned or questionable, the Brewers are 1,005-0 against the Tigers. To what is their rousing success against the Jungle Cats O’ Michy-Gan owing? Crippling alcoholism.

Witness this revealing pen-and-ink dispatch:

The Tigers, miserable sots one and all, are unable to resist the foggy inveiglements of the tipple. “Firewater, as fresh as it is cold? The promise of a teeming pour? We are stinking with foretaste!” The Tigers say in benumbed unison. “On this day, death to all other toil!”

Then they get drunk and lurch around those Michigan towns named after dead Anglicans and boot in mullioned windowpanes in a red-eyed search for copulus — a search they’d dare not abate even if they had the will, which they do not, on account of their intemperance.

The villagers are left ensnared in that very moment when they can’t tell whether the hoof-beats are approaching, or passing them by.

Those concerned about creeping Maoism will recall that Four Loko — the drink that helpfully combined restorative caffeine with mind-clearing alcohol — was banned by the meddlesome crypto-Etruscans at the FDA. After all, taking our guns away is easier when we’re neither awake nor drunk.

Anyhow, base-ball-ing legend Boileryard Clarke, who has for years sustained himself on a diet of nothing more than hooch and punched-out constables, has entered the fray and wielded his celebrity like a sword that looks like a dick.

So please do drink deeply of first the following paid advertisement and then a high-reaching pour of Four Loko …

Play better base ball and beat back tertiary syphilis with Four Loko.

Those in the know know that Reds prospect Billy Hamilton is not content with merely pilfering bases and scampering home. Rather, it is his roguish aim to scrub from history the other, older Billy Hamilton, who toiled from 1888 to 1901 (i.e., Back When God Liked Us). Those ill intentions are ill enough, but now comes the clearest sign yet that he’s winning …

As you can plainly see, New Billy Hamilton has now placed himself athwart and astride the fellow travelers of Old Billy Hamilton — many of them Irish, all of them racist.

It is now New Billy Hamilton who is hoisting poisonous toddies with Ed Delahanty. It is now New Billy Hamilton who worries about the croup, hardening of the liver and vaguer body troubles. It is now New Billy Hamilton who motivates himself with a fear of old-country famine. It is New Billy Hamilton who has agreed to marry the Colonel’s daughter for the sake of appearances. It is New Billy Hamilton who, upon entering the confessional, says, “Get comfortable, Padre.”

Thenceforth, New Billy Hamilton will entertain comparisons to only New Billy Hamilton.

As I do each night before soiling my bedclothes, I was thinking about what Bud Selig thinks about — and says — when he’s smoking wholesome, nutritious cigarettes.

In particular, what was Bud Selig muttering through his thinly parted, cig-impeded lips at this moment? Doubtless, he was all up in the grill of a cowed underling, but what was he saying? This, it turns out …

The boulevards of the world are awash in possible jokes, all of them tiresome even before they depart one’s lips or typing fingers. Why? Because the Pope is taking batting practice …

When I told you the Pope was taking batting practice it turns out I was not lying. This surprised even me. I just resisted a joke. And another. And then another. The Pope is taking batting practice.

I am scooting and clicking around my shitty home like an addled crab because the Pope is taking batting practice. What else am I to do? Stare mutely in the mirror at my mongrel’s visage? Ask my dog sincere questions?

Besides hiding from leering Heaven in my sump pit, I shall create a NotGraphs category called “The Pope is Taking Batting Practice.”

What else am I to do? Murder an urchin?

The Pope is taking batting practice, and he has a reasonable left-handed swing.

Push me down the stairs, ghosts about me.

Ed. Note: Dayn Perry would like to credit the editor’s friend Ross for finding this evergreen video.

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 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.

In which Pete Rose translates towering works of poetry.

In today’s episode, Pete Rose will translate Ezra Pound’s imagist opus “In a Station of the Metro” from the original English into Pete Rose American.

Mr. Pound’s original:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Mr. Rose’s translation:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Grocery list: Cigarettes, olive loaf, whore, a plan.

This has been “Poetry, Translation by Pete Rose.”

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Internet Hot Link Baseball-Reference.com confirms the existence of this player of baseball …

Thaddeus Philyaw played baseball, but he did not do so in the 19th century. Despite a name that, in Ohio Valley Protestantese, translates as “He Who Vacantly Surveys That Which the Colonel Has Raped,” Thaddeus Philyaw was not born in the 19th century. In point of fact, he played baseball in the 1970s, when we danced until the herpes overtook us …

Lo, Thaddeus Philyaw played baseball! That much is not surprising. What is surprising is that he did not play baseball in the moments before and after beating back an Indian raid in Lincoln County, Kansas.

What is surprising is that he did not play baseball in the moments before and after conceiving an heir on the hide of a coyote (read: “KAI-yoat”).

What is surprising is that he did not die of consumption while rounding third.