As the handsome onlooker is no doubt aware, Andy Pettitte, weary of his mewling family, has decided to return to baseball and cash. But please know that he doesn’t feel good about it …
It is not often that an otherwise milquetoast base ball-ist such as Pettitte unleashes a quote that contains multitudes, but, lo, this one contains multitudes …
Young Dale Sveum’s feathered part is symbolic of the deep fissures within: for Young Dale Sveum loves rebuilt engines as much as he loves baseball as much as he loves lady ass.
Young Dale Sveum boasts a necking technique that Sally Callahan, among others, has termed “The Gentleman’s Agreement.”
Upon first laying eyes upon it, Young Dale Sveum described his bow tie as being “sexy antifreeze in color.” When the haberdasher at After Six Formal Wear told him it was “really just light blue,” Young Dale Sveum cut him a hard look. “You and I,” Young Dale Sveum said, “we shall call it ‘Sexy Antifreeze,’ won’t we?” To this day, the patron may request such an exact hue of neckwear at After Six.
Once in Algebra II, Young Dale Sveum found himself idly doodling “I have a passion for passion” on the front of his Mead three-ring binder. He hurriedly scribbled it out, mostly because he knew it was true.
While some great figures of the past held a preternatural belief that they would one day enjoy an appointment with history, Young Dale Sveum always believed he’d have a make-out session with history punctuated by some sweet under-the-bra action.
Although it is usually a signifier of indigence and misfortune, living out of a van sounds pretty damn far-out to Young Dale Sveum.
Young Dale Sveum will be voted by his classmates as “Most Likely To Marijuana.”
After Young Dale Sveum helmed a cabal of jocks in ritually abusing freshman Bernie Stimpner, Stimpner, upon negotiating his way out of the trash can outside the cafeteria, declared: “Dale Sveum will one day be a great leader of men.” And so he was.
(Image courtesy of Chicagoist)
The Internetting Gentleman may have encountered tawdry hearsay that the Miami Marlins, denizens of the Sunshine State, where everything — save for the weather, people, housing market, and milieu — is great, recently dropped a new theme song like something that is on the verge of scalding the very hands that bear it. Recognize:
But then the story, like an indolently raveled thing, began unraveling. The Marlins did not, in point of fact, grant their imprimatur to such a malodorous tune! Jeffrey Loria is a professional aesthete, so how, pray tell, would he green-light such an Up-With-Peopled mess?
Here’s how: the world is shit, and yet it manages to spin. This may not be the Marlins’ theme song, but, for me and mine — so all of us, really — this is the Marlins’ theme song.
In the Sunshine State, it turns out, everything is mothertrucking great.
In which images of the base-balling Reuschel brothers, Rick and Paul, are paired with befitting movie titles …
Like most of us, I knew him only as the almost spectral presence who delivered sex-drenched commands and remorseless taunts from on high. He paid us in corsair’s doubloons. He claimed to have invented new smells and colors. He lifted not barbells but paid whores left pliant from hours of driving coitus. He carried a razor in his sock. His voice was so gravelly that actual gravel spewed from his maw. If a man is something dimensionless and awful to behold, then he was man. He was David Appelman.
This past weekend, in the deserts of America, I met him. By way of introduction, he beat me with a cactus and then kissed my fresh wounds. Such is his power. Such is his malaise. Like someone from a Garcia Marquez novel, Appelman is followed everywhere by a pack of menacing tarantulas. “My spider-sons,” he calls them. His appetite for illegal drugs and sex as locus of control is both boundless and without bound. As he ravishes you on whim, the only consoling knowledge is that whatever he’s doing to you at that moment is but a taste of the horrors ahead. You can always buy another bodice, he tells you. I saw him brawl with Christ. David Appelman is an animated urge.
We are not equipped to remember our births, which is a necessary survival device. We are also not equipped to remember the precise things that David Appelman does to, at and on us. We cannot, lest we combust from vice and rot. Every so often, though, the gossamer parts, if only for a moment, and you remember something about him. He is hairy beyond plausibility. His member is untold and prehensile. It turns out there is an eighth deadly sin.
I am in need of physicians.
We know that Braves catcher Brian McCann is good at baseball, but now comes evidence — evidence that the stern and jowly judge will allow so long as counsel is going somewhere with this — that he is also adept at falling on his sword:
“The most I ever sat and pondered over a season since I started playing baseball,” McCann said.
After deep contemplation — along with plenty of offseason golf and vacations to Las Vegas and the Bahamas — he was sure he had arrived at the root cause of the Braves’ epic September belly-flop. By the time he came south, he was prepared to sling a little blame.
It was him.
Not the hurricane in New York that broke the team’s momentum. Not the injuries to starters Tommy Hanson and Jair Jurrjens. Not the sapping of the bullpen.
All him. He’s Spartacus.
“I truly felt if I played up to my standards, the Cardinals don’t get in the postseason,” McCann said.
In Boston, where the collapse was equally as tragicomic, there were other culprits — three of them, to be precise. McCann, because he is a McMan, is willing to be those three things. Bless this magnificent bastard …
The nomination process, which pairs wonderfully with an artisanal Brie, is complete. The list of names has been whittled down to 10, and one of those names is a player rumored to be retired. In this instance, however, a dispensation — a French dispensation — has been granted. The act of doing so involves a kiss on each cheek between resigned drags on a Gitanes. Now go and vote, wine-drunk functionaries …
Thank you for exercising the franchise, absurd and meaningless though it may be.
What we do is assign cool nicknames to players rather than perpetuate the tired, lamewad practice of assigning cool players nicknames. Last time out, R.A. Dickey laid uninspired claim to the nickname “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.” Although the name indubitably should’ve gone to Eric Sogard, Mr. Dickey has, in unmoved, assembly-line fashion, been added to our Hall of Honouur, which is so stately, so regal, so much itself a celebration of the Norman Conquest, that an extra British-English unstressed “u” is required for proper spelling …
Without question or doubtless doubt, you’ve been waiting, breath bated, for the next episode of “The World According to Gross.” On this point, I have wonderful news: the next episode of “The World According to Gross” is embedded below, and the subject, it so happens, is the sport that binds us …
Some observations regarding the multitudes to which we have borne awed witness:
0:15 – That’s a fake voice.
0:29 – The man who murdered Mr. Gross with a cargo hook and, under cover of darkness, buried him in a shallow grave has just entered the frame.
0:49 – Dámaso García!
0:59 – Ol’ Hard Luck Stieb!
1:28 – Mr. Gross is lying to Julie from “The Love Boat.”
1:30 – Mr. Gross is going to have sex with Julie from “The Love Boat.”
1:50 – The people, they barely care.
2:02 – The young man in the striped shirt sports a haircut, one rarely seen in captivity, that connoisseurs call “The Inundation.”
2:08 – You are witnessing a young lady paralyzed by the bedroomy musk of a local television-news personality.
2:29 – That’s a fake voice.
So what have I missed?