While those disinclined to ponder the inevitable see the 31st of December as the precipice of a new year — a date rich with the illusion of possibility — those devoted to base and ball will know it as the “Day of Crap.”

Why, you may ask, are those poo-festooned hours festooned with poo? Because 12/31/11 marks not the death in hospice of another year but rather the point at which we are equally distant from having seen baseball and seeing baseball again.

You see, the last out of the most recent World Series — God’s favorite World Series — occurred on October 28, 2011. Actual baseball won’t occur until February 29, 2012, when the Phillies renew hostilities with their august rivals Florida State. That comes to 124 days without that which helps us through the night. Advising us the diseased to find any port in a storm is useful only when there’s a port in view. Tomorrow, there shall be no port in view.

At the moment of Camus’s death by French sports car, he was likely plagued (see what I did there?) by thoughts of Algerian colonialism. Tomorrow shall be 24 hours of that moment.

It is well known that the Yankees, proconsuls to all that is gnarled and dark, exist primarily not to play base and ball but rather to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. As though we needed proof beyond what horse-sense confides, here’s a particularly damning GIF. Click and be appalled!

Little explanation is needed, but that’s a young fellow in a Yankee cap at the funeral of the late Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, who was coconuts. Kim was, of course, a vicious despot, so it should come as no surprise that the young man in the cap was a sanctioned emissary dispatched by the Yankee front office in order to ensure a post-transition diplomatic relationship with DPRK!*

Patriots awake!

(Secret handshake of the resistance movement: UniWatch)

^{* Not true, but still …}

Thanks to the death-infused search functions at Baseball-Reference, it’s easy to compile a list of ballplayers who selfishly ruined the holidays by dying on Christmas Day. Let us remember their crossing of the Styx and their insistence on doing so while everyone else was just trying to enjoy themselves.

Also remember this: As you open gifts, force chestnuts down the gullet and nod off in the glow of a D-level bowl game, someone somewhere is dying and thus soiling an otherwise fine day.

Ancient papyrus texts and the earliest cave etchings make unmistakable references to HVAC systems and their power to save humanity. As we learned in succeeding years, the world was at once saved, propelled forward and curated by dutiful monks in their scriptoria and the wholesome, restorative power of air conditioning, which was invented by Patrick Henry, Jaco Pastorius and Nipsey Russell in 850 B.C. Shortly thereafter, the same trio invented baseball and then combined the two on the streets of Houston, Texas, U.S.A., Earth:

There are many reasons we can’t have nice things, but only one reason we can. That reason is air conditioning and its sexy possibilities.

(Freon kiss: Reddit)

The NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation team has confirmed, through highly placed sources, that the following is a Thing That Actually Happened. At this time, we know little else about this thing, but it happened and elicited in onlookers emotions ranging from “happy-lucky” to “no more of this; leave me the hell be.” Again, we know it happened:

True, there is no baseball here. But there once was. And there shall be again.

The child doesn’t want to sleep because of the wonderment about him. Why would one enter, of one’s own volition, that state of soft death when there is so much to absorb? The adult, in contrast, embraces the coward’s sojourn known as sleep because he realizes a consciousness-less existence — a numb, unfeeling life on ice — is in so many ways preferable to the waking one. These little tastes of the abyss ready us for the unending, unswerving one to come.

So it follows that when the human animal begins taking naps, begins looking forward to the captive embrace of suspended animation, the slide toward the grave has begun. Sleep is for those who are in on the joke and have figured out it is not funny but rather horrifying down to our decomposing bones.

And then there is Tug McGraw, who, in the face of all evidence, seemed … happy.

Tug McGraw almost certainly did not nap. Tug McGraw was like a kid out there. We miss you, Tug Damn McGraw.

As the Farmer’s Almanac tells us, it is not late spring, summer or early fall, which means there is no baseball here. Sure, there are posting fees, trades and signings to sustain us, but the ugly, mottled truth remains: there is no baseball here.

To remind us of this, to flagellate us for this, we present to you the following GIF, which is of Bud Selig speaking at length about something, mostly likely in oddly funereal terms. Please click to watch gloom drip out of Bud Selig’s mouth:

This has not been baseball because there is no baseball here.

It was with a measure of confidence that today, in the break room, you attested: “That Rudy Pemberton. He was just a ballplayer.”

About this — in addition to your callow belief in a better tomorrow — you were horribly wrong …

Sure, the image above shows Rudy Pemberton in professional action, but what of the disembodied spectral presence, the one whose soft, Olan Mills edges suggest a man of a poet’s dimension and discontent? He hovers about our assumptions like a reproving moon.

You owe Rudy Pemberton an apology.

(Image taken from a GeoCities page called Boston.com)

Young Derek Jeter’s mother dressed him in a sensible collared Le Tigre for school pictures, but Young Derek Jeter removed it in the boys’ bathroom in favor of the Georgetown sweatshirt he keeps in his locker.

Young Derek Jeter believes that no one in the entire world of Michigan loves Georgetown basketball as much as he does.

Young Derek Jeter doesn’t look for his first chest hair, he watches for his first chest hair.

Young Derek Jeter once gave Melanie Cunningham a Rubik’s Cube with his name on it as a reward for making out with him behind the TG&Y. She smiled. “What a great idea that was,” Young Derek Jeter thought.

It was four months ago that he caught his reflection in the passenger-side window of his father’s Subaru Justy. “I have the most beautiful eyes,” Young Derek Jeter said to himself. “I shall use them to my advantage.”

Young Derek Jeter has referred to hairstyles as “hats for the young man who doesn’t need a hat.”

At the “Spring Fling,” he asked Vanessa Trumbull to dance the moment he heard the opening strains of “Purple Rain.” “No thanks,” she said. “Then you won’t get a Rubik’s Cube with my name on it,” Young Derek Jeter said.

On the baseball diamond, Young Derek Jeter actually has outstanding range to his left, but he chooses not to employ it, lest everything look a little too splendid out there.

Perfection bores Young Derek Jeter, which is why sometimes at church he falls down on purpose. “See?” he says to onlooking parishioners. “Even Young Derek Jeter falls down.”

Young Derek Jeter’s mother will probably be upset about the Georgetown sweatshirt thing, but consequences bore Young Derek Jeter as much as perfection does.

When Young Derek Jeter coils to swing at a pitch, everyone bearing witness, even opposing players, whispers, “I cannot wait to see what happens.”

Young Derek Jeter can wait to see what happens because Young Derek Jeter knows exactly what’s going to happen.

(HT: Snakkle and Todd’s championship Twitter feed)

What follows isn’t particularly new, but, other than fresh dimensions of human misery, what really is?

If the Phillies were a nation-state in the literal sense, then what follows would surely prompt the full menu of solemn condemnations on the part of the U.N.:

As grave provocations go, this one is rather nifty. This question, however, is raised: if the Phillies owned the Mets, would they, although brimming with ill intentions and malice aforethought, provide better stewardship than the let’s-set-these-action-figures-on-fire ways of Fred Wilpon and his boy?

In any event, since this shot across the bow has gone unanswered, the New York Mets shall, from this day forward, be known as the Flushing Terms of Surrender. I say it is so; thus it is so.

(Much love: The Mets Police)