While perusing society’s flotsam at my local thrift store, I stumbled on this rare archaeological find:

The figure you see before you (photographed at a distance, for I was loathe to touch it) is a lifeless homunculus crafted in the image of former Kansas City Royals pitcher Mark Gubicza. Note the characteristic markings and the telltale mullet that place the artifact in the Bob Boone Era (1994-1996 AD). But this was no mere toy, no pagan idol: nefarious deeds were done to this Gubicza. The talented, troublesome left arm is sheared just below the shoulder, the right ankle fractured where he once took a Paul Molitor line drive. The air around the resin was rank with ill omen.

What I had unwittingly stumbled upon, nestled inconspicuously among the little league trophies, was a horrific monkey’s paw: this token, in the hands of some vengeful man or woman, had brought about the downfall of a once proud franchise. Through some voodoo trick or some unholy pact, this villain obviously destroyed both Mark Gubicza and the Kansas City Royals in one cruel motion.  It can safely be assumed that only when the arm is returned, and the ankle repaired by some master craftsman, will the curse be lifted.

Did I embark on this quest? I did not. You may judge me a coward, dear readers, from your comfortable swivel chairs and your well-lit cubicles. You may judge me thus, but you cannot think me a fool. After taking this photograph, I fled from the thrift store in haste, drove home, and showered relentlessly.  I dare not bring down the Curse of Gubicza on my own house, dear readers. I have a family to think of.

It was an emotional weekend at NotGraphs Staff Headquarters in Kamloops, British Columbia. Tears were shed, throats were punched, and the situation grew desperate when Eno Sarris poured out all the Kokanee in a fit of beer-righteous rage. Somehow, in the eleventh hour, a hasty and ill-advised compromise was hammered out, and we can now declare the results of the mercifully completed Villanelle Challenge.

Separate winners were selected from the staff and from the readership. The latter will have the honor of having their poem read aloud during a subsequent episode of FanGraphs Audio by none other than the until-this-moment-unaware Carson Cistulli, while Dayn Perry shudders as the structured rhyme violates his delicate sensibilities. They will also receive, via postal mail delivery, a 1983 Topps Von Hayes baseball card in Very Good condition, retailing at $0.03. The winner of the staff division will win a Dick Allen shrinkydink, which is naturally priceless.

Without further ado, the envelope:

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[Author’s Note: Due to forces totally within the author’s control, such as the fact that he went to see a show last night, the results of Villanelle Week will be posted on Monday. This gives you a couple of days to polish off your half-finished poem or, alternately, a few extra days of suspense. Please schedule your lives accordingly.]

As evidenced by the Call to Action made by our Fearless Leader on Tuesday, we have in the midst of our poetics taken a moment to consider the essentials of our being. That is, we have asked ourselves and all of you, that defining question: “What is a NotGraphs?” You answered, dear readers, and you answered pithily.

Now I’d like to take a moment, if it pleases you, and if it doesn’t, to follow with a second query: “Why is a NotGraphs?” But first, an aside.

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Your daguerreotype  of the evening, lovingly hand-stitched with the magical fibers of Photoshop, is a digital quilt of the 2013 Hall of Fame vote. Bask in the ennui.

This has been your despair-soaked daguerreotype of the evening.

Today is a day when we as a nation look inward and backward and catawampus, reflecting on the history of baseball and how we can shape it into the past we wished it would have been. And as we watch our benevolent elites erase twenty years’ worth of box scores from their own yellowing newsprint, take a moment to enjoy our national pastime just as it appeared in the early days of Jack Morris. Play, vicariously through me, some Classic Baseball.

Glimpse upon the ball itself, burning fiery crimson with the passion-rage of the athlete who loves his game too much. Consider the bases, each the size of a real man’s heart, the only part of each baserunner visible. Stare at the emerald green of the turf, the quaint dirt path from the mound to the plate. Watch Morris pitch to the .700 OPS of Chris Chambliss, representative average hitter of his generation. Note the conspicuous absence of Lou Whitaker or Alan Trammell.

Jack Morris’ baseball doesn’t have any statistics that can’t be represented by LED lights. There’s no room for FIP, or ERA, or hits, or errors. There are innings, outs, balls, strikes, and the score. There are wins. In baseball, you win or you lose and that’s what you are. Sometimes you hit the ball and it beeps three times; sometimes you hit the ball and it makes an angry sound. That is all there is to say. That is life.

This is real baseball, free of chemicals or graphics or analysis. This is Classic Baseball.

The winter season and its accompanying ham-based feasts have left all of us – yes, I mean all of us – somewhat indolent. The wire is quiet this time of year, the football playoffs are full of shouting and trumpet fanfares, and even hockey has crawled out of its burrow and glimpsed its own shadow, ensuring six weeks of a regular season. To stave off this baseball hypothermia, I issued a Villanelle Challenge to the esteemed authors of this fair site, its readers, and by extension, the world.

“What is a villanelle?” those of you with useful undergraduate degrees might ask. Wikipedia explains it best: “A villanelle (also known as villanesque) is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines.” Or, as Robert Wallace put it: “There are enough villanelles in English to convince us that poets like to make trouble for themselves.” Here are a few famous examples.

As with any real contest, the NotGraphs Villanelle Challenge offers no rewards and holds no serious purpose. Those who would like to submit their own poems can do so through the hotline; by the end of the week they will be read, judged with the utmost partiality, and the best of the best will be posted here on Friday. Think of the glory! Think of conquering the most imposing, ridiculous monument in English-language poetry! Think about finding a rhyming dictionary!

But first: a villanelle about the newly unemployed Rick VandenHurk.

The Tale of VandenHurk

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Yesterday, readers thrilled as Carson opened up what was seriously the worst pack of baseball cards of all-time. Though we each in turn smiled at the Phelpsness of life, the reader’s attention was inevitably drawn to the shattered dead-pink remains of the Topps Chewing Gum, that Proustian Madeline that instantly transports us back to our own childhoods. As is often true of the old and regretful, we tend to heap scorn upon the impetuousness of our youth and the gum that recalls it. This is in error.

We owe much to the gum of yesteryear. When Jonas Salk first tested the polio vaccine in 1952, he implemented it not through intravenous methods but through the distribution of an upstart baseball card company’s chewing gum. The success of the 1952 Topps set saved thousands of lives and paved the way for the elimination of the dread disease worldwide.

After this first success, Topps experimented with other beneficial effects in its chewing gum, and despite an unsuccessful 1956 issue partnered with Aldous Huxley to include mescaline in every piece, many of the results were positive. Topps fortified its gum ingredients with St. John’s Wort, riboflavin, and sawdust from a game-used Ted Williams bat. A scientific study in the mid 80s estimated that athletic performance of kids chewing Topps chewing gum was enhanced “at a level ranking somewhere between ingesting an orange M&M and a green one” (McCloskey, 1985). [Editor’s Note: The discovery of the home-run hitting effects and the general proliferation of green M&M’s, rather than steroids, proved to be the true cause of the inflated statistics of the past twenty years.]

Anyone still doubtful of the curative properties of Topps Chewing Gum need only look upon the following graph, and despair.

Clearly, there is a childhood obesity crisis in America, and we are in deep trouble. There is one solution. I beg you, dear readers, go find all the unopened 1987 Topps packs you can. Use a mortar and pestle, and stir the powder into your children’s milk or macaroni and cheese. Do it now, before it’s too late. This has been a NotGraphs Public Service Announcement.

Things are never what they used to be. Take a moment, if you would, and think back on your own childhood. Saturday mornings teemed with cartoons. You would go off and play and your parents would have no idea where you were for hours, sometimes weeks. Cereal had toys in it. Trick-or-treating took place in actual neighborhoods instead of malls and parking lots. The summer movie season was full of films being made for the first time.

Given these facts, as well as the human tendency to selectively remember only the positive things about the past, it’s difficult not to read into every new piece of news as the next step in the inevitable decay of society. Change is lame, we must admit, but not all change is loss; there are things we don’t remember, or never knew, about our idyllic histories that needed to change for the better. We must struggle to see the inequalities in our society, to envision the entire equation, and not merely rage against our own minute sense of loss as time passes.

One knows this. One trains for this. One keeps it lodged near his heart, lets it hurt him once in a while to remind him that it is there. And then one finds this.

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The phone rang, rattling in the glove compartment, but Nick Johnson did not hear it. He was already halfway to the creek. His boots crackled among the the skeletons of leaves scattered between the upturned roots as he wandered vaguely downwards toward the sound of water. It was cold and dry, and he pinched his ears to warm them.

He reached the water, and scanned the area around him: no evidence of man in sight. The creek had a name, but he did not know it. So did the ground beneath his feet. He was probably trespassing, he knew, but the thought aroused no excitement or fear in him. Everything named is owned by someone, he thought. Am I owned by someone?

With a pocketknife he cut a four-foot branch of a willow and notched an end. Then he pulled out an old tobacco tin from his shirt pocket; it had belonged to his grandfather, and most of the color had worn off. He pulled out a hook and a coil of line, then assembled the pole. Busy hands keep a busy mind, he thought. His grandfather had told him that, or else he remembered it that way. He kicked over a few rocks until he found a worm, nice and thick and pink. It was a good day.

He pulled back the pole and paused. This was the only part that was different now, if he forgot his own age. If he forgot the SUV parked on the dirt road and the agent probably calling him with optimistic words, words he shouldn’t need to hear but did. He cast the line, trying and failing to ignore the pain in his wrist that only lasted a moment but meant everything. The hook landed on the surface and then sank gently into the shallow water.

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Yesterday the Major League of Baseball released its 2013 Batting Practice Caps. And while the the news was generally greeted by the grateful tears of sorely underhatted and overfunded fans, it must be admitted that there was a small, sullen minority who felt some modicum of dissatisfaction at one particular logo, that of the storied Atlanta Braves:

As a responsible and thorough pseudo-journalist, I delved into the minds of the casual baseball fan; i.e., I read some internet comments sections. After the resulting chest pains and consumption of cheap whiskey, I can hesitantly lay out the following assessments:

1. That there will always be, in any society, a sense of conflict between people with disparate beliefs and values, and that in such circumstances the act of offending other people is, inevitably, unavoidable.

2. That there will always be people who feel fatigue at such a prospect, and turn to the universality that any feeling of being offended is at best a sign of weakness, and at worst a passive-aggressive attempt to wrest control over the presumed aggressor.

3. That we as a nation are no more settled on the question of political correctness, or even the nature of what makes something offensive to other people, than we were when we were creating Jeremy Piven Animal House ripoffs in the early nineties.

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