Last Thursday, our Fearless Leader provided rumination on dreaming, or the unfulfilled and limitless potential of the future, as the game’s greatest strength. (If you haven’t read it, please take a moment to go do so; otherwise, my rebuttal won’t make much sense.) I’d like to take this opportunity to present an alternative viewpoint, in defense of the past.

I’ve always struggled with the present tense. We’re often cajoled, by motivational posters and the ghost of Satchel Paige, to live in the moment; but by the time that moment has happened, we’ve received the data, interpreted it and understood it, it’s long since passed. We’re always a fraction of a step behind reality. To cross that already treacherous boundary into the future, and to make predictions, sometimes feels incomprehensible to me. My own inability to dream, to imagine the unformed possibilities beyond the event horizon, probably says a lot about me, or at least my failures as a novelist. It might also say something about my home team, whose future and past are all too often similarly dressed.

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Please begin this reading experience by enjoying the following graph:

You may be under the impression that this graph represents the win expectancy of the Toronto Blue Jays as they faced the Oakland Athletics on July 25, 2012. It is certainly within the realm of possibility. However, without labels, we cannot be sure! It could also be one of the following, as the Y value relates to X:

1. The collective hope of Toronto Blue Jays fans (Y) / time (X)
2. The win expectancy of Charles d’Albret in facing the British at Agincourt / time
3. The amount of sense in a Peter Gammons tweet / the amount of characters in said tweet
4. The quality of cereal in milk / time
5. The number of stories about bird watching in Sports Illustrated / year
6. The ability to feel sorry about one’s self / number of pages read of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning
7. The satisfaction received from drafting Daniel Bard in 2012 / time
8. The number of aquatic frogs owned in a given aquarium / survival rate of said frogs
9. The enjoyment derived from having a new smartphone / time
10. The amount of churlishness in a Horatio Alger protagonist / time
11. The number of gamers / average progress made in TMNT for the NES

There are literally dozens of possibilities. Collect and trade them with your friends!

The youth are a continual problem in society. They listen to music created by autonomous computers and Canadians, eat cereal comprised entirely of marshmallow, and are occasionally sulky about the incomprehensibly massive national debt they will inherit without representation. They giggle uncontrollably upon hearing the word “fart” and play card games with rules based on statistics far more complicated than anything found on this fair site. Surely, any attempt to understand such creatures is tantamount to madness.

Woe betide, then, the baseball card company whose profits are linked directly to these whimsical beasts. At least, they were until the early 1990s, when the price of a pack of baseball cards tripled in three years and children were crowded out of the market by “investors” and post-philatelists. Sensing a demographic issue, the marketing gurus at Topps and other baseball card companies found a solution: “Kids Cards”, which would appeal to the young soul of the consumer and bring them back into the collectible fold.

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In which the members of the AL East Champion New York Yankees are inserted into the blurbs on the backs of chapter books, thus imbuing both man and literature with additional gravitas.

Night of the Living Dummy

When twins Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter find a ventriloquist’s dummy in a dumpster, Derek decides to rescue it, and he names it Slappy.

But Alex is green with envy. It’s not fair. Why does Derek get to have all the fun and all the attention? Alex decides to get a dummy of his own. He’ll show Derek. Then weird things begin to happen. Nasty things. Evil things.

It can’t be the dummy causing all the trouble. Can it?

Nick T. Swisher Is a Beauty Shop Guy

What’s the bestest job ever?

A beauty shop guy, that’s what! And Nick Swisher is going to be one when he grows up. But first he needs a little practice. And a few volunteers. Like his bunny slippers. And his dog. And maybe even… himself? Is Nick on his way to a new career? Or is he about to have the worst hair day ever?

Raul Ibanez Is: Rampant

Raul Ibanez had always scoffed at his eccentric mother’s stories about killer unicorns. But when one of the monsters attacks his friend and teammate, Brett Gardner – thereby ruining any chance of them going to the World Series – Raul finds himself headed to Rome to train as a unicorn hunter in the ancient cloisters the hunters have used for centuries.

This will not be the first time that I’ve bemoaned the slow death of eBay, which has essentially devolved into a different, more poorly organized version of Amazon.com. As the proliferation of “online stores” with one-price sales has continued, the online auction site no longer gives us a conception of the free market at work. For example, a search for “Chone Figgins Mariners Jersey” reveals no item costing less than forty dollars, which may be forty times the actual price point according to supply and demand.

Even so, a good economic market has occasional irregularities and inefficiencies that speak the interest of the purchaser, and give him or her the hope that offsets the effort of shopping. Essentially, we want to capitalize on someone else’s inability to detect the value of their own merchandise. We want free stuff. Thus today I present a collection of baseball paraphernalia that has, in recent times, been free on the internet, selling for six cents or less, including free shipping (and handling). Even the envelope used to mail these items are more expensive than the purchases themselves. All of these could have been yours – and perhaps, with luck, they still might be someday.

MEMORABILIA CATEGORY

Photocopy of Joe DiMaggio’s Death Certificate ($0.01): I have to admit, this is both strangely compelling and morose. There’s an undeniable urge to treat anything baseball or baseball player-related as collectible, not so much out of callousness or greed but in our interest in compiling the history of the game we love. But what do you do with a death certificate? You can’t frame it. You can’t really celebrate it. And yet, for a penny, I could see myself buying it. Should I feel bad about this?

For those with moral qualms, there’s also an equally useless but less squicky copy of Roberto Clemente’s original contract with the Pirates.

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An empty bar.
Two fans.
Midnight.

VLADIMIR: Nothing you can do about it.
ESTRAGON: No use struggling.
VLADIMIR: It is what it is.
ESTRAGON: No use wriggling.
VLADIMIR: The essential doesn’t change.
ESTRAGON: (Drinking the remnants of his glass.) We should quit.
VLADIMIR: Drinking?
ESTRAGON: Watching games.
VLADIMIR: We can’t.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for Godot.
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Last week, I shared a new statistic, called FAME, that measured the amount of acclaim that a player received during his career. The purpose of this endeavor was to compare the established greatness of players with the recognition of their accomplishments, and it produced a few minor revelations, namely that Yogi Berra was incredibly overrated in his time, and that Tony Phillips may not have actually existed at all, and was created as a psychological experiment by professors at Stanford who posted flyers on Oakland telephone poles reading “Tony Phillips Has a Posse”.

Yogi won three MVP awards, tied for the second most of all-time, yet never actually led the league in WAR. His FAME score, more than any other player, dwarfs his actual numbers. This led me to ask: what if the BBWAA were, retroactively, to cast off their intangibles and surrender to the droning hive-mind of the baseball accountancy? What if the MVP were awarded to the player who provided the most value to their team, regardless of context, over the hypothetical replacement player? What if John Larroquette were to be considered the greatest television actor of his generation?

As it turns out, the MVP in its current form is a perfect example of the inherent conflict between precision and suspense. Here, for the purposes of comparison, is a list of all players who won three or more MVP awards in their career:

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Having no personal attachment to the Atlanta Braves or the St. Louis Cardinals, I watched the bottom of the eighth inning of the Wild Card Game with mingled amusement and helplessness. As the furor grew and people displayed their frustration through ballistics, the announcers grew increasingly disdainful, warning about forfeits and then simply shaming the fans for their behavior.

For those wounded Braves fans, I have nothing to offer except a shrug of the shoulders, a note about the fickle cruelty of life, and this related but comfortless tale about a meaningless baseball game from long ago. I hope it evokes some brief flicker of merriment.

It was the summer of 2003. I was, at that time, living in the tiny municipality of Busan, South Korea, teaching small children to say the word “fish” and having painful barstool conversations with drunken expatriates. One July afternoon, my friend and I thought it would be pleasant to watch the hometown Lotte Giants face off against the Hyundai Unicorns.

It was a contest between the two worst teams in the league, played on a charmless, unending summer afternoon. The crowds filtered through the rusted turnstiles like zombies, circling the concrete skeleton that was the Sajik Baseball Stadium. These days, Lotte boasts the most popular team in the KBO, setting attendance records. But in 2003, the Giants were on their way to the worst record in the league for the third straight season, and it showed:

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“Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don’t need you.”
– James Michener, advice to aspiring writers

You may have noticed, dear readers, that nowhere in the previous quotation does our historical novelist friend mention statistics. Indeed, it’s a well-known rite of passage for each intrepid, young baseball writer to craft his or her own statistic, much as the children of olden times smithed silver goblets or shot bears.

My quest began, as all sources of intellectual thought and debate in our modern times, with the AL MVP debate. My target was neither the loathsome RBI-proponents who back Miguel Cabrera nor the equally loathsome trigonometry professors who support Mike Trout. Instead, my target was those lofty journalists and philosophers who preferred to stay above the fray by positing that the AL MVP race didn’t really matter anyway. It’s not cool to care about awards, after all. Winning and process reign supreme; nationwide validation for one’s achievements is meaningless if not conceited.

But it does mean something. Look at Detroit’s own Alan Trammell: if he had won the 1987 AL MVP over RBI-machine George Bell, it would have changed the face of his Hall of Fame candidacy. He wouldn’t have been plagued by the consistent, good-but-not-great label that wore the creases into his face and killed his chance at immortality. Not even learning that Wade Boggs took the WAR crown in ’87 could quench my newfound thirst for justice.

And so it is with both pleasure and light self-satisfaction that I present, with my colleague Joel (twitter: @CajoleJuiceEsq), FanGraphs’ newest statistic: FAME, or the Fanfare and Acclaim Metric Extraordinaire.

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The baseball card industry, to me, is fascinating. People are willing to pay real money for little bits of cardboard coated in plastic and foil, with tiny and usually grainy pictures of baseball players. The entirety of a baseball card, the images and statistics, can be found on Google in six seconds. The cards have differing values based on the player depicted on the card, and that value has no relation whatsoever to the aesthetic merit of the player in question.

Despite the crumbling of the baseball card industry some ten years back, these cards are still worth some money, despite the fact that they have no intrinsic value to speak of. The baseball card economy is driven solely by the irrational demand of its customers, driven by tales of Mantles and Wagners found in attics, or driven by the horror of the investments their own mothers had tossed away. In short, baseball card collecting is as useless as it is ridiculous, a waste of time and energy.

This is not, in actuality, a bad thing.

Happiness, after all, is often found in the ridiculous. We cannot be caught up in the spiral of productivity and efficiency; these ideas may make us better, and stronger, but they also make us slaves. They’re emblematic of the childlike sense of play that is crushed out of us by societal conformity and increased obligations. Noted (forgotten) philosopher, playwright, and dashing rogue Friedrich von Schiller spoke out as a proponent of frivolity against a backdrop of developing industrialism. It’s only during play, says he (in German), that we develop our aesthetic sense and allow our curiosity to develop. Leisure, it turns out, is good for us. A hundred and thirty years later, legendary face-maker Bertrand Russell piled on, noting that hobbies are “fun”.

So rather than continuing to impugn the dumb activity that is baseball card collecting, I’d like to celebrate it. Unlike most “important” things, no person has ever been killed over a baseball card, or at least there is no evidence of it when I google “killed over a baseball card”.

Our first entry in the history of dumb baseball cards: the 1981 Fleer Graig Nettles Error Card.

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