(Author’s note: it’s late, and I’ve just consumed several glasses of port and several hours of Comedy Central’s horrible, repetitive advertisements. The mixture has put me in a melancholy mood. Verily warned, therefore, be ye.)

Last night, the Washington Nationals secured first place in the National League, bringing playoff baseball to our nation’s capital for the first time since 1932. Washington fans have been waiting their entire lives to see this day. Or, they’ve been waiting eight years.

The mark of Montreal has been effectively wiped from the franchise. After the departure of Livan Hernandez, no current National has ever donned the Montreal uniform. Only fourteen former Expos played in the major leagues in 2012; their most able veteran was Jamey Carroll, whose 2.2 WAR is reflected primarily through his ability to field grounders at shortstop. Eventually, they too will shuffle off.

Growing up, I never held strong feelings about the Expos. They belonged to a different league, different time zone, and their red-white-and-blue uniforms seemed a little garish. I couldn’t figure out their logo, and their best player in the late 80s, Tim Raines, was a threatening approximation of my own favorite player, Rickey Henderson.

But as a Seattleite, I can empathize with Montreal. We don’t talk about other sports here very often, what with it being a baseball site and all, but growing up I was a big Sonics fan. I watched as a struggling franchise with a decrepit home arena was dragged away by a loathsome owner. Of course, I was upset. Like many, I declared the NBA dead to me, swore my hatred of the OKC Thunder and their stupid powder blue uniforms and their ironic glasses and backpacks and their dumb faces.

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I have been in the same head-to-head, sixteen-team fantasy league for eleven years now. Over that span keepers have come and gone, rules have changed, franchises have arrived and folded. My original four keepers were Ray Durham, Mark Mulder, Barry Zito, and Barry Bonds. My first season, I drafted both Richard Hidalgo and Daryle Ward. My best draft pick that year was Odalis Perez in the 17th round.

These are interesting things, right? They are not interesting. As soon as you read the word “fantasy” in the title, your brain had already sent orders to your eyes to glaze. It is a truth universally acknowledged that everyone loves to talk about their fantasy team and everyone hates to listen to people talk about their fantasy team. It’s one of life’s bitterest ironies, ranking just below Malthus’ theory that increased food production leads to starvation.

I once had a friend in college with whom I would discuss baseball. He was in a deep dynasty league, where teams were made and destroyed in AA. He described his latest trades in earnest, and I enjoyed listening to his superior expertise. The moment I would mention my own team, however, his smile would sag at the corners, the kindness leaving his eyes. He would make that face, and then quickly, he’d excuse himself from the conversation. I caught on fairly quickly, but it still struck me as unfair. We were talking about baseball: something that Billy Crystal had once promised would form an instant bond between all males! Something was wrong.

Fantasy sports are the culmination of what the existentialists first warned us of: a future rich in comfort, where everyone is utterly disconnected from each other. Our own happiness has become meaningless to those around us. As we craft our little life stories through the careful, calculated observation of baseball players, they’re stories that no one else particularly wants to read. We match our wits against the elements, an increasingly faceless online presence. We play the stock market. It’s rarely about the money; it’s rarely even about the bragging rights. I’d be surprised if the majority of players remember who won their league last season. Instead, it’s about the ability to predict the outside world, a world that no longer has anything to do with us. We’re made to feel ashamed for our pride, to lock it away.

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Look, Lew Ford knows. He’s read all the articles about Pythagorean wins, and the articles making fun of the articles about Pythagorean wins. He knows that his team spits in the face of every predictive metric out there, and that if there were any such thing as karma, a giant worm would broken out of the earth and devoured the entire bullpen. He knows that Notgraphs has already published seven articles about the Orioles in the last two weeks alone, that there’s a backlash against the backlash against the backlash. He knows all too well the fickle nature of American celebrity culture, its simultaneous thirst for underdog and sacrifice.

Lew Ford knows himself, as well. He recognizes that we live in a universe of chance. He’s spent plenty of time contemplating the unlikeliness of his own existence: as a professional athlete, as a prospective children’s author, as a sperm. He understands our desire to feel secure, to feel as if the world around us behaves according to rules, and that he himself violates those rules. He knows that his own success can only diminish our conceptualization of success itself by adding to its randomness. Lew Ford understands that Lew Ford makes our existence, in some small way, less meaningful because of his own.

That said, Lew Ford knows that the worst thing you can do is to try to control the uncontrollable, to fight against the current and struggle in vain; far better to let it lead you where it may. That no matter how much life confounds you, all you can do is raise your eyebrows and smile back at it.

Lew Ford knows all this. And now, he’s going to ground out weakly to first, because he is Lew Ford.

Unless you have been without internet access for the last several weeks until this exact moment, or are somehow reading these words from the flickering monitor of a hollowed out office building where you are scavenging supplies while attempting to survive in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, you are no doubt well aware of the website Matthew Carlins described as “the most important blog on the internet today.” I am, of course, talking about the website of NotGraphs’ very own Carson Cistulli, Getting the Paper.

Getting the Paper is a statement of the human condition, reduced to the combination of sunshine, newsprint, weeds, and Craftsman-style porch. It flies in the face of our expectations, hurling paradoxes at our feet and forcing us to re-evaluate the societal norms that have, without our explicit permission, created the foundations of our knowledge. Why does this website exist? the website asks. Why am I viewing it? By viewing it, have I already validated its existence? Have I validated mine? How can we track the location of newspapers when newspapers stopped existing back in 2009?

These are all important questions that I leave to the reader; there is no time to answer them now. Instead I raise a separate but equally vital issue to your attention. None of us exists in a vacuum, Paul Simon notwithstanding; one cannot get a paper unless it is given. We are bound to look up to the heavens and ask, “Who is delivering Carson Cistulli’s newspaper?”

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Welcome to this, the fifth installment of the Ironic Jersey Omnibus. Our tour of personal expression through the medium of polyester and hand-stitching, last seen in the majestic purple of the Colorado Rockies, wanders southeast toward the sunny climate of Houston, Texas.

The Astros, both as a social construct and as a jersey, contain some idiosyncrasies that must be touched upon before we move on to the body of our work. Few teams have hurled themselves so eagerly into the aesthetic void as the former Colt .45s, adorning themselves with stars, rainbows, comets, guns, and numbers on pants. The exuberance the reader must feel at such a dizzying choice of fashion is understandable. It’s with a heavy heart, only somewhat feigned, that I ask you to throw the entire wardrobe out.

Today, there is no room for Eddie Mathews. We must turn away from Nellie Fox, Joe Niekro and even JR Richard. It is not time for Joe Morgan. Not even the muted, tolerable averageness of Terry Puhl can dampen the orange hue of better times. No, today we speak of a franchise that is severly wounded. We can’t ignore it, or wink at it. To wear an Astros jersey is to don the funeral garb.

During these dark times, there are really only three ways to wear an Astros jersey. The first is through sincerity, in total mourning for their ballclub. Such touching and honest displays of loyalty need not be discussed here.

The alternatives are to struggle vainly against the dying of the light, to mock the heavens and the ownership that has forsaken them, or to offer one’s self up in the holy resignation of Kierkegaard, caring for the soul and waiting for divine judgment. Think of this edition of the Omnibus, then, as your spiritual guide as we delve into the darkness of Astrodom and, hopefully, emerge from the other side as wiser, more sophisticated, and better-dressed fans.

STAGE 1: ANGER

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We all know that excitement is a finite, limited resource, easily depleted by September call-ups, teams with poor Pythagorean records, and the tinny, joyous music of the ice cream truck just beyond view. As a cautionary service against emptying one’s self of optimism and retreating into a cynical shell of a man/woman, we travel back to the Magical World of Yesterday, specifically October 1990, to look at the game’s hottest stars, as depicted in ink on shrinkable plastic.

(Said depictions are, as one might imagine, easily embiggenable.)

#1: Ben McDonald

1990 Upper Deck Card: $3.50. (Error card: $32.00.)

Why We Were Excited: He was a pitcher, and he was really tall!

Why We Stopped Being Excited: Synecdoche is an unfortunate reality for pitchers, and America was never able to fall in love with Ben McDonald’s arm as we could his oversized heart.

Career Highlight: Getting on the cover of Sports Illustrated with a baseball in his mouth.

Life Since Baseball: Owns a plantation where you and he can shoot animals with large guns together, as well as listen to fiddle music.

Random Japanese Fact: Visiting bigbenmcdonald.com will transport you to the Japanese webpage of Pitfall of establishment Ltd., which (with the aid of Google Translate) is designed for the betterment of humankind. From their press release: “I make money and the like. Create products to contribute to society, I think many people are thinking of making money. For this purpose, as a means of personal business is easiest. And services such as massage, I think there are a lot of people who have a business idea is not widely spread.” Ben McDonald’s enormous watch is also on display.

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Late in the evening sometimes, when the moon is high and the echoes of my wife’s indie music have been soaked into the drywall, I will make an effort to Better myself as a Person and open, with no small hesitation, Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. For those readers who are unaware or are not masochistic, People’s History is America as seen by the working class, the men and women who worked eighteen hours a day while dying of cancer and mercury poisoning simultaneously, who were thrown in jail for whispering and were regularly beaten for wearing denim.

In other words, People’s History is not what people in the marketing business call a “light read”. It almost explains why, after eighteen months, I have finished 54.7% of the book. I am not good with the concept of sadness.

But I wouldn’t have made it even that far without Matt Alexander:

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One might detect, if one somehow had the inclination, a certain level of melancholy in some of my baseball writing. I assure you that this is in no way reflected in my love for the game in question, but rather a defect in my upbringing wherein my parents lamentably provided me no real tragedy with which to ground my craft. I am a Mariners fan, and this has done its best to to counter my unfortunate life of fortune, but I doubt it’s enough.

Perhaps this is why I took to baseball, rather than football or basketball; in football the offense and defense of a game is seen as a net zero sum, with only occasional flashes of unstoppable brilliance from either side. In basketball, where defense is still treated by the media with uncomfortable derision, offensive performance is quantified as varying levels of heroism, on a scale from zero to one. Only baseball, as Ted Williams remarked, is littered with failure. The best batters get out six times out of ten, and the onus of this is still placed on the shoulders of the hitter, rather than the will of the defense. We are not yet writing poems about the man who struck out Mighty Casey.

The purpose of this long-winded introduction, as you may have surmised, is to reflect on some of the writings of nineteenth-century philosopher and general malcontent Arthur Schopenhauer, specifically his unshakable opinion that the world is full of suffering. His best line: “A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating with those of the animal being eaten.” Misery is everywhere, and it’s unavaoidable.

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We’ve all encountered it at some point in our lives: in little league, the playground at recess, during our short stint playing alongside Daryle Ward in independent ball. The situation: you’re running to first, and standing in your way is the first baseman, ball in glove, ready to apply the tag. As you run forward, you wait for the exact moment and then make The Move, also known as the Top Gun move: hit the brakes and watch them fly right by. A quick feint to our left, the fielder stumbles forward, chagrin already dawning upon him, as you sidestep and proceed down the line. You reach first safely, the crowd cheers and throws down roses, and a sandwich is named in your honor.

Of course, the move has never worked for you. Nor has it ever worked for me. The probable reason: you have never tried it against Miguel Cairo. From last night’s Reds-Phillies game, bottom of the ninth, man on first:

There’s just so much happening in those first ten seconds. To recap:

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A year ago, I shared with you the prospect of the baseballing robot in all of its unicycling glory. It was a future full of action, intrigue, and strangely conservative grass fields. It was a future in which warfare was no longer merely a metaphor for the national pastime: it was the pastime itself. This, ladies and gentlemen, was the era of the Base Wars.

Today, however, allow me to transport you to an entirely different era: forward from the Nintendo Entertainment System of the late 80s to the superlative version of the early 90s, and backward from the 24th century to our own. Thanks to Japan and through the magic of video games, we can now imagine what baseball will be like when Prince Fielder’s contract expires. Witness: Super Baseball 2020.

Robots have, you may be surprised to learn, already infiltrated the sport, though their barrel-shaped design is neither sleek nor sexy. Robots are, naturally, stronger and more sure than their fleshy companions, but they’re also more erratic, wearing out and exploding after four to six innings, without even being shot by a laser.

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