On May 1, 2007, Andruw Jones was hitting .264/.405/.527 and was on his way to winning his tenth gold glove. His Hall of Fame status was all but assured. Five years, three months, and fifteen days later, this happened:

Here, embiggenable at the reader’s discretion, is a snippet of the play-by-play for that inning:

The official scorer of the game, wise to the crippling pressure that age and expectations place on us all, and especially on the rounded shoulders of one Andruw Jones, scored the play as a double. An error, you say? Until the alchemists and the existentialists can brew some elixir that can, at the very least, dull the incremental pain that is the endless life, none of us can claim that Jones had any choice in his actions. We are all, in time, struck down by our own potential.

Ivan Nova does not understand this; he is young. But someday, if he’s fortunate enough, he will be Freddy Garcia, and he will know.

There aren’t a lot of classic baseball books out there, relatively speaking. This isn’t to say that there aren’t a lot of great baseball books; it’s just that the genre is temporal, and not many works last from one generation to the next. Unless the subject is a legend or the author’s writing style is groundbreaking, the names of the players and their personalities eventually fade, the ideas fall out of fashion.

So it goes with Daniel Okrent’s 9 Innings, a Proustian voyage through a single June 10 game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles. As the tale begins in the clubhouses before the game and winds its way through the ninth, Okrent pauses to reflect on the players, transactions, and history that brought that particular game into its state of being. Between these anecdotes, the author weaves in the game, continuing on in the background.

9 Innings isn’t the kind of book that ranks among many people’s list of favorites, and that’s sad. Okrent’s writing is thorough and honest, although his touch is a little heavy, not quite unable to escape the journalistic plodding of the beat writers of the time. The book is primarily failed by the players themselves, particularly the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers. The most famous players of that team, Paul Molitor and Robin Yount, are perhaps its driest characters; Okrent pointedly summarizes Yount as “cooperative and patient, but also singularly unexpressive, inarticulate, even dense.” Jim Palmer appears in the dugout and Cal Ripken, in the middle of his rookie season, is present but unformed.

Meanwhile, the most interesting characters in the book have largely been forgotten: names like Vuckovich, Oglivie, Gorman Thomas, and even Ted Simmons have faded into semi-obscurity, their statistics remembered but their faces forgotten. And because of this, in the end 9 Innings becomes more of a Milwaukee Brewers book than a baseball book, and an indication of how difficult it is for any author, no matter how talented, to make fans care about other team’s ballplayers.

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The Houston Astros are not particularly good at baseball. Their record stands at 36-74; if they won half their games the remainder of the season, they would still lose a hundred games. Whatever it is you call losing in baseball, whether it be tragedy or drudgery, has clung to the walls and seats of Minute Maid Park. It is buried deep beneath that little hill thing they have out there.

As a form of penitence for some unknown or as yet uncommitted crime, I decided to watch the Astros perform their Astroness last night, and was rewarded grandly by the Baseballing Gods. By now, I’m sure, the series of lights and colors that eminated from the top of the 11th inning have taken their permanent place in the back of your retinas; if not, go ahead and watch the highlight four or five more times.

Rather than focus on the play itself, I’d like to look at the carnage from another angle, show some pictures that speak to the heart of Houston baseball. Think of it as a human interest story. Specifically: I want to talk about Pleased Guy.

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It would seem natural to declare that by wearing a hat with a team logo on it, you are making a simple act of supporting that team. The political realists among us, however, would argue that this not entirely true. We live in a zero-sum world; support provided to one team is, consequently, support taken away from that team’s enemies. Alliances are unavoidable.

Perhaps, ordinarily, you have no issue with these secondary repercussions created by your headgear. This is well, but keep in mind that there will inevitably be times when you need to cover your head and maintain your explicit love of baseball, while at the same time avoiding the hypersensitive people with whom you share existence.

To this end, I offer the following options, all purchasable on your local internet:

The Implicit

It has its advantages: simple, cheap, and it confers a Zen-like embrace of nothingness. You can buy four dozen of them for sixty bucks and rest easy knowing that you have enough hats to last the rest of your life, available in whichever color suits your current mood. It also has its disadvantages: worn with casual clothing, you may be confused for an actor in a pharmaceutical commercial and/or a coach in a Tom Emanski training video. Other potential advantages: bedazzling!
 

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It’s not a big deal or anything, but last Friday marked my thirty-fourth birthday. I’ve never really been big on birthdays; the cake is fine, but the singing and the attention and the sincere well-wishing of acquaintances I can do without. Even-numbered birthdays are even worse, because you can look back at where your halfway mark was, and watch how it steadily increases. Half my life ago, I was a high school senior, playing four-chord songs on the guitar and sweeping up a hardware store on the weekends. With each passing year, the number of baseball players older than me is dwindling in logarithmic fashion toward Moyerdom.

D’Angelo Jimenez is still older than me. He is a thirty-four year old baseball player. Half his life ago, he was a seventeen year-old baseball player. Between those two endpoints, this happened:

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Lost in all the hoopla last night over a New York athlete doing something fairly well, the intrepid and occasionally clammy Jason Vargas tossed a proverbial gem last night. Facing the feared Royals of Kansas City, The Mariners’ #2 starter allowed a single hit through eight innings, striking out five. Loyal and fictionalized reader Thorwald Fenton called in a request this morning for an encapsulation of Vargas’ kinetic, relativity-inducing fastball. And because Carson was too busy sipping chamomile and grooming his collection of prize Shetland ponies for the Jubilee Morgan Regional Horse Show next month, I stepped in. Granted, my computer is hardly the technological marvel that his is, but I can’t imagine you’ll have any complaints.

Vargas faced Jeff Francoeur to lead off the top of the third:

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Introduction

While attending a baseball game on Monday, July 23 at the local baseball stadium in Seattle, Washington, the researcher (heretofore referred to as “the researcher”, or “I”) made the acute observation that other people were going to said baseball game. It was also observed that the researcher’s friend was quite late, and that he had the tickets. This unforeseen wealth of time and opportunity led to a scientific survey asking the question: what jerseys were other people wearing?

Methodology

Observations were made by standing at the corner of Occidental Avenue and Royal Brougham, across the street from the left field park entrance and next to a rather tired-looking scalper who clearly had difficulty determining what I was doing on his turf. The street corner was chosen in order to make observations based on south and eastbound traffic into the stadium, and reduce double-counting. For the purposes of this survey, any torso covering that sported a name or number was treated as a jersey, including T-shirt jerseys. Observations took place between 4:45pm and 6:05pm, at which time the researcher decided he’d had enough and went to get a cheap beer.

Analysis

Figures 1 and 2 show the results of the survey, providing a histogram for both Mariners and Yankees jerseys. Figure 2 is further broken down into two categories: those that had the player’s name on the back, and those that did not. “Personalized” categorizes those jerseys that had the fan’s own name on the back, or some nickname he wished other people would address him by, but who probably do not.

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It was the summer of 2001: I was working my first real job after college, standing behind a bank teller line counting sacks of money from local businessmen. I worked the same hours every day and wore the same five collar shirts and ties, all I could afford at the time, while the businessmen brought in the same deposits every day. I would go home, watch my hometown Mariners trot out the same five starters week after week, and play Sammy Sosa High Heat 2001 (it was so real!) on franchise mode.

I remember two main things about that game, playing it throughout the summer. First, most franchise modes are unrealistic, because as you become good at the game you win far more often than any team should. High Heat was good in this respect – the pitcher/batter duel was done well – but after a slow April my Mariners were on pace to win more than a hundred games. But then, running parallel to my fictional success, so were the real Mariners.

The second thing I remember about the game was Ichiro, because he wasn’t in it. Ichiro hadn’t joined the Player’s Union by the time the game shipped, apparently, because he was absent from the team’s roster. Instead, tucked away in the AAA club was a guy named “David Taguchi”. His stats were terrible, and it’s hard to blame them, because nobody knew how this Ichiro was going to adjust to the majors. I edited his stats, perhaps being a little too kind, although it turned out that even I had underestimated him. I don’t remember what Ichiro hit in my game, but it wasn’t as good as what he did in real life that summer.

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The year is 1989.  Milli Vanilli has invaded the airwaves. People are excited about the new Batman movie. Michael Dukakis is off crying, cold and alone somewhere, probably hiding from bears. Prospective athletes everywhere are buying Chris Sabo goggles in droves. Baseball cards have surpassed precious metals as the most convenient and failsafe investment in America.

Baseball cards are now, of course, worthless; the ink used to produce them is universally recognized as poisonous, and many foil-stamped parallel sets are faintly radioactive. Certain states have outlawed the sale of baseball cards and many hobby owners, who once made millions profiteering from hapless collectors during the junk wax era, have been driven into hiding in the Mojave Desert, only surfacing to socialize with each other at card shows housed in middle school gymnasiums.

But O, in that innocent time, with its afternoons stitched into endless tapestry! Huddled together in playgrounds, sipping their juice boxes after soccer practices, they spread their anonymous, clandestine rumors. The Billy Ripken, it was told, could be found in the pack second from the bottom on the top left corner of the box. Andy’s brother’s friend Chris found one there, so it was undeniable fact. They bragged to each other about the number of Gregg Jefferies rookies they owned, and which brands.

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I’m not an artistic person. When I was six I won a coloring contest held at the local drugstore, and decided that it would be wise to reinvest my improbable ten dollar prize into some art supplies. Said supplies languished in the back of my desk drawer for years, and I never again established professional status as an artist. In high school I took a couple of art classes which killed my GPA, but allowed me to spend sixth period bullshitting with friends while smearing expensive oil paint onto cheap canvases with little forethought.

Despite being bad at art, I still enjoy making it. I don’t know if this is some pathetic attempt to create tangible evidence of my existence, a way of carving notches into the caves of my descendants, or whether it’s simple procrastination. My descent into new artistic depths occurred while trying to entertain eight year-olds with one of those summer projects no one actually engages in unless attending a summer camp. The process is simple and inexpensive: all you need are some sheets of clear plastic purchased from your least-detested local craft store, a fine-point sharpie, some worthless junk-era baseball cards, and an oven. If you don’t have an oven, this project may be somewhat less simple and inexpensive.

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