The Ironic Jersey Omnibus returns after a slight hiatus, this time examining the Colorado Rockies. The purpose, for those unaware or forgetful, is to examine a franchise and deliberate not on the finest jerseys available to the consumer, but those that hold a deeper message of joy, disappointment or hipsterism. As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome.

The Rockies are perhaps one of the greatest challenges to the Omnibus, not only because of the youth of the franchise, but because of the hyperbole created by Coors Field. Glimpse into, for instance, the haunted eyes of one Mike Kingery. The soft-spoken lefty with the career 1.0 WAR earned his name for a single season, hitting .349/.402/.532. Sadly, this sort of thing happens all the time in Colorado.

On the other end of the spectrum you have Dante Bichette. I have no idea what you do with Dante Bichette, his twisted physique or his oddly elfin face. The man received MVP votes four different times. And yet in 1999, a season in which he hit .298 with 34 home runs and 133 RBIs, he managed two come in at nearly two wins below replacement level. Along with Galarraga, Walker, and Castilla, he was one of the early faces of an exciting and slightly purple franchise. Bad as he was, it’s doubtful that you could wear his jersey without simply coming off as nostalgic or cheap.

That said, here are the nominees:

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In the first round of the Home Run Derby yesterday, Mark Trumbo hit a home run. As the ball passed along its quietly majestic arc, Chris Berman was heard to remark that the ball was “on its way to Wichita”. On the surface it may have seemed that Berman uttered this insight because Wichita is quite far away from Kansas City, and that the ball that had just been hit had also traveled very far. Digging deeper, however, we see the roots of a paradox worthy of Zeno.

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While Jerry Seinfeld nearly said that we all root for laundry, there’s something noble about the idea.  Fandom, in itself, is transient; the thrill of one game disappears into the tension of the next. Yesterday’s heroes, with the natural exception of Dick Allen and Rick Reuschel, fade from memory. Our fabric is immutable evidence of our existence in this world, something that goes beyond the bounds of feelings and words.  The dirt stains are our cave paintings; they connect us to history.

My original intention for this piece was to provide a full wardrobe of authentic, game-used paraphernalia as sold on eBay. Clad in these, the ghosts of the baseball ancestors would guide your arm, and your foes would fall before you. But as I dug further into my research I found myself strangely compelled by some of the items up for bid, not for their utility or their aesthetics, but for their silent lamentations. After all, not every artifact can radiate the success and fortune of Jon Voight’s automobile. With that in mind, enjoy this, the detritus of our national pastime.
 
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I’m sure you are, by now, acquainted with the anti-statistical crowd who bemoan their inability to encompass the little things in baseball: running out ground balls, going from first to third, concocting really good shaving cream pies for postgame interviews. Perhaps some of this belief system stems from a naturally cautious personality, or an anachronistic Rockwell-based worldview. It could even be based on the simple desire for mystery, the resistance to a science that seeks to boil down the game in the same manner that killed checkers. It is probably none of those things, however. It is probably because of Munenori Kawasaki.

In his meager playing time this season, Kawasaki is hitting .194/.265/.210. He has been caught stealing twice in three tries, and his UZR is negative. He has, as ballplayers go, not been good. But to say this is to take a very narrow definition of goodness, if not a fascist one. It’s the mentality of the factory manager who looks at output instead of people. How do we define Munenori Kawasaki, and ourselves? Is it by our jobs, by the things we create to be consumed by other people? Or is it by how we respond to the forces of nature that toss us from one moment in life to the next? By this alternate set of standards, as evidenced by this footage of the Mariners celebrating their (extra-inning, walkoff) victory over the Boston Red Sox, Kawasaki is a very good player indeed:

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We have all, at some point or another, done things in our younger years that we’re not entirely proud of. Perhaps you bought a Hypercolor T-shirt, or perhaps you bought Hanson’s album Middle of Nowhere. It’s not your fault. Rather, it’s not your fault now; instead, your punishment is to suffer occasional flashbacks to the crimes of your former self, the past you cannot unmake. I understand. I, too, have fought my demons.

Case in point: last weekend as I was rifling through the contents of my filing cabinet, I came upon a rather innocent-looking piece of graph paper adorned with equally innocent-looking handwriting. As I studied the arcane runes, my curiosity was consumed by horror; my initial reaction was to burn the evidence and the filing cabinet that housed it. But as you (dear reader) and I are in the process of building back up trust and familiarity after a long and unexplained absence on my part, I knew that my only choice was to give you the truth you deserve. Thus I’ll share this wayward moment of my misspent youth.

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One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing the backstops, pitchers breathing hard into curled hands, huddling in their windbreakers, catchers lumbering like great black beetles in their shells, crouching in the tall weeds. Baseball was trapped between the pages of Sports Illustrated, held by trembling fingers near lamplight, images of Mantle and Snider striding, smiling, before black and white fields, frozen.

And then a long wave of warmth crossed the country. A flooding sea of hot air, mixed with cut grass and oiled leather, mingled with loam and chalk dust. The snow dissolved to reveal diamonds, glaciation carving patches of clay out of grass. Aluminum birdcalls echoed above the fields.

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“Fashion is art,” as Daniel Radcliffe once may have said. And whether you agree with him or not, you must resign yourself to the fact that you live in a world in which others do. The hat you adorn yourself with as you leave your house or apartment will, however unwillingly, help shape your identity in the eyes of colleagues and strangers. It could, for example, help you nail that big interview at the firm, earn an extra ten percent on your daily panhandling, or ward off potential conversations on the bus during your commute. It’s a choice that you should make carefully.

With this in mind, we, the dapper assemblage at NotGraphs, are endeavoring to make this critical life choice as simple as possible by reflecting on a few of the myriad of options available to the credit card-wielding internet shopper. Today’s enterprise: how to troll.

Part 1: Trolling Your World Series Opponent

Want something that celebrates the accomplishments of young men who have no idea that you exist? Want to do it in a way that smacks of the bombast and heraldry that a self-selected avatar of a champion richly deserves? Wear a hat with a World Series ring on it. On your head! A ring! Rings don’t even go on heads! The blatant absurdity will be sure to demoralize any past adversaries.
 
 
 
 
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The Feast of Cory the Snyder

Today we raise a glass to the august glory that is Cory Snyder, in this, the most recent of our feast-day celebrations.

Life: It is futile to seek the essence of Cory Snyder from his Wikipedia article, a handful of sparse, high-school-english-paper paragraphs scattered before him like so many crumbs.  Nowhere does it mention the forearms, the lateral incisors, the dazed optimism.  Nor does it mention that final, willful gesture in the ninth inning of the 1984 Olympic gold medal game, when he hit a home run and proceeded to urinate on the plate in single-minded, feral defiance.  Clearly, philosophers have long skirted the questions that the existence of Cory Snyder has pressed upon the human condition.  This display of intellectual cowardice from our nation is, naturally, quite troubling.

Spiritual Exercise: Select a tranquil outdoor area suitable for meditation.  Seek the twittering of starlings if at all possible.  Then, the moment before your superficial introspection descends into an unconscious calculation of the groceries you will need to buy, tense every single muscle in your body and hold it as long as you can.  As you do, consider Hawthorne’s rejection of transcendentalism, his belief that it is Nature herself who injects the bad hop into every ground ball.  In such a world, what is the sane reaction?  Is it to struggle against the natural forces bent on your destruction, or to allow Heraclitus’ river to sweep you where it will?

A Prayer for Cory Snyder

Cory Snyder!
Any glance at your 1987 Topps Card
Is immediately drawn to the gaudy glitter
Of the golden bowl that was
Your glory, and your education.

Your flaws did not stay hidden long.
In the blurry shadow-world above,
Your posture is a painfully symbolic gesture
Of the game and the world
That was already tailing down and away.

The moment you appeared
You negated our preconceived notions
As to the finite vectors accorded to time, and hair.
Your golden greatness swirled
And eddied about your shoulders like a mantle.

Your magnanimity was evident at the plate
Where the shortstops, in their reedy voices,
Entreated you to “swing, batter,”
Swing, and swing you did.
You swung at everything you could.

Back in the well-chronicled day, it was common for the Topps Chewing Gum Company to take photographs of baseball players in spring training, usually by camping outside Peoria’s only Sizzler steakhouse.  If said professionals were traded before their cards were released, Topps would simply break out the acrylics and airbrush a new logo on the cap.  Only trained professionals with jeweler’s loupes could tell the difference.

Drunk with power, the Topps executives decided to take this even further, by creating Rick Jones.  The plan was simple: using state-of-the-art Apple II computing technology, the company was able to create an amalgam of every single ballplayer in history.  They conjured up random statistics, including a solid 2.11 ERA at Winston-Salem.  They then slapped on a cascading waterfall of brown hair, a touch of neck-high chest hair for added virility, and as the piece-de-resistance, they added him to the Mariners roster.  Most regions of the country were not yet aware that Seattle even had a baseball team, much less who actually played for the team, and so the addition went unnoticed.

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It’s the zenith of human folly to assume that mankind has reached perfection. This is especially true of baseball, which could be described from a perspective divorced of context as being a rather silly activity. Personally, I can’t think of a better forum for evaluating the various elements of baseball than at NotGraphs, where such discussions can be undertaken seriously and inconsequentially. But first, an aside:

This week, and I allow the reader to conduct their own amateur psychological analysis of the fact, I attended a Seattle Mariners game. I arrived early and found a spot in left field to watch the Yankees take batting practice. Rather than the hitters, though, my attention trained on a clutch of players, including C.C. Sabathia, Bartolo Colon, and Nick Swisher, shagging flies out in left-center. They began humbly enough, but soon they were throwing their gloves up to deflect the ball, and then at each other in order to distract them. It’s a boyishness buried deep in the genetic code of baseball, something every little leaguer does in practice, and it never really goes away.

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