July 1, 1990: Andy Hawkins is somehow the starting pitcher for the New York Yankees. He’d been fired a month ago, only to find reprieve in an injury to Mike Witt. Despite pitching well in June, his ERA still floats at 6.49, his record at 1-4.

A different man took the hill that day. After five innings, neither he nor his opponent Greg Hibbard has allowed a hit, and after each third out Hawkins wandered back to the dugout, his jaw aimlessly working a wad of gum, his eyes dull. By the bottom of the eighth, the game still scoreless, Hawkins had conjured two infield pop-ups. Then, the fates cut the string:

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(Editor’s note: Felix Pie is a professional baseball player currently employed by the Hanwha Eagles of the Korea Baseball Organization. He is walking home from the stadium after a game.)

The phantoms surge past and across and through the streets.
The moon hides in shame behind a lachrymose black veil
An oily candle, burnt too short, lapping cheap tallow.
Headlights roar and shudder, blood-drunk wet lions
Thrashing like dying fireflies in the puddles of soju underfoot.
The summer wind licks like a consumptive’s warm sigh.

This is a place where the flying birds do not reach.
Bamboo and grasses grew wild where they tread,
Long since crushed into gray powder lining the roads
Their colors boiled, wrought into neon, pumped into the signs
Calling the chirping moths, their only direction toward.
This world bears no names, offers no constellations.

Hidden in shadow, scattered along the littered sidewalks
The old men cry out hoarse laughter from the pojangmachas
Huddled motionless under tent flaps, gripping small green bottles,
Scraping their scarred beards with the backs of their hands
The crust of crimson sauce outlining lopsided grins.
When the hour comes they will sink into the asphalt.

The way is difficult to find, among all the dead ends.
Life pours into the drains in the abyssal alleyways behind every corner.
The serpents and the courtiers and the chrysanthemums have long since vanished.
There are no dew-teared blossoms to mourn the pilgrimage of the exile.
Felix Pie squints at the symbols, hunting for some willowisp
To illuminate the path and lure him home.

On behalf of the Upper Deck Company LLC, we at NotGraphs would like to apologize for the harmful influence of its 1990 edition of baseball cards. At a time when America was already enthralled by the siren songs of Wilson Phillips, and being told that King’s Quest V was a really good video game, our nation’s youth was already reeling on the edge of credulity. Then came these images, undoing three decades of helpful short films about how to act, groom, and play baseball, forever sealing off any hope of universal truth or beauty. One might protest that it was Crystal Pepsi that killed the last spark of resistance and laid an entire generation prostrate before the towering menace of American propaganda, and one may be correct. There are no simple answers. For now, we can only offer this meager apologia to the long-vacant souls of our generation.

Delinquent as this notice may be, we would like to offer the following corrections, in hopes that those affected might salvage a fraction of the lesser years of their lives.

This is not how to bat.

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The year was 1991, and Americans needed more sports cards. They’d ripped open all the Upper Deck foil they could find, pressed down on the translucent plastic of the Score packaging to read the faint name of the bottom card of each pack. They filled three-ring binders with Jeff George’s mustache and Dikembe Mutombo’s teeth, and even attempted to figure out what a Pavel Bure was.

Still, it wasn’t enough. Impatient to sell the next big rookie card, companies followed the concept to its natural limit and invented the pre-rookie. They released thousand-card sets full of players no one had ever heard of. The process had been distilled to the point where a collector need only buy a pack of unrecognizable players, put them in the closet, and wait. It’s no small irony that an increasingly cynical hobby turned to youth for its speculation.

In truth, there have always been minor league cards. These were generally confined to the merchandise booths of the local team stadium or the local gas station, a stack of grainy photographs sold as team sets. They were little more than a glorified program that kids could play with after they got sick of the game four innings in. It was one such set I found a while back, in an old familiar thrift store baggy, memorializing the nearby 1991 Everett Giants.

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My daughter is not impressed by you, Jack Daugherty.
She creases the cardboard in her clumsy hands
While you gaze upward at a future, long since past.
To her, we are all undrafted free agents.
She doesn’t understand how it feels to have a baseball card.
She doesn’t understand how it feels to be young.

A million photographs of you languish in plastic tubs,
In garages and attics, wedged between Weedles and basic lands
Protesting to an uncaring, amnesiac world
That you made it, when so many failed, when so many
Assumed you’d fail. You drew 10 walks in 1989.
You, a propaganda poster for the Protestant ethic, a piece of history.

But history is a tyranny of the old upon the young
Of implicit values, adages and limitations,
The insipid morality of sugarless breakfast cereals
Strained carrots, quiet lies, living for tomorrow.
There is no American Dream for the children
Who cry through their naptimes.

My daughter rejects your truths, Jack Daugherty.
She cannot read your name and would not care to.
The accomplishments summed on the back of the card
Are not even numbers, betray no intelligence
A feral, flimsy, and fleeting cuneiform
Good only for being eaten.

As my daughter gnaws apart your effigy,
Destroys one small fraction
Of your existence in this world
She coos to herself, softly.

Studies I don’t feel like citing show that numbers are irresistible. The real world, with all its relative values and subjectivity, is undeniably terrifying. Put a number on something, however, and all your problems are solved.

That 90 bestowed on your bottle of pinot noir will tell you exactly how much you’re going to enjoy its tones of cherry and sandalwood. That 4.2 rating you saw on the internet will inform you exactly how competent you’ll find your sweater-clad Lit professor. A quick trip to his player page will demonstrate exactly what it feels like to watch Luis Valbuena play baseball. All these draining uncertainties in life, all this tiresome effort of developing your own opinions and feelings, get stripped away in a couple of digits. Truly, this is the best of all possible worlds.

Now I offer you an opportunity to quantify your love for our very own site, via this arbitrary and ridiculous Sporcle quiz. Prove to the world your appreciation for the NotGraphs #brand. Escape the soul-shearing ennui of your daily experience for up to six minutes, and then compare yourself to your peers through a number that, as well as anything else, represents your value to society and to the people you love. Select a question and answer each with open eyes and pure heart. And don’t cheat, or Banknotes Harper will turn you into shitty burgers.

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When I was in college I wrote zero novellas and rarely even a short story. Instead I wrote first pages to longer pieces that would not and could not exist. I put them each into a file cabinet, where the ink bled and intermingled, emerging as one embarrassing Rorschach blot. But despite my performance issues as a young writer, I soothed myself with the knowledge that there were very few twenty year-old novelists.

Now that I am thirty-five that comfort has grown tepid. My production has grown inconsistent, the tone of my longer pieces warbling as I patch them together fifteen minutes at a time. I am no longer one author, but a collective: one paragraph written by the hollow, pre-dawn Dubuque, the next the amalgam of a distracted Dubuque scribbling post-it notes at his desk. The result is often a mosaic, the kind one needs to stand far away from.

It’s hard not to think of the aging curve, reflecting on these facts: the gentle descent, the almost loving touch of attrition. Granted, the curve for writers is a much softer slope than the graph above. But it’s particularly noticeable now, when so many of our favorite baseball players are in the Best Shape of their Lives. It’s become cliché to note the cliché, but there’s also an underlying sadness to the fiction. It’s never the young who proclaim their physique; they don’t need to. Only the old think about feeling well, desperately cleave to the hypnotherapy of positive thinking. The alternative is the abyss.

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The Omnibus returns, this time in the city of Brotherly Love. For those readers just joining us in our odyssey, I will copy and paste its mission statement: “to examine the culture of a baseball team, distill the essence of its fandom, and then to establish which jerseys, as worn by a fan, make the most self-aware and challenging statements to his or her comrades.”

In most cases, for most cities, fans are generally in search of an identity. With the exception of the perpetual and the present disappointments, the culture of a team’s fandom is based on the proximity of their most recent championship. The city of Philadelphia stands outside these maxims. Their reputation was etched in alkaline more than thirty years ago and, whether fair or not, has never been amended. Philadelphia has become a city of pitch, an aggressive manic depression.

The Phillies began wearing names on their jerseys somewhere in the mid-seventies, and it’s an interesting demarcation. In their first ninety-two years of existence, the team managed two scant pennants – a span in which the lovable “losers” of Wrigley won five times as many. It was near the end of this era, which also witnessed fifteen years of wretched Eagles football, that the People developed their infamous rage.

Since those names showed up, however, Philadelphia baseball has changed entirely: they’ve won twelve pennants and two World Series in the past forty years, and until 2013 hadn’t won less than 80 games since the Y2K scare. Yet the mood among Phillies fans belies their relative successes: it is dark, and growing darker. The ballast of an aging and expensive core and a disavowal of modern talent evaluation have a city opening up the backs of their Game Boys and Walkmen in preparation.

As a Seattleite, I am currently faced with a dilemma never before considered: how long does the bliss of a championship last? The philosophy of the Seahawks (as with most champions) is immediately trained on a repeat, on dynasty. Like the bloodless capitalists who make this country great, success is never enough. But taken to its natural limit, this philosophy can only end in loss, and disappointment.

Where is the balance between the prospective and the reflective? How can we keep ourselves moving forward but still appreciate our past? And, perhaps most pertinently for the theme of this article, where is the line between appreciation for 2007-2011 and the cynicism toward 2013-2017? Here are but a few jerseys that seek to address this topic: the name you wear will be your colors in the endless battle. As always, feel free to suggest your own in the comments.

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Welcome the latest of NotGraphs’ award-winning series of crossbrand edutainment, wherein we consider the life works of an Important Historical Figure and examine, through careful research and analysis, what kind of manager that man would make. Today’s selection: the underrated twentieth-century French antihero, Phillipe Pétain.

Pétain rose from relative anonymity to become Commander-in-Chief of the French Army during the later stages of the First World War, primarily because he alone among his peers showed a hesitance to hurl his soldiers endlessly into mustard gas-coated barbed wire. He emerged from the War a hero on the scale of Eisenhower, only to end his life thirty years later in disgrace and exile.

Strategic Tendencies: Pétain was very much of the Earl Weaver school of warfare; he was preferred to wait for the three-run home run, saving up his offensives until he was assured of victory rather than dashing forward at the slightest opportunity. He was the sort of man who would hate to make outs on the basepaths. At the same time, the sacrifice bunt would play right into Pétain’s strong sense of nationalism, and of putting one’s country before one’s own happiness.

Defensive Philosophy: For aesthetic reasons alone, Pétain would never employ the shift.

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Advice for young self-made writers of dubious talent and forgettable, sometimes-pleasing web-humor: relax! Producing quality material, especially in such a strangely self-limiting genre, may seem intimidating at first, especially while Masahiro Tanaka is busy killing baseball for weeks at a time. It may appear as though every decent idea you squeeze out of your limited perspective and unimportant personal history might be your last. But don’t worry: if you’re truly destined to be a semi-anonymous content-creator, the Fates will apportion you tiny little pellets of inspiration at random intervals. How else to explain, after a 2.5-year writing career, my recent discovery of this:

Such ancestral bonds might go unappreciated by a Mississippi Matt Smith or a Zach Reynolds. But my sole genealogical heritage belongs to a man who killed cute animals for a living and created a town solely for the purpose of selling their skin. Armond Dubuque doesn’t much of a leaderboard to climb, is what I’m saying.

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