Assuming, as our market research suggests, that you are a card-carrying member of the bourgeois, you most likely spent at least some of your time during the holiday season tasting the fruits of capitalism. The pinnacle of such a lifestyle is that faint glint of reflection that arises as you surround yourself with your new physical possessions, struggling to appreciate how much happier they make you in the few moments before you adapt to your new standard of living. Eggnog is optional during this process, but pleasant.

As a member of the faux riche, I too am not immune; even as age and responsibility have replaced shiny, unassembled toys with gift cards and unsolicited career advice. So it was fortunate that my dear, sweet mother, in the process of unironically buying me white socks at the local Target, made the impulse purchase of one of those blister packs of old baseball cards near the registers. As sort of a belated Boxing Day, it’s my turn to re-gift my own new-found wealth to you, in the form of vaguely diverting content. Think of it as the trickle-down economics of Christmas.

On the back of Steve’s card, an anonymous source at Topps added the following factoid: “Logged his 1st big league Stolen Base: 9-12-85.” What this person could not have known, though he could perhaps have guessed, is that despite eight more years in the majors, it would also be his last.

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Yesterday, as I was waiting for my daughter to start crying again, I read a few pages from a little gem of a book. Its title: The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book, published in 1973. After an autobiographical introduction, the text is a proto-NotGraphs series of vignettes about various players, stars and nobodies, accompanied by full-color copies of their 1950s Topps cards. It provides a little flavor to all those names that appear in spreadsheets from time to time.

Carlton Willey is one such man. A highly-touted prospect, he emerged from Truman’s War to lead the NL in shutouts in his rookie season. That was the extent of his black ink.

Carlton Willey was born in Cherryfield, Maine, the self-described Blueberry Capital of the World. One of the authors of the book, describing his annual trips through the town on vacation to Canada, describes it as “inhabited exclusively by lobster fishermen and grizzly bears.” But the image that sticks out is of a banner strung across the only street in town, written in faded red ink on white muslin. The words: “WELCOME TO CHERRYFIELD, MAINE, HOME OF MAJOR LEAGUE PITCHER CARLTON WILLEY.”

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The date: the November 14, 1989.
The place: your idyllic childhood neighborhood, teeming with family owned drug stores, people who say hello to each other on the sidewalk, and Richard Marx cassettes.
The scene: you, begging your parents for a couple of bucks to go to the baseball card store. “They’re not toys,” you cry in a reedy voice that betrays a luckless adolescence. “Baseball cards are an investment.” You show them your Beckett Baseball Card magazine, revealing a series of numbers with arrow signs pointing up.

The date: November 14, 2013.
The place: a Value Village. People still talk to strangers, except now they kind of mumble things and smell slightly off. Richard Marx cassettes still present.
The scene: Your partner is looking at baby clothes that said baby has, in the time it takes the human brain to process visual information, already outgrown. And as you’re glancing through bright, plastic, potentially deadly toys, you find this:

Your baseball card portfolio has been underperforming.

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On Friday, the Seattle Mariners granted Franklin Gutierrez his freedom, as defined by his freedom to not be paid seven million dollars by the Seattle Mariners. A scant four days later, November 5, marks his Feast Day in the latest of an unrightfully-neglected series. Raise a glass to our friend, the Job of baseball, and join us in prayer.

Life: In 2009, his first season with the Mariners, an age-26 Gutierrez posted a six-win season. In the four years since then, he has suffered ailments from his elbow, knee, shoulder, groin (three times), back (twice), oblique, leg, hamstring (three times), pectoral, heel, head (twice), neck, and lower intestine. He also had a bad case of the flu.

It is, one must admit, a novel way to avoid the dehumanization of synecdoche so common in baseball. The man is not just He also, in his brief window of playing time, posted a slugging percentage north of .500. Some team will therefore take a chance on him, and he will either prove to be a winning lottery ticket, or a losing lottery ticket, or not a lottery ticket at all but rather a crude-crayon-drawn map leading to the buried remains of the family gerbil.

Spiritual Exercise: Consider the Protestant work ethic that has made America so great, at least according to your outdated middle-school history textbook. If hard work and talent are what bring people success, how do you explain the misfortune of Franklin Gutierrez? Conjure some moral failing that designates his suffering as justice, and relieve yourself of the crushing burden of knowing that happiness is essentially a series of meaningless die rolls. Then drink an American lager, and think about all the things you’d like to own if you made more money.

A Prayer for Franklin Gutierrez

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As a nation rages over the definition of sportsmanship and whether smiling is included in such, it’s natural to reflect on the wisdom of John McGraw. Once, in the dark pre-internet ages of baseball and America, McGraw was forgotten save for twenty-three separate references in Bill James’s Historical Baseball Abstract. But now, thanks to No Child Left Behind, tales of America’s Ruffian Sweetheart are now recited and memorized by elementary-age children during the Mandatory Edutational Bus Ride Chant section of their morning commute.

Despite the great leaps made by educational reform, however, some Americans might still somehow be unaware the Little Napoleon still ranks third all-time with a career .466 on-base percentage. How is it possible that a man only 1.03 Altuves in height and 0.89 Altuves in weight could prove so able at reaching first? The NotGraphs Arcane Research Department delved into gigabytes of Retrosheet data, and interviewed random nonagenarians. They uncovered the following anecdotal evidence, symptomatic of the barbarism of 1890s baseball.

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For children of the eighties, it was the glint of hope amidst the mud of the gold pan: the blue, angled text of the Rated Rookie.

It’s easy, with our hindsight and our endless, self-perpetuating cynicism, to recognize the Rated Rookie as an early intrusion of branding into our idyllic childhoods. We were taught to salivate at the first sight of #53B6D6, and salivate we did, despite the fact that the inaugural crop of Rated Rookies included such luminaries as Mike Stenhouse and Doug Frobel, while omitting guys like Don Mattingly, Darryl Strawberry, and Pete O’Brien. It didn’t matter. The Rated Rookie was a mark of distinction, an epaulette that denoted membership in an elite circle. It whispered a secret promise, sometimes false, always interesting.

And Billy Beane was not among the chosen.

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Good news! You are only 24 hours (plus five business days for standard shipping) from eating this:

The Albert Belle Bar, a concoction of crisp rice covered in rich, milk chocolate, made rancid by eighteen years of oxidation and disappointment.

Note, of course, that you will have to outbid the rest of the world: its insatiable gourmands, seeking a new thrill after dabbling in coelacanth and human hamstring, the chemists seeking to disintegrate it and sprinkle its essence onto fugu and kale chips, and the secret militias who will stockpile them with the other chemical weapons underground in steel chambers, awaiting the coming anarchy.

But you will vanquish them all. You will unwrap that shiny wrapper, taking care not to tear Albert’s face, and take a bite of that forbidden treasure, whereupon it will assault your tastebuds like a poorly-placed cameraman. And you will know what living truly is.

It will not be enough, of course; existence never is. Soon you’ll find yourself staring at the monitor, eyes bloodshot, at two in the morning, refreshing eBay to find the Pronk Bar with a Buy It Now listing. But that’s tomorrow. For now, gather your rosebuds while ye may.

I found the picture of him in an old souvenir magazine, wearing that old trident cap, smiling forever, frozen in optimism. The team picked him up that winter because that’s what the team did back then: they combed through the trash, looking for new names to sew on the jerseys, new faces to learn and forget.

Clint Hurdle hit .400 in Spring Training. He got along with people. The coaches told him he’d won a job. Then, an hour before game time on Opening Day, the president of the team called him in and told him he didn’t. Seems they’d found a new piece of scrap, some guy named Phelps, for $35,000. A pittance, or a year’s worth of work.

Clint Hurdle went to the Mets. He’d hurt his back the previous year in Cincinnati, which is why they’d given up on him, and it flared up again after a dozen games. He was finished. He stuck around anyway, rode the buses, earned a few more call-ups, learned whatever they asked him. He tried catching. Eventually, he was no longer worth the roster spot, so he became a coach, and then a manager. He had kids, maybe. I don’t know.

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they tell us (josh donaldson)
to live in the moment,
each moment

never stopping to think
living a million lives of
blood-blind courage

to twerk like nobody’s watching
to toss out our receipts
to have another
cronut

they tell us, the old men
with the hang gliders and cocaine
who cried yolo before yolo

but you and I know
(josh donaldson)
these men are fools

because the moment in the air
means nothing
without the moment
afterwards

The Omnibus takes its wagons eastward to New York City to consider the Amazin’ Mets. Since this feature seems to grow increasingly intermittent, a reminder of its purpose: 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.

The Mets are not an easy team to evaluate. I’m actually more familiar with the brand of Mets that existed before I was born, thanks to Roger Angell’s sublime book The Summer Game, than I am with the franchise’s modern incarnations. I do not know what a Quintanilla is or how many of them equal a gallon.

I discussed the matter with FanGraphs’ own Eno Sarris. Mets’ fans are continually disappointed and long-suffering, but this probably describes the fanbase of all but a handful of baseball cities. And while many franchises can be divided into distinct eras, the history of the post-86 Mets is a nebulous thing. All teams have their ups and downs, but rarely do they seem to have them at the same time. The following, then, are one person’s attempt to greet the Mets.

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