Tomorrow afternoon the present author will have the privilege of participating in the third Fangraphs Staff Ottoneu league. This despite the fact that until yesterday, I had no idea that there were two separate iterations of Jesus Montero. This despite the fact that I am not entirely certain that Julio Lugo is not still on a major league roster. And if he is, whether or not he’s worth a dollar. Despite it all, I’ll face off against many of RotoGraphs’ finest.

I may not be the everyman you deserve, dear reader, but I’m the everyman you’ve got.

In preparation for the big day, I took some time Wednesday night to participate in a mock auction. What better way, I thought, to hone my instincts against this roundtable of experts, than to match wits against the keen intellects that only Yahoo! Sports can offer. I was ready to learn.

Two hours and fifteen minutes later, the light from this screen was hurling itself on my weary retinas:

I earned my education; but perhaps I learned less about fantasy baseball than I did about myself. There are few things sadder than doing a mock auction with eleven bots.

“Didn’t know you could bet on any special player.”
 
“On anybody or anything. We bet on strikes, balls, hits, runs, innings, and full games. If a good team plays a lousy team we will bet on the spread of runs. We cover anything anyone wants to bet on.”
 
    –The Natural (1952)

Fantasy baseball has well earned its reputation for being a healthy and educational activity for boys and girls aged 9-99. Furthermore, an independent medical think tank discovered that exposure to fantasy podcasts while in the womb has advanced language development in newborns by up to 15%, as well as caused a 25% reduction in paying for saves. This is science.

But though it’s a natural thing for a young man or woman to own up to twenty or thirty fantasy teams in a given season, nurturing them like plants or goldfish, one can suffer from a certain level of diminishing returns. That’s why we need new forms of fantasy baseball, new things to bet on, to keep things fresh and instill some faint imitation of purpose into our lives. To that purpose, I propose the Fantasy Baseball Twitter League.

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Life is a journey of discovery, according to the rustic hand-painted mass-produced wooden signs in the antique store I walked past yesterday. So it proved to be, for as I later wandered aimlessly through the wild internets, I made a fortuitous and fortunate query:

I don’t know what providential force brought the name of Niedenfuer to my fingertips; the world works in mysterious ways. But Niedenfuer I sought, and for my trouble fell upon one imdb page. Surely, I thought to myself, this can only be an appearance in a World Series highlight video or, at best, a quick interview in a hand-taped biopic. Surely one could not expect a film career to rival that of fellow reliever Craig Lefferts. I was lost, I can see now. My heart was full of doubt.

If the fifties were a time of worried cigarette smoking, fallout shelters, and Jailhouse Rock, then one can forgive the current generation their One Direction. For the current generation daily breathes in the midichlorians of that benevolent force, the Internet. And today the Internet earned that capital I, for it presented me – unworthy and lost soul that I am – with the following motion picture event. I share it with you, a humble and converted prophet, a fisher of men. I share with you: Casey at the Bat.

http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi3685287449/

The video linked above is presented by Hulu and is an hour long. You will want to clear some time in your schedule to accommodate it, and then watch it posthaste. But if you, too, are plagued with doubt, please read past the cut and allow me to convert you. Soon you will find yourself changed, and your spirit unbound.

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A lot has already been accomplished in the year 2013. We have universally ratified the use of WAR in evaluating a player’s ability, conclusively established the exact correct players in the Hall of Fame, agreed upon the role of steroids in the game of baseball, as well as how to punish players who have used them and what in fact a steroid is, presaged the winners of this and the following World Series, and unlocked the horrible secrets of the inverted W and eliminated pitcher arm injuries forever. It’s an exciting time.

Now we can turn our attention to the heart of baseball’s matter: how to pluralize the RBI.

In his critically acclaimed book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, award-winning researcher Steven Pinker discusses morphology, or the rules we follow when forming complex words, and attaching prefixes and suffixes to roots. Unless you’re a linguist or an elementary school teacher, you know most of these rules without knowing them: for example, that the suffix –ed sounds like idif the verb ends in t or d, like t if the verb ends in p, k, f, s, sh, ch, and th, and like d for all other verb endings. You already speak this way, because it sounds right, and it sounds right to everybody.

If only communication were so simple in baseball. But alas, when wRC+ and “hustle” pass each other like strangers in the night, how can we forge common bonds? How can we, when we don’t even know how to describe that very basic function of human existence, the run batted in?

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“Top-left corner, second pack from the bottom,” my friend told me. He didn’t remember where he had heard it from, or why it worked. All we knew is that he was the proud owner of the Holy Grail of baseball cards: the 1989 Fleer Bill Ripken error card, the one with the expletive bared on the bottom of the bat for all the world to see. It was the ultimate taboo, a premature interruption of adulthood into our adolescence.

Of course, there were plenty of Holy Grails in that era of baseball cards, enough to occupy our feeble attention spans. There were the Gregg Jefferies rookie cards, the Dale Murphy reverse negative, and later, Ken Griffey, Jr. We looked at the numbers next to the names in our Beckett Baseball Card Magazines and dreamed our stock market dreams, anticipating the envy of a new generation the way we envied the adults whose collections hadn’t been thrown out.

It didn’t happen, of course. We became adults, and the forbidden terminology of Bill Ripken’s bat became just another everyday word in the lexicon. Meanwhile, a generation of parents, chagrined by the tales of zealous mothers past, saved those baseball cards in pristine condition, and the supply outpaced the demand of a dwindling base of collectors. Given the wide production of the late 80s baseball card sets, it isn’t a stretch to claim that there’s a Bill Ripken error card out there for everyone who wants one. They currently go for a couple of bucks on eBay.

This didn’t kill the collector’s spirit, however: the search for errors and variations has long lived in the human heart, and is not limited to the baseball card. Witness the 1955 Philadelphia Double Die, or the Inverted Jenny. The search just goes deeper, now.

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When Ibanez traipses through the grass,
One hardly feels the moments pass.
With his eyes peeled tight and expression grim
The sky seems like it might fall on him.

Are his arms too short? His legs too tall?
One hardly seems able to tell at all
When the ball’s hit hard above third base
One feels the thrill of a NASCAR race.

What perils could our hero befall?
Get decapitated by the wall?
Or perhaps, he might only injure his grace
As the ball caroms off both glove and face?

But perhaps on Ibanez we’re being too hard.
It’s not like it’s wiffleball out in the yard.
I know, as one who felt Algebra’s sting
A parabola can be a quite tricky thing.

And adding 3-D complicates it a ton!
One wonders how outfielding ever gets done.
To calculate vectors and find the right spot,
My tip for Ibanez: go somewhere you’re not.

If Carson Cistulli is reputed for his love of obscure prospects, my own affection has always tended toward the other end of the spectrum, the retired and forgotten ex-player. And as someone who regularly underperforms his own peripherals, the author has always had an especially soft spot for one Dave Bush, Starting Pitcher and Eternal Disappointment.

It may be difficult to recall now, but the mid-aughts were a time of heady optimism: of winnable wars, steady economic growth, people who were or looked vaguely like character actor John C. McGinley, and pitchers with strong strikeout-to-walk ratios. First among these, for the hipster baseball fans, was Dave Bush. Bush was the fantasy sleeper of the fantasy sleeper age, someone whose numbers never quite added up. They still haven’t.

Bush grew older, as did we all, and hope dwindled. It all came to an end the day when he set a major league record by giving up four consecutive home runs to the Arizona Diamondbacks, dropped his glove like a microphone, and disappeared alone into the desert. That’s why when I chanced upon his player page, this line leavened my heart:

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By the time you read this, and perhaps even by the time I’m done writing it, Mike Carp will no longer be a Seattle Mariner. He won’t even be Mike Carp any more, by the way I measure the Mike Carp-ness of a thing. Unless you follow the Mariners, in fact, he was never really Mike Carp in the first place, any more than you are.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the fate of a man like Mike Carp would stand out to me from the general ebb and flow of the general human existence. That time will come again, when the loss of a Mike Carp can be felt, can carry significance. For the Mariners, Carp leaves his team much as he found it.

A couple of days ago on Twitter one Carson Cistulli compared me to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, and to be honest, I wasn’t initially thrilled by the comparison. After all, Heraclitus isn’t the kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with; he hated almost everything and everybody. We’re talking about a guy who came down with dropsy, ignored the advice of his doctors, rubbed cow manure over himself and baked himself in the sun. He was dead the next day. We’re not talking about an ancient hero here.

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As an intelligent baseball fan, you have surely by now read or heard the famous and apocryphal story of Rickey Henderson renewing his acquaintance with John Olerud. If not, here’s the original tale, as told by ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian:

In spring training 1999, Rickey Henderson of the Mets was reunited with first baseman John Olerud, who had been his teammate with the Blue Jays six years earlier. As most people know, Olerud had an aneurysm in college, which required brain surgery. So to protect his head, he was allowed to wear a helmet in the field. As the story goes, Henderson was talking to Olerud one day, noticed the helmet and said “You know, when I played in Toronto, we had a guy who wore a helmet.”

“Rickey,” said Olerud, “that was me.”

Now, for your enjoyment, please partake of three adaptations of this timeless yarn.

1.

It had been weeks now, but John never got used to hospitals. The stinging scent of disinfectant, the hollow glow of the fluorescent lights, the squeak of intern’s sneakers in endless tiled hallways: all of it felt synthetic, unnatural, unwelcome. John reached room A232, took a single deep breath, and pushed through.

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It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the woman we now know as Jane Austen was in fact a time-traveling criminal. After watching the movie Clueless in 1995, Ms. “Austen” created a temporal paradox by traveling back to the late eighteenth century, ingratiating herself in a middle-class home, and pre-inventing the romantic comedy. The historical Sandiego may have gotten away with her literary fraud, too, if she hadn’t made a critical error in the early pages of Northanger Abbey (1817):

“…and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books…”

Ms. Austen, soon after the book was published, was assassinated via “typhus” by TimeCop Jean-Claude Van Damme. But for reasons that are whispered by time paradox conspiracy theory buffs and JCVD fans, Austen’s novels were allowed to remain in the timeline. This led to various American experts debunking the pre-invention of baseball by Austen and salvaging the more reasonable theory that one single man invented a game involving rudimentary objects and basic rules, thousands of years into mankind’s existence.

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