Today, February 13, we celebrate President’s Day, which by government conspiracy was relocated to the third Monday in February and opened up to all Presidents, due to the secret machinations of the Van Buren descendents. We also, coincidentally, celebrate the latest in our universally beloved, if intermittently scheduled, feast days.

Joe the Superlative

Life: Little is known of Joe Charboneau before he marched onto the field at Spartanburg in the middle of a game and hit a double with the palm of his open hand. After that his legend quickly grew: it was rumored that he was the offspring of a god and a bear, that he could knock birds unconscious with by shouting, and that in his one-bedroom apartment he housed shrine displaying a grisly collection of teeth he had collected in the bar-room brawls that punctuated his adolescence. On each stop on his journey, he fathered countless children, headlined dozens of separate bands, and invented a new drink, the Super Joe, which was a mixture of Budweiser, Miller Hi-Life, Schlitz, a mentholated cigarette, and a slice of sous-vide-cooked bacon.

After the rise, came the fall. Every father teaches their son about Charboneau fixing his own broken nose with whiskey and a pair of pliers, but not many knew about the failed medical practice he set up based on the same principles. Nor did the fledgling SJBL (Super Joe Baseball League) succeed, with its risky combination of baseball, moonshine and bare-knuckle boxing. Eventually, an older, weary Joe Charboneau said goodbye to the country and game he loved, traveled to Luxembourg, overthrew the government and has ruled there quietly ever since.

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so much depends
upon

a red schoen
dienst

brushed with spring
shadows

against a green
wall

“What beats me,” he said with a trembling voice, “is why did it always have to happen to me? What did I do to deserve it?”
–The Natural (1952)

“But I didn’t see it coming.”
“How could you possibly know she’d hurt you? How could anyone?”
“I didn’t see it coming.”
“You think you should have?”
“Yes. But I didn’t. Why didn’t I?”
–The Natural (1984)

The film version of The Natural is saccharine and sentimental, laden with heavy-handed imagery and emotional manipulation. It eschews the dramatic tension of the text for a pulpy, feel-good ending. It is fantasy fodder for middle-aged men. And despite common belief, it is vastly superior to the book in nearly every way.

Bernard Malamud’s novel was published in 1952, and the era sits heavy in the pages. It’s a work about heroes, but at the same time it doesn’t believe in heroes. It’s a book about baseball that captures none of the game’s spirit.  The Natural is a product of its lame times.

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Baseballnumbers have come a long way in twenty years. They’ve made Jeremy Brown into a D-list celebrity, driven Steve Garvey to gibbering insanity, and transformed Bert Blyleven into a bearded god-child. But lest you fear that the market inefficiencies have all been made efficient, and that the world is horribly, horribly flat, I present one bastion against common sense: the promotional speaking industry.

Yes, for a trifling sum, you can enlist one of many eager retired or current baseball players to speak at your family barbecue and/or corporate retreat. Do you have strategic branding initiatives that lack a celebrity endorsement to complement it? Fetch your checkbook! But be sure you’re not overpaying for RBIs.

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Not so long ago, I told the harrowing tale of Mark Gubicza, mangled plastic corpse, and the dark malaise it flung over the moribund Kansas City Royals franchise. The twisted, insane smile of that armless crippled puppet still haunts me, as it haunts us all indirectly. Many a night I have spent in troubled, listless sleep, reliving the moment of my cowardice, my refusal to aid the dozens of remaining Royals fans.

Ultimately, I decided that I had no choice but to face my demons. In one hand I held a dented aluminum bat from the sporting goods section, and with the other stared through the preview pane of my phone camera to avoid making eye contact with the spirits of the damned.

Thus armed, I reached the back of the store to face my spiritual oppressor, only to discover among the plastic golden trophies something I never expected:

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As you probably already know, FanGraphs+ is back for 2013 and better than ever, with more than a thousand player capsules, special articles written by smart people, and fantasy advice adjusted for both standard and Ottoneu leagues. What you may not know is that FanGraphs is also rolling out another new product: FanGraphs-.

Like ERA-, FIP-, and SIERA-, FanGraphs- is league adjusted. What this means is that the thoughtful analysis and baseball news you crave has been adjusted for your own fantasy league, one in which you are doomed to continue your lifelong streak of disappointment and failure. Player capsules will carry helpful advice; however, that advice, being designed for you personally, will be tinged with regret and will serve to make you doubt yourself in every choice that you make. Here are a couple of examples:
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People need systems. Maybe not all the time – true genius creates its own rules – but most of us need lines to color in, because otherwise our dogs would start to look like cows. The Omnibus has its own order, progressing through the National League in alphabetical order, heading to Washington, then to Baltimore and on through to Toronto. I’m telling you this because our next stop is the sunny climate of Miami, Florida, and it is beyond my capacity to alter this.

I don’t want to be here. Miami resists irony: it is all-inclusive, all-extreme, the opposite of itself. Even its uniform teeters on alternate edges of the color wheel. Miami trolls itself, and laughs at its own joke.

Like it or not, however, travel to Miami we must. So, as a refresher, the rules: the Ironic Jersey Omnibuc attempts to explore what it is to be a fan of a given team, and how best to express that fandom through the name and number on one’s garment. In previous editions, this exploration has taken the form of a tour of the ghosts of a team’s past, but as you’ll soon learn, the easy path is not an option for us at present.

The first decision: to don the teal or the orange? One of the cardinal rules of the ironic jersey is the rule of time: any jersey too fresh, no matter how keen its edge, will often be confused with the simplistic optimism of yesterday. Take the example of Jose Reyes: five years from now, he will become the perfect symbol for the Loria Marlins, a promsing star sold like so much cattle at the first downturn in the market. But today, Reyes is just a random purchase off the 2012 rack; a fortunate chance, but a chance nonetheless. No, we must travel further, and venture into the teal.

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I awoke last Saturday to a phosphorescent glow pouring through the windows, the mixture of weak sunlight and stale white fog, a weather grown tired of itself and everything. It was a dead morning, a morning for weak instant coffee and textbooks, the kind Roy Hobbs would see out of a train window, the kind where even a boy in a Bradbury story grows old.

It was on such a sickly January morning that I stared out into the wilderness of my own uncut lawn and thought: “Yes, today. Today is the day. I shall go and carve life out of this lingering low pressure front, and drink from its sap.” I would go, I decided, on a baseball pilgrimage.

I already knew my destination: the old Sick’s Stadium, nestled in the heart of South Seattle. It was the home of the Seattle Rainiers of the Pacific Coast League and, for one magical season, the Seattle Pilots. I took my copy of Ball Four, a camera, a can of Rainier Beer to pour out for my baseball ancestors, and some mittens.

The voyage was a treacherous one, and like the pilgrims of misspelled British sagas of yore, I endured innumerable hardships. I had to scrape the ice off my car windows and got caught at no less than five consecutive red lights. My soul was tested, and I turned from Dearborn Avenue onto Rainier stronger, wiser, and somewhat colder than ever before. The check-cashing places and sausage outlet stores rolled past my vision until finally my destination crept above the horizon.

Sick’s Stadium.

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In yet another hallmark of the present author’s questionable decision-making skills and political acumen, I present to you the third in a likely three-part series on the procurement and evaluation of a collection of unknown baseball cards. Today’s episode: a 4,000-count monster box purchased for ten dollars at a local baseball card store. Surely, such baldfaced oneupsmanship of our Fearless Leader will not go unpunished, and my 5,000-word chapter about Pete O’Brien for the upcoming NotGraphs: The Book book has been all but doomed. Still, I am willing to martyr myself and my sportswriting career prospects for you, dear reader, as I share with you a voyage almost as magical as reading a book, only not quite.

The box in question:

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