The ballplayers above share nothing but a love of the game, the ability to look good in a round-topped, large-billed cap, and the appearance of their names in at least one sentence of standard English. Not just any sentence, mind you; a Memorable Quote from a Classic Film. Proceed.
Should you be the first to crack my rebus, I will a) write all about it in my diary and b) reward you by letting you name the topic of my next post. (Click to embiggen)
— But, you will say, every moment in naked baseball is a great moment in naked baseball. And to that I say, Quite so. Should that prohibit us from enumerating them and celebrating their greatness? Well then. There are so, so many places we might start. But the best place, I propose, in keeping with our dedication to the Picture and its ever-increasing exchange rate with the Word, is that place at which naked baseball was first photographically documented: at which its joys, theretofore private and ephemeral, were first entrusted to posterity.
It is one of the eternal injustices of the world that greatness on the upper lip so rarely coincides with greatness on the ballfield. A man — and here I expressly exclude such god-spawn as Eddie Clarence Murray — only has so much energy to give. Who among us has not wished to lift a timeless mouthbrow from its prosaic confines? To grant a thing of beauty the immortality toward which it forlornly strives? Why, we ask, must a masterwork like Ross Grimsley’s be stuck straining Ross Grimsley’s soup?
There is a way. Before you lies an Olympus of great mustaches, and the mortal, frail, broken faces from which they arose. Also before you lie some ballplayers of repute, who kept themselves hairless through inexplicable choice or sheer frailty. All you will need to set the universe aright is a pair of scissors, some tape*, and a crippling sense of cosmic responsibility. (Click to very bigly embiggen)
* Scissors and tape can be found at many general-purpose retail establishments.
Yu Darvish took his first ride on the Range. He pitched well, and comfortably. Yu Darvish, I suspect, does everything well, and comfortably. Had his parents been disinclined toward greatness, they would not have named him for a pronoun and an adjective. Small matter that we mortal English speakers fail to recognize that adjective. Yu does not consult the dictionary. The dictionary consults Yu. He is at home among the Races of Middle-Earth, when he so chooses. (Gil-galad was a Darvish king. / Of him the harpers sadly sing.) He is at home amidst Victorian nonsense. (‘Twas brillig, and the darvish toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.) And he is at home on the proverbial street. (Ball so hard / This sh*t darvish.)
There is a world of forms, readers. Of algorithms, percentages, maneuvers and protocols, ticking and whirring in glorious rarefaction. And then there is a world of grass and leather and sweat and rosin, the things with which we fell in love. There are times, and there will be times, when the scales encrust our eyes and even the truest among us lose sight of that latter world. At those times, I submit, we could do worse than to take a moment to regard and cherish that most intimate of baseball transactions: the delicate pas de deux of cowhide and cartilage. (Click to embiggen)
Baseball is a game. JUST A GAME. We know this in our hearts of hearts; we confess it grudgingly to those people in our lives who, for various reasons, hate innocence and justice and America; we hiss it at our haggard reflections, 60 or 80 or 100 times a year (or would, if we were pathetic, which maybe some of you are! Some of you who are not me!). But there are higher powers that seem not to have gotten that memo. For they continue to entrust our sport with characters and events of unmistakable cosmic significance. Doubt ye me? How quickly ye distracted minds forget the shattering tale of Roberto “Fausto Carmona” Hernandez Heredia. A tale that was on the lips of every schoolboy in those halcyon, mist-shrouded days of late January. A tale, in the end, that can only be told, and told fully, by desecrating a major work from the Western canon.
“She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.”