My 62-year-old Dodger fan friend, who is a 12-year veteran of a 32-year-old fantasy league team, sent the following email to Clayton Kershaw’s doctor. He then forwarded it to me with the note “The recommendation he made was exactly what I asked for. Coincidence?” In real life, people, in real life.
We all know that excitement is a finite, limited resource, easily depleted by September call-ups, teams with poor Pythagorean records, and the tinny, joyous music of the ice cream truck just beyond view. As a cautionary service against emptying one’s self of optimism and retreating into a cynical shell of a man/woman, we travel back to the Magical World of Yesterday, specifically October 1990, to look at the game’s hottest stars, as depicted in ink on shrinkable plastic.
(Said depictions are, as one might imagine, easily embiggenable.)
#1: Ben McDonald
1990 Upper Deck Card: $3.50. (Error card: $32.00.)
Why We Were Excited: He was a pitcher, and he was really tall!
Why We Stopped Being Excited: Synecdoche is an unfortunate reality for pitchers, and America was never able to fall in love with Ben McDonald’s arm as we could his oversized heart.
Career Highlight: Getting on the cover of Sports Illustrated with a baseball in his mouth.
Life Since Baseball: Owns a plantation where you and he can shoot animals with large guns together, as well as listen to fiddle music.
Random Japanese Fact: Visiting bigbenmcdonald.com will transport you to the Japanese webpage of Pitfall of establishment Ltd., which (with the aid of Google Translate) is designed for the betterment of humankind. From their press release: “I make money and the like. Create products to contribute to society, I think many people are thinking of making money. For this purpose, as a means of personal business is easiest. And services such as massage, I think there are a lot of people who have a business idea is not widely spread.” Ben McDonald’s enormous watch is also on display.
* Oakland scoreboard gives the strangest info. Currently showing: Seth smith July (career totals) 6hr/26rbi. that’s it.
* Derek Norris is batting .364 in the 7th inning in 2012. more highly predictive info from the oak scoreboard.
* Remember how 1Bs used to be plated on first when receiving a throw? Now it almost seems theyre stepping towards the throw.
* Looks like 1bs are gettin away with pulling their plant foot off the bag before the catch is made.
On May 1, 2007, Andruw Jones was hitting .264/.405/.527 and was on his way to winning his tenth gold glove. His Hall of Fame status was all but assured. Five years, three months, and fifteen days later, this happened:
Here, embiggenable at the reader’s discretion, is a snippet of the play-by-play for that inning:
The official scorer of the game, wise to the crippling pressure that age and expectations place on us all, and especially on the rounded shoulders of one Andruw Jones, scored the play as a double. An error, you say? Until the alchemists and the existentialists can brew some elixir that can, at the very least, dull the incremental pain that is the endless life, none of us can claim that Jones had any choice in his actions. We are all, in time, struck down by our own potential.
Ivan Nova does not understand this; he is young. But someday, if he’s fortunate enough, he will be Freddy Garcia, and he will know.
It would seem natural to declare that by wearing a hat with a team logo on it, you are making a simple act of supporting that team. The political realists among us, however, would argue that this not entirely true. We live in a zero-sum world; support provided to one team is, consequently, support taken away from that team’s enemies. Alliances are unavoidable.
Perhaps, ordinarily, you have no issue with these secondary repercussions created by your headgear. This is well, but keep in mind that there will inevitably be times when you need to cover your head and maintain your explicit love of baseball, while at the same time avoiding the hypersensitive people with whom you share existence.
To this end, I offer the following options, all purchasable on your local internet:
The Implicit
It has its advantages: simple, cheap, and it confers a Zen-like embrace of nothingness. You can buy four dozen of them for sixty bucks and rest easy knowing that you have enough hats to last the rest of your life, available in whichever color suits your current mood. It also has its disadvantages: worn with casual clothing, you may be confused for an actor in a pharmaceutical commercial and/or a coach in a Tom Emanski training video. Other potential advantages: bedazzling!
I’m not an artistic person. When I was six I won a coloring contest held at the local drugstore, and decided that it would be wise to reinvest my improbable ten dollar prize into some art supplies. Said supplies languished in the back of my desk drawer for years, and I never again established professional status as an artist. In high school I took a couple of art classes which killed my GPA, but allowed me to spend sixth period bullshitting with friends while smearing expensive oil paint onto cheap canvases with little forethought.
Despite being bad at art, I still enjoy making it. I don’t know if this is some pathetic attempt to create tangible evidence of my existence, a way of carving notches into the caves of my descendants, or whether it’s simple procrastination. My descent into new artistic depths occurred while trying to entertain eight year-olds with one of those summer projects no one actually engages in unless attending a summer camp. The process is simple and inexpensive: all you need are some sheets of clear plastic purchased from your least-detested local craft store, a fine-point sharpie, some worthless junk-era baseball cards, and an oven. If you don’t have an oven, this project may be somewhat less simple and inexpensive.
This is but one page from a wildly entertaining bit of merchandise I purchased while in Minneapolis for SABR 42: a 1990 Milwaukee Brewers game program. It’s a fluff piece on then-new commissioner of baseball Fay Vincent. I’m sure many similar pieces appeared in programs across the league and across the country, but I found it interesting for one paragraph in particular:
Many say that he is a perfect blend of former commissioners Peter Ueberroth and Bart Giamatti. If that is the case, then Francis T. “Fay” Vincent, baseball’s eighth commissioner, will help lead the game into a new era of prosperity this decade — a decade in which the business of the sport will be greater than ever before.”
Vincent would receive an 18-9 vote of no confidence from the owners in 1992 and resign his post to current commissioner and then-Brewers owner Bud Selig. 1994, of course, saw the strike, and many would argue that baseball wasn’t fully revived until the 1998 home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. And, of course, this was the beginning of that whole “steroids era” thing. A great new era of prosperity this decade indeed.
Whoops!
Many thanks to what-if.xkcd.com for putting the old radar gun debate to bed. According to legend, the faster the fastball, the better. NOT SO.
In answering the query “What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?”, the fine people of what if? have ultimately established that it would result in no less than a hit-by-pitch every time:
Shared with minimal comment, courtesy of Jonathan Gantt:
Terrifying, yet irresistible.
My favorite part? Watching what appears to be the broadcaster dashing across the field (2:53) moments after telling us he would do just that. A man of his word.
