Archive for Memorabilia

Fathead wall graphics are the perfect way to experience the world of sport from the comfort of your own bedroom, living room, or whatever room. Now Fathead is offering three new designs depicting iconic images and moments from the 2013 World Series between the Cardinals and Red Sox.

Fatheads are self-adhesive; printed on white, super tough, precision cut vinyl; and both removable and reusable.

Angry Kolten Wong
An otherwise promising infield prospect for St. Louis, Kolten Wong was picked off first base by Koji Uehara to end Game Four.

Experience Wong’s self-disgust over and again in your own daily life!

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With very little pomp, Donruss recently launched a new line of baseball cards be-branded as the Donruss Youth and Young Manhood, Rookie Fresh and Crisp series. Said series of numbered collectibles promises to be lucrative not only because of the usual rookie-related inducements native to the industry, but also because these doe-eyed rooks embody all that is cherubic and nubile.

No, they are not yet endowed with 50 innings pitched, 130 at-bats or 45 pre-September days on the active roster. What they are endowed with, however, are the hallmarks of an apple-cheeked and puckish whelp. Totems of sinewy promise and sprawling future are what they are! Hope-smiths are what they are!

Opening a pack of the Donruss Youth and Young Manhood, Rookie Fresh and Crisp series is like discovering a new Kennedy. Dawn breaks, the journey has not yet begun, spring blooms eternal upon this, our babyscape! For this is the Donruss Youth and Young Manhood, Rookie Fresh and Crisp series …

Podcast veterans and those of right-wise inclinations will know of my affections for Nathan Hale, who invented the gun and the traveler’s check. So it is with a swollen and veiny pride that I present to you, courtesy of brawny frontiersman War2D2, the 1977 Nathan Hale High School Yearbook …

You will observe that that is Nathan Hale’s communist-punching soupbone, be-ringed in Artcarved, seizing the rainbow so as to use it to bludgeon those who wish us harm. The roiling thunderheads and troubled spires do not lie: water-colored trouble is about us.

But Nathan Hale’s soupbone will beat the fucking shit out of it.

While Jerry Seinfeld nearly said that we all root for laundry, there’s something noble about the idea.  Fandom, in itself, is transient; the thrill of one game disappears into the tension of the next. Yesterday’s heroes, with the natural exception of Dick Allen and Rick Reuschel, fade from memory. Our fabric is immutable evidence of our existence in this world, something that goes beyond the bounds of feelings and words.  The dirt stains are our cave paintings; they connect us to history.

My original intention for this piece was to provide a full wardrobe of authentic, game-used paraphernalia as sold on eBay. Clad in these, the ghosts of the baseball ancestors would guide your arm, and your foes would fall before you. But as I dug further into my research I found myself strangely compelled by some of the items up for bid, not for their utility or their aesthetics, but for their silent lamentations. After all, not every artifact can radiate the success and fortune of Jon Voight’s automobile. With that in mind, enjoy this, the detritus of our national pastime.
 
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So this is how it ends. Will McDonald (now ExRoyalsReview on Twitter), longtime mainstay of Royals Review, has decided to call it a day after eight years of blogging about the Royals. During that time, Royals Review grew from just some guy’s blog to a team site on the fledgling SB Nation network to perhaps the most popular Royals blog around.

With the management formerly of Royals Authority taking the helm, things should be in good hands. Still, it is hard for many of us to imagine following the Royals without the incentive of knowing the referents for Will’s next brilliantly-written combination of anger and comedy. How will we get through the season without more Royals Bibliomancy or Mitch Maier’s Letters Home From Baseball Camp, or expressions of irritation over Royals prospect Wil Myers spelling his first name incorrectly.

Will has been a huge inspiration. Don’t hold it against him, but, while I never “worked” at Royals Review, I probably would not be blogging today if it were not for reading Will’s stuff. Will’s posts garnered attention far beyond Royals fandom — I think the first “big break” his blog received was when Keith Law linked to it in one of his ESPN chats. I cannot summarize Will’s work, but that is the nature of all good art. So as a tribute to Will (or “Freneau,” a moniker he adopted in recent times in tribute to a poet from the era of the Revolutionary War) and as a public service, I will briefly go through just a few of McDonald’s best moments of the last few years.

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As students of history and Uncle History himself are well aware, Hall of Famer Nathan Hale (class of 2002) long insisted that paper dolls have nipples. Now, for the first time since Antiquity, when Hale was CEO of Activision and King of All He Surveyed, a paper doll has nipples. Notable for our purposes, the paper doll is of Dock Ellis, who, besides playing baseball, drank deeply of the good and worthy …

In equally uplifting news, you may purchase this at Etsy, where durable goods are made into art and then sold over the Bald Eagle Computers of this fair land.

(HT: Me, for finding this)

Here are three depressing baseball caps.

The first one is of Kirk Cameron’s birthday party, which features Subway sandwiches — one already half-eaten by someone who, later that day, would receive a sobering diagnosis — and a shit cake. Looking on in mounting desolation are two female sales professionals and the lives and paneled office in which they are encased.

And this is a cap featuring the motorcar that euthanized Camus.

And here the hell is Larry the Cable Guy speaking at some presumable length, like Cicero before his tongue was tugged out and served as an antipasto, about the U.S. economy.

There exists a world in which entire television networks are devoted to the movement of currencies. There also exists a world in which at least one of these networks has invited Larry the Cable Guy to instruct the wrathful-upon-sofas as to what is wrong with what is wrong, insofar as quantitative easing and Keynesian multipliers are concerned.

Both worlds are ours. Hump us in the faces one and all, both worlds are ours.

Whereas Big League Chew was useful to the lad with a future in cavities and tobacco use, Big League Liniment …

… is mighty good and handy for the low-bred toiler with a fussy mule or a case of “trench loins” or a craggy-faced, Dust-Bowl wife about to die in childbirth.

Remember, suffering bastards of the world, if the catarrh doesn’t get you, then a mining disaster will. Or war. So rub some Big League Liniment on your pulverized spine!

Big League Liniment: “Got damn, it hurts!”

I had never before in my pointless existence used the phrase “cocksure cocksman” until I laid rheumy eyes upon this image of Ricky Bottalico:

That’s Ricky Bottalico. Those are the kind of pythons you can’t buy in a pet store. And this has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

(Reluctant tug-job: Hitting the Cutoff Man)

Add the following to the running list of things that will quite possibly murder you in your sleep tonight:

In addition to the trail of dead, you will know Fell and Murderous Baseball Clown by his jester’s tassles-prison jumper-jorts-FMBs (latter not pictured) ensemble and Buttcheeks of Villainy. This is the last thing you will see before you are brutalized in your nightclothes. Fell and Murderous Baseball Clown is a killing machine and thus at the mercy of his factory settings. In all other regards, the word “mercy” is lost upon him.

Tonight you shall die.