The recent base-and-ball hootenanny provided us with several storylines. One of the most prominent, of course, is Jeffrey Loria’s success in unloading all dis gold bullion and all deez doubloons in exchange for the lives and efforts of baseball players. Which leads us to …
As part of my series of tweets illustrated literally, I take on this mysterious tweet from handsome Dee Gordon, aka “Skinny Swag 9”:
Chestnuts Cistulli has already concocted a post that, leveraging the football-card models of the past, instructs the Baseball Card-Industrial Complex on ways to improve the product and or merchandise and or deliverable. Naturally, the Internetting Gentleman is left wondering what the Garbage Pail Kids line of enthusiasms can teach Topps and their business combatants. Here is your answer:
Yea, verily: Capital. Punishment. Humor. Now.
Let us have executions. Let us have ducking stools. Let us have trials by ordeal to see whether Aaron Miles is a warlock. Let us snuff out life in the service of human amusements.
No, it’s not what you think. Albert Pujols is the very model of consistency as a baseball player. The man’s WAR has WAR. It’s not about Pujols deciding to spend the next decade in Anaheim either. He made the decision that he felt was best for him and his family and I wish him the best of luck.
Pujols has a different type of consistency problem, you see. The reader might recall that in 2006, when Ryan Howard won the NL MVP Award, Pujols responded like a petulant child in a press conference:
I see it this way: Someone who doesn’t take his team to the playoffs doesn’t deserve to win the MVP.
Howard’s Phillies, of course, missed the playoffs in 2006 while the Cardinals won the NL Central and, ultimately, the World Series.
Pujols probably deserved the MVP in 2006. Not, as he claimed, because his team made the playoffs, but because he was the best player in the league (his 8.5 WAR led the league and his .448 wOBA was best in the NL). Indeed, Pujols’s statement was colossally dumb for at least two reasons. First, although the Cardinals made the playoffs, they did so with an 83-78 record. The Phillies finished with a record of 85-77. Second, when in 2008 Albert Pujols won the MVP award in spite of his team missing the playoffs, he found himself in the awkward position of having to choose between (A) Rejecting the award on principle or (B) Accepting the award and admitting that he was wrong when he said what he said in 2006 lest he look like a hypocrite. But even this could be construed as a tacit admission that he was just being a sore loser in 2006.
Young Yu Darvish doesn’t know what all the fuss is about.
Young Yu Darvish lost his hemp necklace that time he was caught reading some poems he wrote to Kumiko in Yoyogi Park and they had to run away from her aunt. He went back to look for it, but only found her underwear.
Young Yu Darvish once did get caught that time he was smoking cigarettes in the pachinko parlor with Keiko. But he knew that all it would take to get excused without incident were some furrowed eyebrows and a firm “Su-Me-Ma-Sen.” He’s nothing if not polite.
He’s never seen a gyroball, but he’s thrown a gyrocutter before.
Young Yu Darvish was never the same as the other kids, but that’s on them.
Young Yu Darvish’s chain says “love” in Japanese. He has one that says “hate” in Persian that he wears sometimes when he’s feeling a little different. He tells people they both say “love.”
When John Legend says “This ain’t a movie no / No fairy tale conclusion y’all,” young Yu Darvish knows what he’s saying. Like, deep down in his soul. Also, he thinks it’s a great thing to say to girls in English when he’s breaking up with them.
Young Yu Darvish has only been learning the guitar for three days but can do a great “Sunbeam” already. One time he was playing it in Harajuku and a girl just slipped him her number and ran away giggling. He plans to keep playing guitar, but worries about his fingernails. He needs them for that knuckler that he’s working on.
A teacher once told young Yu Darvish that he had an old soul. Once everyone left the room, she also gave him his first kiss.
He once played hockey, for kicks, for a couple of years. They won a county championship. Young Yu Darvish then quit because he didn’t like the way the pads chafed.
Young Yu Darvish wonders what’s out there.
Favored first prodigies, creation’s darlings,
mountain ranges, peaks, dawn-red ridges
of all genesis, — pollen of a flowering godhead,
links of light, corridors, stairs, thrones,
spaces of being, shields of rapture, torrents
of unchecked feeling and then suddenly, singly
mirrors: scooping their outstreamed beauty
back into their peerless faces.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, from the Second Elegy
(translated by Edward Snow)
List from Score’s Baseball’s Hottest Rookies 1989-1990 Book & Card Set.
Words via Google search (“__________ is”).
Selected images chosen from the name’s GIS results.
Jim Abbott
Jim Abbott is NOT a newt.
Kent Anderson
Kent Anderson Is A Powerful Narrative Of Uncomfortable Circumstances.
Eric Anthony
Eric Anthony is no longer eating dairy.
Sometimes a man, comprehending simultaneously both the pointlessness and abject misery of this thing we call life, is compelled by angst to unleash upon the uncaring world a cathartic, primeval scream.
Other times a man, trapped inside the satchel of the wife of a baseball writer — a wife who absolutely promised the baseball writer that said man would be unharmed during transport but who then broke the man anyway and didn’t even really seem that sorry about — sometimes that man is compelled to unleash a cathartic, primeval scream, as well.
“Yeah. I think I’m done with baseball.”
So here is Danny Ainge.
Every time I come across a reference to Ainge’s baseball career, I remember that I forgot about it. But the great 3-point shooter logged an Ichiro-an season’s worth of plate appearances (721) over a three-year MLB career — most of it played while he was still in college at Brigham Young. He holds the Blue Jays club record for youngest player to hit a homerun. He was the subject of a legal battle between the Jays and the Boston Celtics, wherein a “four-man, two-woman panel” ruled that the Celtics would have to buy his contract from the Jays, lest they be guilty of contract interference.
In basketball, he went on to become a fan favorite. In baseball, he was . . . forgettable.
We witness him in the above photo possibly trying to forget himself, or at least trying to forget that part of his life he spent playing baseball. The photo, perhaps snapped just at the end of a sigh, wistfully suggests Ainge’s brief MLB career. He would hit just one additional homerun, and post a batting average below that infamous Mendoza Line in his final season with the Blue Jays.
According to the above photo, baseball has officially taken over the entire universe today. While MLB has yet to release a PR statement, there is all kinds of talk floating around Dallas speculating what this will mean for us, the people of Earth.
• Everyone will be drafted; not for the army, but by potential employers. For the next six years, you will work for pennies on the dollar compared to what you’re worth (unless you’re a top-250 pick), but then you’ll get to explore the market for your services. Some call it indentured servitude, but I call it progress.
• You will not be in line for a promotion if the rest of your team sucks. Guilt by association. In a few years, this sentiment will eventually go away, but until then, get used to not being praised for your accomplishments.
• All things in life will now have a three-strikes, four-balls system. If you do well on four work projects, you will receive an automatic bonus. If you screw up three times, you’re fired. No if, ands, or buts.
• Just like baseball’s three-outs systems, once you get fired from three different jobs, you are no longer allowed to work for the next two years. You will be forced to find a Sugar Momma or Daddy to support yourself, as life is now out of your hands.
I, for one, welcome our new baseball overlords and their maverick policies.
I, a Cardinals loyalist, am still formulating my basest emotions insofar as Pujols-to-the-Angels is concerned. Briefly, though, I’m not angry; I’m disappointed in the world, which, I suspect, are my factory settings. I’m frustrated by sports populism which turn high-level business decisions into personal affronts. Again, though, I’m mostly disappointed in the world, which is stupid and dumb and stupid and fart.
Or, alternatively:
(Image and related sadness courtesy of Monkey with a Halo)