The Strange Case of Archie Bradley and Dylan Bundy

The lives of Archie Bradley and Dylan Bundy are intertwined like so much twine that has been woven or otherwise joined together. Both are right-handed pitchers taken in the first round (Bundy at fourth overall, Bradley at seventh) of the most recent draft. Both were the stars of their respective Oklahoma high school teams. And both those high school teams played each other to decide the 2011 Oklahoma state 6-A baseball championship. Furthermore, there is a distinct physical resemblance between the two — particularly in the Haircut part of the body.

The observer is struck by a notable difference in these images however (which the author definitely didn’t come across while attempting to scratch a certain newfound itch for sporting collectibles) — namely, that Bradley appears to be a cheerful sort, at harmony with the world and everything in it, and with a conscience as clean as a Cotton Mather’s codpiece. On the other hand, there is Bundy (more like Moribundy, innit?), a decidedly sullen-looking type, wearing the expression of one who’s peered into the lower elements of his soul and been unable to shake from his mind’s eye what he saw there.

In a perhaps unrelated note, NotGraphs has recently come into possession of a strange sort of artifact involving the two gentlemen in question — specifically, a notebook that appears to contain entries in the hand, at one moment, of Archie Bradley; at another, of Dylan Bundy.

Very curious, you see?

Of course, without all the facts, it’s irresponsible to make any conclusions. However, it is passages like the following that lead one to suspect more is at play.

Again, from the aforementioned notebook:

… but the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound, at last overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last ingredient required; and late one accursed night, I compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill-race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.