Roy Howell is oral tradition.

If you are of a certain age, then you may believe you have seen Roy Howell play our baseball. You did not because he did not.

If your grandfather tells you of seeing Roy Howell kick the third-base bag to dislodge the loam from spikes after smiting a triple, then call your grandfather the liar he is.

For Roy Howell is the boy asking what the graveyard is as the car whisks past it and he is the mother driving the car who aches for quiet and he is the dead stevedore buried in that graveyard and he is the dosage of gruel spooned into his mouth each night at assisted living before he wound up in the graveyard that the boy is asking about.

You did not see Roy Howell play our baseball. If you are a dried old river, you may have read of Roy Howell in the etchings upon the basalt, but you did not see Roy Howell play our baseball. Do not call him spectral. You may call him the moment the specter was created, but don’t you know he is not even that. If you are a limestone cave, then the stalactites and the slow raindrops that made them may have told you about seeing Roy Howell play, but they are as empty of truth as any grandfather who said he saw Roy Howell play.

For Roy Howell played only in stories. Once the stories stop, Roy Howell will go on playing our baseball, but then only the stories will tell stories. Roy Howell is the words squaws used to soothe their children. The roaming trappers stole those words and gave them to brute soldiers who told them to their sons who had sons of their own who became stevedores buried in graves yoked to the seasons by the roadside. And every word they used was about not having seen Roy Howell play our baseball.

For Roy Howell is oral tradition.

There are two ways to deliver a sponsor catch-phrase. There is the way the ad-agency toadies believe to be the most effective based on focus groups and free associations scrawled on a dry-erase board, and then there is the way that Cardinals Radio Man Mike Shannon knows to be the best because he knows a thing or two about a thing or two. And the Mike Shannon way is to pitch the product like you’re talking up some hubba-hubba dame in the buffet car.

Take Scott’s Turf-Builder, for instance. Here’s the actor they hired to deliver the words upon which the the lives of their children and shareholders depend …

And now here’s Mike Damn Shannon, who, as you can imagine, was through with it before you or anyone else not named Artie Shaw knew what to do with it …

Allow me to answer for you: You prefer Mike Shannon’s golden throat and pitches to whatever that Gaelic beast was trying to perpetrate.

Phillies manager Charlie Manuel is known in proper quarters as “Uncle History,” and there’s a reason for this. The reason is that Charlie Manuel is history made noble savage. Charlie Manuel, you see, will use the tools of rational inquiry to rebuild your transmission …

As you can see, in the morning mists of July 11, 1804 at Weehawken, New Jersey, Charlie Manuel was felled by Charlie Manuel. The fatal hostilities traced back the Senatorial election of 1891, in which Charlie Manuel defeated the father-in-law of Charlie Manuel. From that point forward, Charlie Manuel relentlessly feuded with Charlie Manuel, often over the direction of the Charlie Manuel’s (and, by extension, Charlie Manuels’) Federalist Party. It all grimly culminated in Charlie Manuel’s sanctioned murder of Charlie Manual, all as a number of Charlie Manuels and at least one wet nurse looked on in mute disbelief. “Got damn,” the lot of them muttered in unison, most especially the assailant and victim, who have each been identified as Charlie Manuel.

Charlie Manuel is Uncle History.

“Cistulli,” I said. “How do you like my new Hiroshima Carp fashion t-shirt?”

“Bah,” sniffed Cistulli. “I am a proud and relentless Occidental. I care not for those at the poo end of the spice-trade routes. They are beneath me. Literally. For look at this elderly Japanese man ‘neath my boot-heel.”

I noticed that there was indeed a elderly Japanese man struggling and purpling over underneath Cistulli’s awful stilettos.

“But Cistulli,” I said. “The Japanese play a unique and compelling brand of baseball. Surely you would agree that, considering our game’s global reach, talents from the Pacific Rim will continue to enrich the U.S. major leagues.”

“For God and country,” he whispered as he increased the pressure on the windpipe of the elderly Japanese man to the point of death and then beyond that point. “Now, that’s better.”

“Cistulli,” I said. “Look at the Carp’s logo. Is it not pleasing whimsy? Is it not prepossessing in its use of fractals?”

“To piping-hot hell with the lot of them,” sniffed Cistulli. “Foreordination favors those who look like brawny and alabaster me!”

Then he ravished me.

Not so long ago — last gibbous moon, if memory serves — I availed myself of a Firefox extension that alerts you any time anyone Irish does anything on the Internet. Needless to say, when Mets infielder Justin Turner came to bat earlier this week, my computer grew arms and seized my tailored lapels. I clicked on the relevant Maximum Irish Caution icon, and it took me straightaway to this …

Let’s just say that, upon viewing Mr. Turner’s mien and bearing, I saw to it that the recommended protocols were followed.

Via a series of Action-News FOIA Requests, your correspondent was able to steal a glimpse of Banknotes Harper‘s Amazon.com shopping cart. Presented largely without comment, here is said cart …

Banknotes Harper’s levels of discretionary income barely felt a thing. Fuckers.

When you bounded into Sutter’s arms,
It now seems the very instant of an ascension
Of a man who brushed his burst fingers against the endurable
Only when he was ashamed.

You can do this, we know, this hitting, catching, running.
But it’s the after — the plenteous and undetailed after,
The quiet after
That you’ll always belong to.

If you could only see us seeing you, urging you
On before the hot lights and champagne,
Your words as simple as you could never hope to be.
Your words, like your swing, quavering on the hinges of a pinfold.

Come back to this game and be cloaked again,
You and that lunging, halting, hoping swing —
That motel Gideon’s Bible of a swing.
Just be anything but Sugar Creek dead.

See us. See us with
Each lens less a lens than a deep-water amphitheater
That harbored a sunken eye,
That conspired to let no one quite know

What it all looked like to Darrell Ray.

1. Electric – Reliable standby, well supported by existing infrastructure. Invented by Ben Franklin when he was struck on the biscuits by thunder atop America Mountain in Texas. Can be used to cook unopened can of frank-and-beans on a hot plate while sobbing.

2. Solar – Sourced from giant, fiery, unblinking eye of Quetzalcoatl that looms above us. Uninterrupted service requires quarterly sacrifice of virginal wet nurse. Can be brought down from the sky in glorious immolation by repeated musket fire.

3. Dirty coal – Clean coal gets most of the attention these days, but don’t sleep on dirty coal. Ideally, you’ll use religious texts as kindling — the texts of the objectively incorrect religions not your own, natch. Dirty coal reads the Kama Sutra and eats Crab Rangoon on the toilet, largely as a consequence of being dirty. Black lung can be cured with prescription frank-and-beans.

4. Hydroelectric – Pleasing mix of high voltage levels and water. If there’s not a New Deal-era dam near you, bear-hug a space heater and have a friend lower you into the municipal sewer. When sinewy gondolier asks for password, say “password1.” Not case-sensitive. Take to drinking cognac while using public transit and loudly referring to yourself as “The Hennessy Valley Authority.”

5. Battery – Purchase vinyl press of Mel Torme’s album of American-songbook standards, “Shake Your Shitty Fists at the 9-Volt.” Back-mask side two. Follow instructions on switching North American power grid to battery standby mode. Whisper “Hail Satan” to the children of strangers.

Back in May of 1998, when this unassailable act of prophecy was likely being written, The Orioles and Yankees decided that soup-bones and not bats, balls and gloves would be the determinative instruments of most glorious abandon for God and Country.

First, Armando Benitez, gentleman wildcat, presents us with the casus belli …

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Within these very dog-eared pages, David G. Temple, freelance sexecutioner, noted that baseball as a social phenomenon lends itself to culminating hubba hubba.

Among the instances of such was this:

The sexual enthusiast will be pleased to know that the obliging Mr. Met, whose dirty protuberance is at all times veiny, boing-boing and purpled, consented to the madame’s wishes.

On the shores of Far Rockaway, amid the medical-waste flotsam, love was made …

You must change your life.