I’ve collected baseball cards since I was a kid. When I use the word “collect,” I really mean that I don’t throw away the ones I have. I’m not the sort of person who can justify a heavy investment in luxury items like baseball cards, lottery tickets, bottled beer, or plus-rated gasoline.

For someone who grew up at the rise of the junk wax era, my collection is and was pretty decent. When one of my father’s co-workers gave me a crumbling December 1987 Beckett Magazine, I sorted through my card and found that I owned the rookie card of a guy named Tony Gwynn. I took it to church to show my friends, and lost it. Later, I traded a ton of cards for a 1963 Carl Yastrzemski, which I always found difficult to look at because of the patch of sunlight on the tip of his nose, and which made him look like an elf. The card was worth $75 at the time. I took it to a card show, and had it stolen. Later on, in 1992, I pulled some fancy insert rookie card of Shaquille O’Neal, and it, too, was stolen. That one is hard to feel upset about now, given that it’s probably worth 20 cents. Still, I was a pretty stupid kid.

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A hundred and fifty years ago, Walt Whitman thrust himself into the literary scene, challenging us to distill the vitality within us, the truly American. Since then, we as a people (and particularly our high school English teachers) have sought the Great American novel. Moby Dick? Too ponderous. Gatsby? Too shiny. Grapes of Wrath? Too many tortoises.

But it turns out that our quest is in vain, simply because it’s already completed. We have the text that encapsulates our youth, our dynamism, our hope. We have Matt Christopher’s The Kid Who Only Hit Homers.

In Sylvester Coddmyer III, the titular hero, we have a mixture of Ragged Dick and Nicholas Nickleby, a boy with humility and heart, who tackles his difficulties with pluck and moxie. Unlike the modern brooding hero, Sylvester is a boy of action rather than words. He’s a self-made kid, one who gets out of bed each morning pulling handfuls of bootstrap. He doesn’t make excuses; he only hits home runs.

But by no means is Sylvester a flat character. He’s an everyman; to describe him too precisely would rob the young reader an opportunity to find common ground with the character, just as every teenage girl in 2009 imagined herself as Bella. No, Sylvester has weaknesses, and ones we can all understand. He likes pie too much, for example. Christopher gives a subtle nod to The Natural by having Christopher overeat pies and miss a game. We’ve all been there!

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My wife and I, being healthy and productive members of both society and the working class, often spend our evenings pursuing projects that imbue our lives with a sense of fulfillment and personal satisfaction. So was it on the evening last, as I typed words about baseball and my wife digitized photographs of our collective youth. These two spheres collided tragically when  my aforementioned and charming wife uncovered photographs of my own baseballing pursuits, in the form of fake baseball cards devoted to my Little League team.

I present to you the backs of said cards. I do not present their fronts, because as you are perhaps aware, the Internet is a swarthy port-tavern of a place, and the present author may have, in his youth, worn the sort of spectacles that put Ron Kittle’s to shame.

I also present them to you in order to confess the sins of a foolhardy youth. Judge as thou wilt, Internet. I shall emerge the stronger for it.

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Casper Wells threw his Suburban into neutral and let it coast onto the off-ramp. According to the Rand McNally map he bought in a town called Williamsburg, he was just on the outskirts of some town called Williamsburg. He saw stalks of corn whenever he closed his eyes, which he had been doing well before he’d parked the car at the market. He idly wondered if he’d make Williamsburg before dark. The sun in his eyes told him it was morning.

He’d spent the night at a motel somewhere, a place off the road with a vacancy sign and no customers. When he’d gone into the office, there was nobody there, just papers and a bunch of keys on the wall. He couldn’t take the keys, couldn’t sleep in that empty place, so he went back out to the car and drowsed fitfully in the driver’s seat. When the sun came up, the motel was still vacant, still.

He scratched the head of his poodle, Checkers, and let her out to do her business in the grass at the side of the road. The air smelled of corn, somehow, sweet and yellow. Casper went into the store and bought some coffee and a couple of pepperoni sticks from the owner, a man with a sort of plaid face. He asked the man how to get to Chicago. “Just keep going,” he said airily, as if Casper could do anything else.

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I wandered the forgotten, half-stocked shelves of the back corner of the low-end department store like a ghost, weaving through a graveyard of display model car seats and pressboard cribs. On the walls hung plastic wrapped in plastic, pink and light blue devices, the last bastion of comic sans font. I waded through reams of onesies with messages like “First Round Draft Pick” and “Daddy’s Little Angel”, with disdain my machete. We were still in book, I thought to myself. The nursery was painted, the ultrasounds studied with burgeoning horror, our diaper philosophy established. All was proceeding.

I had long since lost the reason for being there. My wife unseen called out questions from the southeast, but I was far away, back in my own childhood. Growing up in 1980s suburbia, where crime waves consisted of vandalism, my parents would allow me to explore alone the wide, beige-tiled aisles of the local general store, and I would stare at all that colorful plastic and the potential that was vacuum sealed within. I coveted it all: wind-up pocket toys, board games, sports equipment. With my little senses I drank in the untapped fun.

I’ve failed, in my own little liberal arts degree way, to live up to the economic status of my hardworking parents. I’ve long grown accustomed to my own poverty, and since my wife volunteered herself into our collective cause, she’s accepted her own lead crown. But looking at all this stuff – and there is no better word for it – adorning the shelves, beaming with its own uselessness, I felt regret. I probably won’t be able to waste money on dumb things for my daughter the way my parents did for me, thanks to life choices squandered fifteen years hence.

It was under this cloud that I sulked aimlessly, until I stumbled across this:

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The NotGraphs Fireside Chats comprise a series of ruminations on the craft of writing, sometimes in relation to baseball, sometimes less so. The goal of this exercise: to learn something about baseball from the way we craft meaning about it, and perhaps about ourselves from our need to do so.

All Fireside Chats are rated TLDR.

Today’s guest is Jeremy Blachman, who you may be familiar with from his writing on a website called “NotGraphs”.

Patrick: So let’s begin. What are you going for in a baseball article? How do you know when you’ve achieved it?

Jeremy: I don’t know that I’m ever sure what I’m trying to achieve. What I’d like to think are my best posts are the ones that have a genuine idea behind them. My favorite post I’ve written for NotGraphs was a mailbag of rejected fantasy chat questions, because I felt like it was not only a legitimately worthy idea for a piece, but that I’d read so many real chats over the years and felt comfortable enough with the form that I knew I could execute.

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1. Stop working for a couple of minutes. Consider the American expatriate and repatriate, Karl “Tuffy” Rhodes.

2. Take as much of him into your mind as possible. Capture the three home runs on Opening Day against Dwight Gooden, his subsequent disgrace and exile. Imagine his travels along the Narrow Road to the Deep North, spiritually speaking. Add his redemption, his mastery over himself and his adopted homeland, finally shedding his gaijin status, throwing himself into the river, and once more becoming Karl Rhodes. Or read his wikipedia article.

3. Convert these impressions into musical form. If possible, write them down, upload them and link to them in the comments. Otherwise, don’t. But take the time to imagine what a song about Tuffy Rhodes would sound like. Select whichever medium, style and genre seems natural to you.

4. Click on the following link, which contains a real song not only involving Karl “Tuffy” Rhodes but actually about Tuffy Rhodes. Listen to the song.

5. Try to recall your Tuffy Rhodes, the Tuffy Rhodes of five minutes ago.

6. Consider the power of the artist to imprint him or herself upon your own feelings. Abandon your own creative vision of Tuffy Rhodes, forever lost. Curse Aristophanes once more for the death of Socrates. Eat a bagel, forgive yourself. Go back to work.

Has the physical exhaustion of the endless middle-class toil got you down? Are you desperate for another in a long string of trivial distractions to amuse you and distract you from the harsh reality of the unblinking void? Allow this ancient, unanimated daguerreotype to bring a moment of Good Feelings into your life, or at least some cognitive dissonance.

The game: attached below is a photograph of the northern half of the present author’s home library.

(Embiggenation is a necessity for this particular activity. Click to do so.)

Majestic, no? Note the grandeur of the Ikea bookshelves, all named Billy. Take in the couch, a bloated and gaseous corpse, purchased in the Watergate era. Cast your eyes toward the crown molding, lending a touch of Ionic superciliousness. Finally, bathe in the radiant light of the books, all purchased for between $0.99 to $3.00 at thrift stores and public library book sales.

Once you’re finished being struck by awe, let’s move forward to The Game.

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The Omnibus flees the state of Florida and heads north on Interstate 75 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home of the Brewers. I will confess, dear reader, that I was glad to have the Marlins of Miami in my rear-view mirror. It was all too much: the orange, the stadium, the Loria. But if the Marlins are an overdose in irony, the Brewers may very well be its opposite.

I tabulated the statistics, collated the names, sifted through the history. Afterward, I found myself at a loss. I had no idea, I realized, who the Milwaukee Brewers were, or who they were trying to be. Confounded, I turned to the wisdom of my esteemed colleague Robert J. Baumann, who resides ‘round thereabouts. His response:

“All of this speaks to a sort of Midwestern complex: we are at once embarrassed of who we are, and apologists for our pasts. There’s a statue of Bud Selig outside of Miller Park that was just erected last year, for crissake: the man who brought baseball back to Milwaukee, yes, but also the man who undermined their success for nearly two decades by insisting that small-market Milwaukee could never compete, allowing the team to throw their hands in the air and sign players like Jeffrey Hammonds as a half-assed effort to field a team that wouldn’t finish last. There are a number of reasons why Major League was filmed in Milwaukee…”

Milwaukee’s baseballing history is as flat as the cornfields that non-Midwesterners associate with its name. While most franchises are garnished with surprising veteran appearances and loud rookie implosions, the Brewers have few of either: Selig rarely paid for name recognition, and even Pat Listach hung around five seasons with the team. What’s left is apologetic mediocrity, celebrated and familiar. Even the names on the backs of the jerseys are vanilla: Thomas, Scott, Cooper, Harper.

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This weekend I found myself, in succession:

1. In a depressing, rundown coin shop with sunbleached boxes of forgotten baseball cards, each coated with layers of increasingly-marked down price-tags

2. Purchasing a box of 1989 Sportflics baseball cards for six dollars

3. Opening packs of Sportflics baseball cards in my living room and seeing, in their shiny plastic coating, a reflection of myself.

For those unaware, Sportflics were an engineering marvel, a golden age of ballooning among the baseball card culture. For the low, low price of 79 cents, nearly double what a pack cost in those days, a kid could rip open a pack to find three whole whopping cards. But these were no ordinary cards. These were cards instilled with Magic Motion: a ridged plastic coating that caused the image of the card to move when you tilted it, theoretically. In reality it just made the picture hard to see most of the time.

Maybe I’m a Sportflic, I thought, ridden with angst, as I pulled a Gregg Jefferies out of a foil wrapper. Here I am still trying to convey thoughts and feelings with words, while the rest of the world is leaving me behind. No one has time to read words anymore; the future will revert to hieroglyphics, sad trumpet noises, animated GIFs and smell-o-vision. My fate is sealed, I thought. Then I looked at the cards again. But why must I martyr myself for the sake of literature, that fickle trollop? Why not join the future, already in progress.

And so, after relearning Photoshop for the hundredth time, I bring to you the latest in internet baseball pseudo-analysis, combined with the pointless charm of the Sportflic. I bring to you: the GIFCard.

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