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.

Look at David Nied! Just look at him!

David Nied is playing a boy’s game in a god’s country! Is that a cowhide baseball or a frosty snowball, both totems to a lad’s insouciance! The promises of youth! The crisp air in one’s lungs! The ball taking determined flight from the determined hands of a Young Man of America! Who cares if his paymasters will force him to pitch in Mile High Stadium! David Nied, Young Man of America, can do this!

David Nied failed.

This is Vic Tayback’s grave:

(Thanks, I guess: Old Time Family Baseball)

Casey McGehee or Sterling Honorheart?

Both are there for those with nowhere left to turn. Both stand when a lady enters the room. Both would prefer not to fight but will if pressed. Both eat their vegetables and have firm handshakes. Both begin each morning with deep knee bends and prayer. Both shall take back the streets.

I must ask again: Casey McGehee or Sterling Honorheart?

(Bang and a boom: Lifetime Topps)

Via The Big Event comes unsurprising word that the Oakland A’s 2012 calendar is chock full of infelicities and grim reminders. The belowly embedded image, much like my revenge-fists, shall do the talking:

Mr. Peter Hartlaub goes on to tell us that within the A’s 2012 calendar we find four months devoted to players traded, one to a player injured, one to a manager fired, and one to the dark heart and ways of Cliff Pennington.

Depressing stuff for any A’s loyalist, no? So in order to cheer them up, here’s Davey Lopes with enough devil-may-care jubilance to go around:

It was with a measure of confidence that today, in the break room, you attested: “That Rudy Pemberton. He was just a ballplayer.”

About this — in addition to your callow belief in a better tomorrow — you were horribly wrong …

Sure, the image above shows Rudy Pemberton in professional action, but what of the disembodied spectral presence, the one whose soft, Olan Mills edges suggest a man of a poet’s dimension and discontent? He hovers about our assumptions like a reproving moon.

You owe Rudy Pemberton an apology.

(Image taken from a GeoCities page called Boston.com)

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.

Recently, abiding reader jcxy floated a Sketchy Internet Rumor of a Rich Garces bobble-belly. Needless to say, upon hearing said rumor the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team sprung to handsome action. After 12 or so tense seconds of Computer Googling, “Sketchy Internet Rumor” became “Internet True Fact.” Bear fat witness:

This has been two things: the last time I doubt anything on the Internet and your Daguerreotype of the Evening.