Yeah, this is a complete tangent, a dog-whistle of a joke.
But the Times two days ago wrote a story about Jack Kerouac's fantasy baseball league, in which he created three rosters of imaginary players and subjected them to a season in his mind.
Back in the day of APBA and Stratomatic, you could do that pretty easily. (Truth: I still have a set of cards of players who existed only in my head.)
My all-time fave baseball book is "The Universal Baseball Association Inc.: J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor," written by Robert Coover. It's about a sad, middle-aged nebish who runs just such a league, and the lives of the players he has created.
My all-time fave line from it, a bit of spoken verse.
"When I die, just bury me with a bat and a couple of balls,
"And tell 'em Verne struck out, boys, if anybody calls."
While we're at it... the second all-time baseball book: "Pride of the Bimbos" by John Sayles
I read the Coover book in high school and still remember it as an all-time fave...I also heartily recommend The Southpaw by Mark Harris, the vastly superior prequel to the tearjerker Bang the Drum Slowly. Glad to finally see some commentary on this site that rises above the usual arcane drivel. What are the Yankees waiting for? Sign Cairo now!
ReplyDeletePossible Freudian Algebra Values for "Wolf" in that one Coover story that's just a rewrite of Little Red Riding Hood. Let LRRH=A-Rod
ReplyDelete1. Jeter
2. Madge
3. Fans
4. Slider, down and away
5. 1st and 3rd, nobody out
6. Jeter
7. A-Rod (meta!)
originally published at Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency to Touch Himself during Pitching Changes