Years ago when I was more of a baseball fan than I am now a friend turned me on to a little red book/magazine that came out every spring and contained the stats of every baseball player for the current year. I refer to Who's Who in Baseball. What interested me was not so much the averages but the listing of all the trades. You could look up a guy and then the guys who he was traded for and then the guys who they were traded for and the next thing you knew it was time to trot out to happy hour.
It went out of business last year, maybe the year before, an obvious victim of the internet. I was discussing this with the friend who turned me onto Who's Who, and he mentioned a site called The Baseball Reference. It had all the stats and all the trades and just a whole lot of shit.
But I remember it in its pre internet days when it was a beast of a book. Every guy who ever stepped into the batter's box or toed the rubber was in it.
What fascinated me the most about the book is there were all these guys, more than you would imagine, mostly old-timey guys, who had just one at bat, and in that at bat they had hit a homer, and I always wondered what, why not another at bat? Did they get run over by a truck, did they find Jesus in some weird cult, did they decide that this baseball thing was a flash in the pan and get into investment banking? We will never know.
Oh somewhere their remains may be moldering in some forgotten and run down cemetery. Perhaps some freckle-faced kid will stumble against their fallen headstone in search of an errant foul ball and get a glimpse of the name and wonder a second or two before he hauls the torn horsehide back to the ballyard,
But other than that there is just the name, the team, and the date in that big fat book. And every now and then some kid, because who else would do such a stupid thing, pauses his finger on the stat and maybe mouths the name, and when he does that does the guy feel a shiver in his backbone as he strums the harp or is poked by the pitchfork?
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