Short Relief: Keep Circulating the Tapes

TURN DOWN YOUR LIGHTS (Where applicable)

In a not too distant future
Way down in Anaheim
There was a guy named Albert
Not exactly in his prime

He worked for the Angels baseball team
Just a few hits from a milestone dream
He did a good job batting every day
But Mike Scioscia had Ohtani
So they traded him away

They sent him to a worse team
For prospects or cash (la la la)
They had to eat most of the deal
Despite the media backlash (la la la)

Now keep in mind Pujols can’t control
Where he bats or sits each game (la la la)
Because he’s 38 years old
And runs about the same

Rumor roll call!
Brewers!
Rockies!
Athletics!
Raaaaaaaaays!

If you’re wondering if this rumor’s real
And could happen at anytime
Repeat to yourself, it’s just a long
Setup to a weird punch line

For #mysteryteam gets the hitter’s 3000th

Each generation has its foibles that are difficult to translate to children and grandchildren: leaded gasoline, the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, virtual reality, pay phones, governmental checks and balances. For myself, I grew up in a pre-internet age where if you didn’t know something, you just continued to not know it unless a World Book or your smart uncle was nearby, which blows my mind now. But one of the more invisible changes about modern day from my own time is the level of permanence in the world. Everything stays.

My parents never dabbled in camcorders; the only video recordings of me as a child are church plays and school projects, mostly as a teenager. Meanwhile, thanks to our phones my wife and I document nearly every iterative triumph of our children’s lives, more for our sake than theirs. Baseball is the same way; every inning of every game from 2017 is still accessible for a moderate fee, and further back still exists, stored in the vaults, concrete, affixed to our memory. That we have box scores is one of baseball’s miracles, but now we have adjectives to go with our nouns.

This is probably a benefit, overall. Given my pattern of sleeplessness and memory loss, those videos are an absolute relief – I can be there, but I can also exist over my own shoulder. But I imagine that the blurry sepia-tones of my own childhood are best locked in that hue. The human mind is such a wonderful editor, leaving behind a timeline of pine trees, summer wiffleball, and indistinct contentment. I don’t want to know how many times I screamed at my parents over having to go to bed, the way my own daughter sometimes does now; I certainly don’t need the 1985 Seattle Mariners in any more focus than they are now, a smattering of hopeful spring training smiles on 3.5-inch cardboard.

But there are things we’ve lost, likely for good, not because they’re impossible to exhume but because they’re not really worth it; disposable mediums like magazines and commercials, and also Jonathan Silverman, star of Weekend at Bernie’s and Robo-Dog: Airborne, managing a baseball team of actors and film technicians, playing against the Colorado Silver Bullets.

The Silver Bullets, an all-female touring team funded and promoted by Coors and managed by Phil Niekro, were relative pioneers and absolutely deserving of a historical deep dive, despite the paucity of YouTube footage for even them. But my instinct is always to dive to the absolute bottom, and that’s not the groundbreaking roster but a temporary team, mentioned only in passing in discussions of their newsworthy opponents, including Kevin Costner, Mark Harmon, and The Good Wife and Sports Night’s Josh Charles.

We do not know which positions they played or how they hit; we know that their games were sometimes televised, but not whether anyone locked them away on videocassette. We know that Dean Cain played for the team, only because someone who created an online shrine to Dean Cain in 2002 (including a meticulous list of his radio interviews and charity events).

As modern citizens of the world, we deserve to be able to watch Dean Cain try to hit a curveball. There are some things you want to be able to pass on to your children.