One of my co-workers at the library is a baseball aficionado. He devotedly follows the Milwaukee Brewers. I followed baseball passionately as a kid and can still rattle off a small ton of pre 1980 Baseball trivia. Do you know what Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average is? Do you know who hit the most doubles ever? 

I do.

And so feeling it never goes amiss at work to take an interest in a co-workers hobby, I took a modest interest in the Brewers. I particularly took an interest in the rising star of a player named Christian Yelich who grew up fairly close to where I grew up in Southern California.

As I watched, on my own, and through the information from my co-worker, Christian Yelich started tearing up the league the very year I started watching and tracking him. He even won the MVP that year! The next year, 2019 he looked about the same, and he was headed for likely another MVP award when he hit a foul ball off his kneecap and broke it. His knee, the ball was fine. It was a bit of a freak accident, time consuming, but not a terribly difficult one to recover from.

However, when he came back the next season he suddenly could not hit worth beans. He had other physical problems as well, particularly his back. So we were waiting for this season.

This season he was even worse! However, weirdly, without their star hitter, the Brewers were brilliant, mostly behind some bizarrely good pitching, like, historically good pitching. The Brewers are currently sailing along to win their division, and they have one of the best records in baseball.

Also, Christian Yelich, who oddly reminds me a bit of Ted Williams, has finally, late in the season, started to hit again from out of nowhere. Most of the season he was an albatross around the Brewers neck, struggling to hit a miserable .200, a benchable offense, but how do you bench a player who you are hoping at any moment might become the best hitter in baseball again?

So with Christian Yelich hitting again and the best pitching in a new era of pitching dominated baseball, maybe we could see a Milwaukee Brewers World Series? 

It sure would be nice, and I like to see my co-workers happy.

But why am I telling you all this?

Oh, I have some baseball player pictures and I just got going on it out of nowhere. 

Sorry.

Here’s the greatest baseball player ever, in my opinion. I asked him to sign his library card but he absent mindedly signed a baseball instead.

Maybe I was wrong up above there. Maybe the best player ever was this catcher below. When I was, er, taking this picture I felt a real fondness for the guy and his smile, and by all accounts Josh Gibson was loved by everyone, though how much of that is myth and legend I am not equipped to know. It’s also pretty tough to judge a Negro League Player, but that he was one of the greatest baseball players ever seems profoundly evident.

This, below, of course is just a kid who comes to my library, but I know for a fact that he pitches in Little League. This summer he’d sometimes come in to the library in uniform after games. He seems a little depressed to me after these games, so maybe his team doesn’t do so well?

He’s always asking me if we have any books on Joe Shlabotnik, who, apparently, is his favorite player.

We don’t have any books on Joe Shlabotnik.

And finally, I wasn’t born when this photo below was taken, but late in this player’s career I did see Willie Mays play for the Mets when they came to town to play my Dodgers. That’s likely the best player I ever saw play in person, though he was a bit past it at the time, and I was a bit before it.

And with that, I leave you for the day.

Go Brewers!

There is some dark part of me that wanders the Internet looking for things to get mad at. This is not good for my spirit. But I am clearly not alone in this. Much of the Internet is obviously constructed along these very lines; a series of rich opportunities to become enraged, disapproving, disappointed, frustrated, and angry. 

Why is the Internet like this?

I don’t know, but it infuriates me!!!

Oh. You were hoping for the non joke answer?

Me too.

Fortunately this inducement to rage is not all of the Internet. There is also the part of the Internet designed to sell you stuff. And sometimes, if one is very careful, and a little bit lucky, one can even find the part of the Internet designed to inform or entertain you. That part’s pretty neat. But why can’t there be more of that! It just makes me so…

No, I think that joke’s all used up.

Lately I have been trying to use rage as a kind of barometer for my time on the Internet, the canary in the coal mine of sorts. Before I look at or watch something, an article, a site, a thread, a video, I might do a little check: “Am I likely to be able to watch this without becoming furious?” But also then, when I’m reading or watching something, I am trying to take my getting furious as a measure of the very quality of what I’m consuming. If I’m watching or reading something that makes me furious, even if that seems righteous and just, even if that makes perfect sense in accordance with the content, maybe that content just… isn’t… very… good.

I read a large amount, both in books and online. And I have come to watch quite a bit of YouTube videos. Some of all that is in Politics, and concerns injustice, the terrible ways the world works, and the needless suffering that is caused to so many for such small and horrible reasons. But I have found in the best of those videos and books, the ones that speak most clearly and honestly, the ones whose understanding is rich and full, no matter how dark and bitter and sad the subject is, I do not become enraged. 

Rather, 

I am enlightened.

Relevant Life is a Fountain Pages for further exploration:

Politics

Internetland