This is Not Good

This is the kind of picture that populates the Yahoo! Sports MLB Photo Gallery these days:

Disorienting cropping, static straight-ahead camera angles, noticeable lack of Derek Jeter.  Who is this person?  Evan Longoria.  What does his hair look like? Indiscernible.  After all, what else could anyone possibly want to know about Evan Longoria? Nothing!

My quality of life directly correlates to the quality of the Yahoo! Sports MLB Photo Gallery. I may never know what anyone looks like again.  What will I put on this blog? Acrostic poems about my favorite athletes, I guess.  Here's my first two:

1.
Day after day,
Even when I am
Reasonably happy, I spend at least one minute thinking about how in-
Evitably, Derek Jeter is getting older.  It
Keeps happening.  There's no reason to take it personally. It's

Just something that is happening.
Every day,
The past gets larger and larger, like a floating yak that can't stop
Eating.  Someday this insatiable ghost yak, or whatever it is, will consume you.
Realistically, thankfully, I doubt that Derek Jeter has considered his spirit animal of death.

2.
Please be good at football this year.
Eli has already won two Superbowls.
You deserve another one,
Two, three, four
Or five...just kidding. You're probably too old for four.
Not that I know anything about the lifespans of professional athletes.

M
A
N
N
I also don't know why you're in that boring car commercial.
N
G

Someone please fix the Yahoo! Sports MLB Photo Gallery. Writing poetry is stupid and hard.

Don't Forget About Jayson Werth. I Never Will.

Jayson Werth is still out there, skulking around the outfield, making $18 million dollars a year and giving pre-humans their due representation in the Major Leagues.  There were a lot of photos of him in today's Yahoo! Sports MLB Photo Gallery, so I thought I'd share my three favorites with you.  I like these photos because each one of them teaches you something about Jayson Werth.

1. He's started using Chase Utley's hair gel.

2. He can roll his eyeballs all the way back into his head.

3. His arms aren't like other people's arms.

Maybe he's not pre-human. Maybe he's UNDEAD.  

Some Things are Over, Some Other Things aren't Over

I can't keep up with facts-- I've sunk into an inescapable bog of sorrow and confusion and I'm not coming out until next April.

Because didn't this year of milestone accomplishments and improbable comebacks necessitate a 28th World Series championship? Shouldn't the forces behind the Red Sox collapse have compelled the Yankees to victory, in a seesaw of karmic momentum?

Okay, it's not that they didn't win. Every year, every team minus one doesn't win. The not winning doesn't take away the 162 game days you got to spend with your team and the not winning doesn't prevent the cyclical reintroduction of your team into your life next spring. Maybe not exactly the same team as the year before, but close enough.

So, Jorge Posada probably isn't going to come back. He was never my favorite Yankee. It was admittedly very sad to watch him standing alone on the top step of the dugout, deprived of that final ninth-inning at-bat, staring off into the field as his silent teammates filed past him, but it'll be okay. He'll find another team and become a crotchety fixture on their bench. Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera will look even older and more out of place. Derek Jeter and Mariano will stand alone in the dugout after A-Rod's sixth and seventh consecutive season-ending strikeouts and wonder what they'll be doing next April. Those things will happen and still the close-enough Yankees won't end.

At least they didn't have it as bad as the Phillies, who had to watch Ryan Howard lie in the dirt as the Cardinals amassed on their infield, tearing off their jerseys and chanting "Happy Flight."

Baseball isn't over. I've been monitoring every game. I'm rooting for a Brewers-Tigers World Series. And after that happens, baseball will be over for a while, but not forever. Not for very long, even, when you think about it. Maybe I'll finish my "Derek Jeter in Trenton" essay and start my Cole Hamels video masterpiece in the meantime.

Time Keeps Happening

"Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers."

We're all getting old. Come back soon, Peyton.

Something Bad is Happening + a Phil Collins Video

I can't watch baseball these days without feeling those old bad sports feelings of defeat, despair and the hopelessness of all and any life against death-inducing time. I don't know why. Things are okay. The Yankees can't beat the Red Sox, but that doesn't really matter. Mariano Rivera has lost two games in the last three days, but that doesn't really matter. Derek Jeter is passing into legend before our eyes, but that doesn't really matter. The Yankees could still win the World Series. They're not the Mets. Things could get worse, but they don't necessarily have to [this year]. And still, things aren't good right now. I just know that things aren't good.

This video doesn't logically relate to the way I feel, but it is still somehow the way that I feel:

It's saying: "I don't understand what's happening. I don't think it's anything good. At one point, things were fine. This is not that time."

Why I Don't Think About Tulo

Call it superstitious, lazy or pathological, but I've never looked at a photo of Colorado's Troy Tulowitzki because I won't pay attention to any shortstop that isn't Derek Jeter. However, tonight while making a list of baseball players whose first and last names start with the same initial,* I decided that it was time.

While scrolling through the trove of Google image thumbnails, I felt overcome by a sadness that I quickly realized had nothing to do with young Tulo and his unremarkable appearance and everything to do with the inevitable decline of Derek Jeter. Things haven't been going well for DJ recently. Not only is he batting well below his usual average, but he's also failing to get the crucial game-changing hits that once earned him the nickname Captain Clutch.** Maybe it's just a bad year. That's okay. These come and go. It also happens to be the last year of his contract with the Yankees, and this fact has provided an irresistible news hook to what could have otherwise passed as a season as forgettable as Troy Tulowitzki's face.

Personally, I think that the end is still a long way off and that the near future holds at least two or three more truly great Jeterian years. Then, in his final season, the Yankees will win the World Series and even non-Yankee fans will cry because we'll all know that the team did it for him and that he did it for us. This kind of maudlin hokiness is exactly why people like sports. As W.G. Sebald once said:

It is a characteristic of our species, in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair, for a number of reasons. Because we have created an environment for us which isn't what it should be. And we're out of our depth all the time.... And I think there is no way in which we can escape it. The only thing that you can do, and that most people seem to be able to do very successfully, is to subdue it. And if you can do that by, I don't know, playing baseball or watching football on television, then that's possibly a good thing, I don't know.

What happens when the diversion from sadness and despair becomes its own source of sadness and despair remains to be seen. I'm a fairly new sports fan, and Derek Jeter will be my first sports hero to pass his prime, retire and eventually die. And then what will I do? Look at photos of the new nondescript shortstop who reminds everyone of Troy Tulowitzki in his prime? Or give in and write a book about walking around England, failed artificial lights, silkworm noises and driving on the wrong side of the road?


Or, do as I've grown accustomed to doing and continue to follow Derek Jeter's advice, which, of course, was always meant to be applicable beyond baseball: never treat your life like an old t-shirt. Not even past the glory days.

*Here is the list I made without using an external reference: Alfredo Aceves, Billy Butler, Chris Carpenter, Carl Crawford, Coco Crisp, David DeJesus, Edwin Encarnacion, Gio Gonzalez, Josh Johnson, Jair Jurrjens, Kila Kaaihue, Kenshin Kawakami, Mark Melancon, Melvin Mora, Ramon Ramirez, Stephen Strasburg, Troy Tulowitzki
**I used to think his nickname was Captain Crunch because his head looks like a peanut.

Travis Thechimp Mets Uniform

I take great pleasure in reading through the search terms that lead people to this blog. Sometimes, they make sense. Last month, for example, people arrived at Third Base or Bust by searching for "kinsler baby faced hamilton house bud lite" and "pictures of jose reyes crying." There were a lot of inquiries combining the words "cocaine" with "Darryl Strawberry" (thanks Paul) and "Montreal Expos" (thanks Matt). Many other people wanted to know if Scott and Grady Sizemore are brothers (THEY'RE NOT, OKAY? I WAS WRONG). And, of course, the steady stream of those seeking "Mark Teixeira weird face" photos continued.

After reading through all of these reasonable gateway words, I was thoroughly baffled by a phrase at the very end of the list: "travis thechimp mets uniform." Travis the chimp Mets uniform? It took me about ten minutes of futile memory scanning and 25 seconds of Google searching to remember the post I wrote about a Connecticut housechimp that had to be gunned down by local police after going berserk in February of 2009. I don't know if this is Travis, but for the one person in the universe who visited our blog hoping to find a photo of a chimp in a Mets uniform, your search is over:


To the person who wanted to find "third base or die blog," well, we're not quite ready to get that extreme. Check back next year. And to the person who long-ago searched for "the past is always with us," are you my Bergson-reading, life-fearing, yak-dragging, sports-loving psychic other? Or did you click on the search link and immediately wonder, "WTF, Derek Jeter??!?!"

If You Like Crying About Sports, You Will Like This Video

The Past is Always With Us

As much as my heart beats truly and eternally for Derek Jeter & Co., I tend feel pretty pessimistic whenever they play the Red Sox. Going into last night's game, the Yanks were 0-5 against the Boston uglies in 2009. Before the game, a flurry of Yankees PR-type stories flooded my Twitter feed, promising that tonight would be different. But alas, the past is always with us and nothing ever changes.

Derek Jeter watches as Nick Green's homerun ball sky-rockets overhead...
who the f' is Nick Green? Yeah, that's kind of the point.

Mark Teixeira sings a sad, sad song into his silent bat

Unaware that a baseball game is being played,
dimwitted A-Rod attempts to eat his face

A.J. Burnett gave up three earned runs on five walks and five hits in less than three innings. He also kicked the dugout water cooler on his way out of the game. He was mad. I was, too. Josh Beckett, on the other hand, allowed only one hit in six innings. The Red Sox won 7-0 after the surprisingly attractive Nick Green hit what was probably the first and last home run of his professional career in the 7th inning. ESPN noted that Boston hadn't beaten New York six straight times "since the year the Titanic sank." Good Lord.

Tonight, the Yanks will rise again to die another death at Fenway. I refuse to watch or listen. What, really, is the point? "Can't [escape] the past? Why, of course you can!" That's what Gatsby should have said when he broke that clock at Nick Carraway's house. The statement is equally tragic and more correct. As we know, it all concludes with unreachable green lights on distant docks, black hills rolling silently across the Republic, the end of wonder, and boats borne back ceaselessly into the voracious, all-consuming, insatiable past.