Pristine. No Trash Talk in Sight

Tomorrow the regular baseball season ends and thus so ends the 25th season of the Patrick Finley Memorial Fantasy Baseball league, for the fantasy league is a kind of Platonic shadow of the thing itself, dependent, murky and unreal to those who believe only in The Thing Itself. It's just numbers, you know, and many perfectly satisfactory major league ball players, whom you would love to have in a real game or on the bench ready to go in to demonstrate their unquantifiable skill, don't generate fantasy numbers and are slapped away backhand during our yearly drafts.

This distresses some baseball purists, though I have always been able to tell the difference between this blog and Moby Dick and to continue to enjoy both, and I am able to transfer that ability of telling one thing from a loosely similar thing to the game of baseball and to number-driven baseball games and am able to take pleasure in both of those loci, too.

I say all this because it is such a temptation of end all futile and pointless arguments about such by saying: Fuck you.

But that's the slack way of doing things, isn't it? (There's being dickish, and there's being Moby Dickish.)

Anyway, our season ends tomorrow, and there will be a fine bookend quality to it, since only two of us survive from our first season 24.5 years ago, and one of us will win. That one is not me, so I am a little disappointed.

It's been a dull procession to victory this year. The standings have been close for those at the top, and the person at the very top managed to irritate one or two league members during the trading period just before our August 1st deadline, though I can't remember exactly how. There was either bullying and conniving or the appearance of bullying and conniving, and though the negative rhetoric of male companionship is both brisk and pungent -- No, Fuck You, too; (They embrace) -- it does tend to heat up and run wild, the male ego being both tinder and tender, so friendly insults do tend to turn deadly, and there goes the friendship.

It's so volatile and complicated being a man. (But some of us are so good at it.)

So: A general pissed-offness has been hovering over the league since August 1st, which means our league leader needs to lie low. He can't send out the preening taunting emails that one expects of a league leader, to which one responds appropriately until suddenly:

What? Fuck YOU. But we are already at the Fuck YOU stage and perhaps beyond it. The boys lie quiet.

More to the point, I am not contending for money this year -- a real shame since I am the only person who has been in the league for all 25 of its years but who's counting? -- and so I'm not throwing out my usual stream of wit bits, during the distribution of which I understand that I must take more grief than I give. I know how to walk the line. That's my gift. I'm a lovely man.

So all is quiet on the Finley front. Tomorrow JP will win, and I guess we will act as if he didn't. Then, in February forgive-and-forget will set in, and the squalls will dissipate and there will be: The League. I've given up on The League a dozen times, but so far it has come scratching at the door, a little more woebegone each year and a little older and a little more tattered, its breath coming in gasps. League members -- at least a few, a nucleus -- have opened that door. So far.

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.” (Robert Frost)


It would seem that after all this time we are more like sibs than friends. It is as if we did not choose each other. We have all stepped upon the gum together. We pull. It stretches. There is no escape.