Oliver Lee Bateman's Blog, page 7

The Jeff Bagwell Hypothetical

Others have already skewered the sanctimonious idiocy1 that will attend the 2012-2013 voting for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, so there’s no need for me to do that. Instead, I’m going to pose a pair of hypothetical questions that might help the largely unqualified voters2 make an admittedly pointless and inconsequential decision about which ballers will be enshrined alongside immortals such as George “Highpockets” Kelly and Chuck “Hoosier Hammer” Klein.3

Hypothetical the First

You’re this 5’11”, 185-pound guy who was pretty good at baseball, good enough to play third base in college and good enough to get drafted by your beloved hometown BoSox. After being moved to first base and spending a few years in the minors, it’s obvious that you’re nothing special. You have above-average plate discipline and field your position well, but here’s the deal: a) first base is the easiest position to play, b) plenty of first basemen, even first basemen in the low minors, are good hitters, and c) you’ve been training most of your life and it appears there’s no way that you’re going to get big enough and fast enough in time to make some real money via the skills that you do possess.

At age 23, you’re traded to another team—a shitty team, a team nobody really cares about—and you’re given an opportunity to compete for the first base job there. That offseason, somebody offers you dianabol, an easy-to-take oral steroid. You’re a good Christian, a believer in fair play, etc. but you know for a fact that big-money players like Jose Canseco are using the stuff. Your entire livelihood is on the line, and, thanks to some rather amazing lobbying from your players association during the 1980s, there isn’t any sort of comprehensive drug testing regime in place. If you start doing this, and maybe work a little bit harder in the gym, your odds of surviving past that rookie contract and earning the big guaranteed money will likely increase from .5% to maybe 2-3%.

In your first season in the majors, you win the Rookie of the Year Award. You club 18 home runs (you’ve never hit more than 15 at any level before) and you look and feel like a million bucks. Maybe you’ll soon be earning a million bucks. You train harder and incorporate more performance-enhancing drugs into your nutrition program.4 You manage to wring a decade’s worth of strong performances out of your new and improved physique, winning one MVP award and finishing second on another occasion. Finally, after sustaining a severe shoulder injury5, you decide to hang up your cleats. You finish with 449 home runs and one of the best on-base percentages in history.6 With your nest egg tucked away in the bank, you sit back and wait to see if Jay Mariotti et al. decide that you deserve the opportunity to join the likes of Heinie Manush, Rabbit Maranville, and Rube Marquard in bucolic Cooperstown.

Hypothetical the Second

You’re a young man from a home that was broken more times than Arturo Gatti’s nose. For reasons now lost to history, you performed admirably in high school and college, graduating from the latter at the ripe old age of 19. At some point between your age-20 and age-22 seasons, your thoughts become cloudy, cobwebbed, befogged. You get yourself fired from terrible part-time jobs. You struggle to read more than a few pages at a time. You alternate between being extremely tense and incredibly morose. You have no idea what you’re going to do with your life, and you wind up wasting all the extra time that you had earned by virtue of being an above-average student in below-average southern public schools.

Somehow, your terrible and half-assed applications to third-rate law schools—which you filled out only because your father was demanding that you leave the house—all yield full-tuition (and, in a few cases, full-tuition-plus) scholarships. You don’t want to be a lawyer, of course, but you don’t want to be that any more or any less than you don’t want to be anything else. So off you go to the overcast, humid, and thoroughly unpleasant Midwest.

Your first semester of law school goes poorly. Your grades are average at best, and you don’t read a single assignment. You don’t read so much as a single page of a single assignment. You sit in your one-bedroom apartment playing video games.7 You do manage to gain 60 pounds, mostly from consuming mass quantities of $5 Hungry Howie’s pizza pies.

At your wit’s end, you start seeing a therapist. The therapist refers you to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist notes that, although you had a negative reaction to Prozac during your age-18 season, you might get better results with the atypical antidepressant Bupropion. He turns out to be right.

The anxiety doesn’t go away—in fact, it seems to worsen—but it does fuel an extremely successful run. 10 “highest overall grades” on the last 20 or so exams that you take at your third-rate law school. Strong scores on the GRE and MBE appear more in line with your early-life performances. You now seem to be able to remember everything that you read.

And it just gets better from there. Although you continue to experience moments of doubt and frustration, you complete a Ph.D. in a very short period of time. Finally, you land that rarest of things: a decent full-time job in academia.

Summation

In either hypothetical, is it possible to separate the effects of whatever drugs the individual was taking from the resultant performance? Or is everything else, from the weight training to the extra time invested in study, what produces these outcomes? In both cases, it can be argued, as Peter Kramer does in the case of anti-depressant users, that new “selves” have emerged through the interactions of various chemicals. Putting aside such issues of “selfhood” for now, though, we’re left with a pair of questions:

Is it ethically defensible to treat a “healthy” individual (i.e., someone who is able to crawl out of bed each morning and perform various tasks, as both Bagwell and the individual in the second hypothetical were) in order that he might excel in a given career?
Is it ethically defensible to deny him that treatment?

The answers to those questions seem obvious: Yes to question one, no to question two. Stanford professor Henry Greely has written extensively in support of carefully administered cognitive enhancement therapy, and, at least in one interview, spoken out in defense of the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports8. By contrast, incompetent and often uninformed sportswriters, many of whom are managing their woes with less effective antidepressants like alcohol and nicotine, are in no position to weigh such considerations. The idea that someone “cheated”9 because he violated a set of rules that hadn’t even been formalized is ludicrous.

But what else can be expected from the cliché-spewing BBWAA? America’s oldest guild of hero-worshippers remains stuck in a state of arrested adolescence, forever experiencing the pain that comes from losing first loves who have moved on to bigger and better things. Jeff Bagwell won’t win a bust in Cooperstown this go-round, and he probably doesn’t care.10

Srsly, bro—read that link. Jay Mariotti, who like my paternal uncle is a Trinity High School (Washington, PA) alum, is quite possibly the worst sportswriter in the history of sportswriting (and that’s saying something, given how terrible nearly all of that crap is). Mariotti’s take on the Hall is breathtakingly illogical: he won’t vote for new players, because nobody deserves to go in on the first ballot, and he won’t vote for players who remain on the ballot, because obviously they weren’t good enough to win admission on their first try.
The great majority of whom neither understand the not-all-that-advanced statistics developed by Nate Silver and his Baseball Prospectus buddies in the late 1990s nor have participated in athletic competition at any level.
Actually, hold on a minute. The Hall itself is a joke, overstuffed with juiced-ball ciphers from the 1920s and 1930s, but this idea of deciding who warrants popular approbation is critically important. The Clemens and Bonds trials were stupid and costly, as was that half-decade quest to ruin the reputation of cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, but they reflect something that’s critically important about our cognitive dissonance-afflicted society. What am I talking about? Think about all the shitty, emotionally distant parents who blew their gaskets when some little kid fell to his death at the Pittsburgh Zoo; think about all of the adulterers, closet cases, and pedophiles who rushed to lambaste everybody from Chuck Robb to Elliott Spitzer for their non-national security-threatening misdeeds. Think, for goodness’ sake, about what it must be like to be Clarence Thomas or Ted Haggard!
Which, by the way, is nothing new. Mays, Aaron, and all of their contemporaries chowed down on exactly the sort of amphetamines that are now triggering suspensions for players like Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz. As anyone who has taken a “dexy” after a night of carousing knows, the pills work. For baseball-playing purposes (where the players are forced to endure a 162-game grind that makes the superfluous and much-derided 82-game NBA season look like a walk in the park), they’re every bit as effective as steroids and HGH. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things; heck, during the early 1960s, several professional football teams actually distributed dianabol tablets to their players.
And perhaps with some awareness that a new, harsher drug-testing regime would soon be implemented by league officials who realize that they’re going to have to throw a bone to jilted sportswriters and fans (but hey, we all liked those moon shot home runs during the magical ‘98 season, right?).
You also record a pair of 40-homer, 30-steal seasons, the only such seasons produced by a player who spent the majority of his career at first base.
"bro u sound like a complete fuckin fool lawlz"
"As for an appeal to the ‘natural’, the lives of almost all living humans are deeply unnatural; our homes, our clothes and our food — to say nothing of the medical care we enjoy — bear little relation to our species’ ‘natural’ state. Given the many cognitive-enhancing tools we accept already, from writing to laptop computers, why draw the line here and say, thus far but no further?"
And here I mean “cheating” only in the vaguest sense of the term, given that the players weren’t being tested for these substances during a considerable portion of the “steroid era.” In other words, they “cheated” the likes of Skip Bayless and Jay Mariotti out of the opportunity to go to their graves believing that Barry Bonds emerged from his father’s (???) womb with a 405-pound bench press and a 4.5-second 40. Speaking of 40s, did you know that Jose Canseco claims to have run a 3.9 40? This is utter bullshit, but if it were true, it would give him a 9.75 100m, which is only milliseconds slower than the time recorded by Usain Bolt. Can you imagine that Surreal Life lug running neck and neck with Bolt?
You know what else Bagwell doesn’t care about? The NHL lockout. Professional hockey is the one sport where the season lasts so long that you could cancel three years of it and still be left with the impression that the Stanley Cup playoffs just ended.

—Oliver Bateman

Career Day

"Okay, everyone," Mrs. Twiggs said in her kindly teacher’s voice. Appropriate, since she was a kindly teacher, don’t you think? She was wearing a sweater bedecked with pictures of apples with worms in them, chalkboards on which arithmetic problems had been written, and other education-related foofaraw. “Our guest speaker today is a real hero. I’m sure your parents have told you all about all the wonderful things he’s done for this town and its people, so I think we all owe him — the man with the gold car1 — a nice warm welcome.”

The second- and third-graders applauded as loudly as their tiny little hands would allow them to applaud. Mrs. Twiggs clapped, too. She was a big believer in “leadership by example” or something. Who really knows? I wasn’t very well acquainted with her while I was among the living, to tell you the truth.

The man with the gold car smiled. “Thank you,” he said with the same winning smile that had won him the hearts of everyone in Anytown. “Thank you all very much.”

"No, the man with the gold car," Mrs. Twiggs said, "Thank you."

The man with the gold car smiled once more and nodded. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. The honor is all mine,” he said. He crossed his legs and looked out at the classroom full of children who, it should be noted, seemed awed by everything about the man, most especially the masculine radiance that emanated from his very being.

"Pillowface, you wanted to give the man with the gold car something, didn’t you?" Mrs. Twiggs asked.

Pillowface Jones, looking as bashful as her pillowcase-for-a-face would admit, shuffled awkwardly toward the front of the room.2 She handed the man with the gold car a sheet of paper, her hand quivering as she did. He took it, looked at it and smiled. “Are you an artist?” he asked in the vaguely disturbing way that a grown man asks a child — especially a little girl — such a question. “Hmm?”

Pillowface didn’t respond, really. I mean, she giggled nervously, but that’s not much of a reply, now is it?3

"She’s shy. It has to do with her condition," Mrs. Twiggs pointed out helpfully.

The man with the gold car took another look at the crayon drawing. In it, the man with the gold car — in a crudely drawn gold car — was smiling as he ran over a baby in a stroller. The man set the drawing in his lap, patted Pillowface on her down-filled head, and returned his gaze to the rest of the children.

Mrs. Twiggs looked at Oscar. “Oscar, you have something for the man with the gold car too, don’t you?”

Oscar nodded.

"He wrote a poem," Mrs. Twiggs said with a smile, "He loves to write poetry."

"Mmm," the man with the gold car intoned pleasantly.

Oscar stood up at his desk, his hands also quivering as he held a sheet of college-ruled notebook paper not far from his face. Nervously, he read aloud, “C-C… Camden found her knowledge lacking/S-So of course she was… s-s-surprised when it attacked/Her, a beautiful gold car/Impacted and cracked her/Now she’s dead, her back… backbone fractured.”4

There was no response for a “spell.” Then, the man with the gold car wiped a tear from his eye. He clapped loudly. Oscar beamed. “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard, Eddy,” the man with the gold car assured the young poet whose name he had already forgotten.5

"Did you hear that, Oscar? He liked it. He really liked it!" Mrs. Twiggs exclaimed as only a frumpy, middle-aged elementary school teacher can.

Oscar was happier than a man with a “near-miss” lottery ticket that could be redeemed at any convenience store for 100 more lottery tickets.6

The man with the gold car reached into his jacket, produced a Luger and trained it on Oscar’s head. He pulled the trigger, blowing Oscar’s tiny little brain out of his tiny little head and plastering it all over the wall. Everyone was impressed.7

"Oh, this has been a treat," Mrs. Twiggs said as Oscar’s blood soaked the white tile floor of the classroom. "Hasn’t it, everyone? Hasn’t it been a real treat?"

All the children nodded and smiled. The man with the gold car smiled, stood up, smoothed the wrinkles from his pants, and walked over to Mrs. Twiggs’s desk. “I’ve enjoyed myself, Mrs. Twiggs. You’re a wonderful teacher and you have some terrific kids here,” he said.

"That means a lot coming from you, the man with the gold car," Mrs. Twiggs said, barely able to hold back the tears. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her, up to and including that time that a salesman at the mall had told her she’d look good with a sexy new smartphone8 in her hands. And for someone like the man with the gold car — nay, for the man with the gold car himself — to have said it… Well, that was the cat’s whiskers served on the rocks in a crystal goblet. “It really does.”

The man with the gold car smiled. He knew it meant a lot, of course. He was well aware of how much weight a compliment from his lips carried. He grabbed Mrs. Twiggs by her short brown hair, tilted her head back, and sliced open her throat with a large butcher’s knife that some kind soul had placed in his hand. Her blood gushed all over his nice new suit. He smiled and so did she. That’s right — she died with a smile on her face.9

"The man with the gold car" (the original title of this piece) was the product of a series of back-and-forth AIM condos with dearly departed Moustache Club co-founder J.R. Powell. Remember when everybody and his sister used AIM to chat it up all the livelong day? Those were the days, yessir.
Pillowface Jones, a wretched creature with a pillow for a face, first appeared in the story "Getting Old is What We’re Here to Do," which was written way back in ‘06 or ‘07 but not published in any format, electronic or otherwise, until it appeared in NAP 2.1 in 2011. She was added to this story years after it was initially composed, although I can’t quite recall why. Perhaps I was trying to further complicate the Moustache continuity; perhaps I thought readers enjoyed the idea of a character having a pillow for a face. Who cares?
This story, like so many of J.R. Powell’s, is written in what he called the “false first person.” Most people find the technique annoying, but most people also care about whether or not Cristina Aguilera and Kim Kardashian got butt implants. For the record, the answer to that question is yes. Have you looked at their bizarre, artificial-looking asses? How on earth could anyone find that attractive?
The “lyrics” to a “prose poem” we composed via AIM, for those of you who are wondering.
This whole business of confusing/forgetting names is a recurring theme in the Moustache stories, arising out of the fact that the IRL “Oliver Bateman” was frequently referred to as “Oscar” or “Berkman” by his co-workers at the Golden Corral. This was not done in jest; these people simply couldn’t be bothered to remember his name. In the Moustache-verse, Oscar Berkman is often called “Eddy,” with the two names used interchangeably at many points. “Eddy” is a reference to the authors’ earlier careers in e-wrestling, during which time they handled the character Eddy “Flap” Jacks. Eddy Jacks is also a featured character in many of the later Moustache stories, thus further muddying the waters. And Muddy Waters, as bluesmen go, wasn’t nearly as good as Howling Wolf (not that I could ever be bothered to listen to more than a few seconds of either of their work).
One of hundreds of references made to the lottery, a pet topic of mine/Eddy’s.
The sequence that follows is “ultraviolent” in some abstract sense, but there’s nothing particularly disturbing about it. I suppose there’s a sort of “uncanny valley” principle at work with regard to such matters: Richard Karn wearing a skinsuit and molesting/force-feeding a 500-pound Brian Wilson while he sings “God Only Knows” is tolerable (within reason, anyway) in a way that a matter-of-fact rape-murder in a “str8” story simply could never be.
This line was added a year or two ago, reflecting my ongoing obsession with people and their indispensable “cellys.”
The man with the gold car would make a half-dozen other appearances in Moustache fictions, usually to kill a minor character in a particularly gruesome manner. The characters were delighted to be murdered by him, viewing it as “the cat’s whiskers served on the rocks in a crystal goblet” or some such thing.

—J.R. “The Passion of the Christ” Powell and Oliver “Eddy” Bateman