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Castaways and
Cutouts |
When I was 13 years old, my family moved
from Atlanta to Louisville. Now, as any kid who's ever had to
move knows, it's best when you're put right in the thick of
things. You want to start school ASAP. It's tough to do,
especially if you're kind of shy like I was, but you make friends
quickly because you have to. Unfortunately, we moved at the end
of May. Right as school was letting out. That meant three
months of complete, unadulterated boredom. When you're bored, you
do crazy things. This was my response to my situation, and
looking back, I'm pretty sure I was clinically insane. I started cutting out my baseball cards and making one-panel comics out of them. You might remember this sort of thing from Sports Illustrated for Kids. I think they called them "Comic Cards" or something, and apparently exclusively featured Tim Flannery holding a surfboard construed to say "Surf's Up!", or Jeff Suppan knawing on a baseball, or Roger McDowell with sunflower seeds glued to his face. In this situation, the "artist" would usually just cut out the background from the Roger McDowell card and write some stupid sign like "SUNFLOWER SEED FACTORY" in the background. I like to think that my cut-outs were closer to art than those hacks. But not much closer.  lol One thing I learned from the study of cutting out baseball cards was that pitchers almost always look goofy on the field. Especially when they're throwing. You can usually construe the context to imply that they're trying to moon somebody. They make the most ridiculous facial contortions, too. I mean, check out Nolan Ryan up there. He looks as if someone just told him, "Eat your lips off or I will murder your entire family."  But anyway, whenever you can combine almost any card of a pitcher with one of those "novelty" shots. Invariably, every baseball card set out there would feature a few shots of players clowning around. "Clowning around", in the baseball card world, is apparently confined to a) operating equipment that they do not really know how to use for comedic effect b) wearing their hat backwards for comedic effect c) giving an open-mouthed smile for comedic effect Hey, look! Fun with sacrelige!  I can't really explain this. I spent a while thinking about why Ricky Bones would hand Ozzie Smith over to crucifixion, and I can't come up with a valid explanation. And wait, why are the floating heads demanding to crucify him when he is clearly already being crucified? Well, whatever. I should do a follow-up about them setting free Rod Barajas.  I remember being thrilled when putting this together because I was finally able to establish some continuity. Looking back, what I really find funny is reflecting on the stereotypical cure-all pseudo-products they have in spoofs in childrens' shows. You know, like how the Nintendo would be called the "Pretendo", and so forth. "Fonajel"? What, was I making a play on "phony gel"? I'm an idiot! That's so unforgivably retarded, yet no worse than would you would see in "Doug" or Mad Magazine or whatever.  God, I'm so ostensibly glad
the Cheek Protector Era has passed. Nothing was funnier than
watching Kurt Stillwell or Lyle Mouton or whoever come to the plate
with a helmet that looked like something an overprotective mother would
put on her six-year-old at a T-ball game. Even if you saw one of
these guys knock a good hit and earn a stand-up double, you'd be
thinking, "Yeah, but...you're wearing a cheek protector. I'll give
you a base and a half."
Hopefully the whole trend of batting armor will subside. Sure, you've got to protect yourself, but any time you get a feeling that if resurrected, the likes of Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio would snicker at you, you have a moral obligation to feel self-conscious about it. Otherwise, the use of the elbow guards and shin pads and wrist protectors will continue progressing until one day John Olerud steps up to the plate with an empty Lego bucket over his head.  I can get behind any humor found at the expense of Charlie Kerfeld. That guy was the worst. At least spit the chew out for your baseball card photo, you shithead. He was even terrible in the original RBI Baseball for the NES. When you pitched with Nolan Ryan until he was running on fumes, then ran through Mike Scott and Danny Darwin, you were left with this guy, who would then invariably pitch up a 37 MPH curveball and give up a game-winning hit. Of note, though, is that Charlie Kerfield was the only player in that game to be drawn to proportion.  Unfortunately, I can't stand behind everything I put together. There were quite a few that belonged straight in the SI for Kids section behind the Gail Devers tear-away cards. doyyyyyy  doyyyyyyyyyyyyy
 That's either Mickey Tettleton or Chris Hoiles. Can't remember which obscure 30 homer-caliber orange-uniformed catcher. If not for the "O" peeking out the side of the vest, he could be Matt Nokes. Whichever one it was, I know those sorts usually aren't too bright, but I'm pretty sure the ability to recognize an inquiry as to one's IQ, as well as form an answer, would require an IQ of at least 50. An IQ of 1 would probably belong to a very small mammal, such as a mouse. In promoting such a fallacy, my IQ was probably fairly low, which makes this situation very ironic! Here we see me grooming myself for a promising Internet humor career.  If I had added "...OF DOOM!!!!" to each of those speech bubbles, and maybe pasted a Hulk Hogan wrestling card in there somewhere, I would have been well on my way to a spot writing for i-Mockery. Coincidentally, i-Mockery is a crappy website, so I really dodged a bullet there. Mercifully, I also somehow managed to avoid the evolution to sprite videogame webcomic artist. That's actually more of a lateral move, probably. Luckily, I have eschewed this fate to grasp the golden chalice that is writing fake chatlogs between baseball players. Okay, well, this one is funny.  No editing was done on my part there; that's all one card. If I remember correctly, that was a 1995 Fleer card of Sean Berry. Around that time was when some baseball card companies abandoned the job description of "making cards with pictures of people playing baseball on them" to design fluorescent, UV-coated monstrosities made to depict that players like Sean Berry were whisked to play in some nightmarish alternate reality in which apparitions of their past existences pleaded with them to not mess up at baseball. At least, that's what I got from it.  I want to make clear that any time I tell a Rafael Belliard joke, it's well-meaning. He was the lovable all-glove, no-hit utility infielder who ran approximately 45 miles to make the second-to-last out in a tight 1-0 game that clinched the 1995 World Series for the Braves, and whoever can't appreciate an all-glove, no-hit utility infielder needs to re-evaluate their love of baseball. However, it's always fun to crack a joke at the fact that Rafael Belliard went a full decade in the majors without hitting a home run. Almost every time Belliard stepped to the plate, Skip Carey and the other TBS commentators would laugh as they announced the number of at-bats it'd been since Raffy hit one out. Shortly before I moved, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that he had finally knocked one out in a Spring Training game. The story was like four paragraphs long and tucked away on like page C8, but the headline was in huge font: GONE! I wish I'd clipped and saved it. In one of the last home games of the 1997 season, his last season of any significance in the majors, he hit another one out, his first regular-season homer in ten years. The Turner Field crowd gave him a five-minute standing ovation, and Pete van Wieren hugged Don Sutton, and everyone was happy. Good old Raffy. Hey, were you aware that country music and rap music are somewhat different from one another?  It's not entirely clear why Bobby Bonilla and James Baldwin accepted Shane Andrews into their posse. You may have noticed that that is easily the third time this article I've used a paraphrase of "I don't know why this is going on". Apparently the humor from this article stems from the fact that I do not know things, so following that logic I suppose this is pretty funny. I probably plucked that Billy Ray Cyrus card from one of those giant gift packs of randomly-themed trading cards. It was mostly full of all the cards that had no prayer of selling on their own. You might get a couple of packs of baseball cards, but without fail they'd always be Topps Big or minor-league Pacific cards or something else stupid. The remainder were all niche-market themes. You'd get Country Music Stars, or NASCAR, or off-brand ComicCards. For good measure, there were always a few of those baseball cards you popped out so that the players stood up. The players in these pop-ups were always the most hopelessly 1980s players ever, like Steve Sax or Billy Hatcher, despite the fact that it was 1995. I'd be like opening a pack today and getting, like, John Jaha. This is probably the funniest thing I have ever done.  I say this because nothing's had the kind of shelf life this has had. I did this ten years ago, laughed my ass off, forgot about it, came across it the other day, and laughed my ass off all over again. In terms of sheer humor I don't think I could do any better. Although I shouldn't really take all the credit; the picture completely makes it.  This is the last picture in the book with anything on it. After this, it's all blank. Evidently, I started putting together some great story, then I just lost interest. I imagine I just decided it wasn't worth my time anymore. I was about to start school in a new city. I made friends, joined the baseball team, and completely forgot about it. I look back at some of the stuff I wrote in high school, and even the funny stuff I tried to write wasn't funny at all. Granted, this stuff here is stupid, but it still makes me laugh occasionally. Yet, even after growing up a few years, I couldn't re-produce it. I imagine the reason for that was that I started writing for other people. I wrote for the sole purpose of the approval of others. It took me a while to escape that. I graduated high school and found myself extremely bored in college. Everything I did was contrived and boring. Then I started writing again. Really writing, I mean. Writing just for fun, just because I wanted to. Once again, I was writing to make myself happy. I really enjoyed what I was doing, one thing lead to another, and suddenly I find myself helping to put together a site as ridiculously fulfilling as this one. I suppose the message here is that if you're trying to write something funny, and you find yourself not laughing at what you're writing, other people probably won't, either. I'm leafing through these empty pages in this book. You know, there's nothing sadder than a book that just sort of stops halfway and is forgotten. Thank God I picked it back up and kept going. For my sake more than anyone else's. |
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