TITLE
Nine Ways To The Immaculate
AUTHOR
David Roth
PUBLICATION
Defector
YEAR
2023
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
I was talking to a friend about how many people had played in the Major Leagues shortly before my plastic Adirondack chair imploded. Exactly how shortly I don’t recall, but we might as well imagine it happening when it would have been funniest, which is immediately after. We had all been in the lake by then, and all of our chairs had been sitting out on the concrete dock for many years, growing brittle through winters and rain and the pressure of generations of terrible brown spiders and, as often as our friends will allow, my own damp and hideous bulk. My chair had groaned a bit before giving out utterly, both its backmost legs shearing off and much of the rest of the chair pebbling against the dock on impact, but also this chair and its dusty twins had been groaning for years. We knew each other; I might have said, before this, that we were friendly.But if this moment was always coming, it would make the best comic sense if it happened right after my friend told me that there had been something like 20,000 big league players in history. This is a lot to think about, and certainly enough to obliterate a dried-out old dock chair even before my own awful ass enters the equation. So let’s think about it as that: two dudes talking about the enormity of baseball history, in the context of the online baseball history game Immaculate Grid, and getting after it so intensely that the combined weight—of my middle-aged corpus, and all those baseball lives—was just too much for that old chair, built as it was for normal use by normal people under normal conditions. I went out like an uptight authority figure in an ’80s television commercial for some chewy candy, all “whoa whoa whoa” and hapless.
GAMES MENTIONED
Immaculate Grid
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive