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Swing away, swing away
H.: This baseball thing.
O.: What about it?
H.: It's driving me crazy. Those poor guys.
O.: What guys?
H.: The Expos. Just played at home for probably the last time.
O.: You know, I was a baseball player once.
H.: Yeah?
O.: I was a catcher for the Burham Dulls.
H.: The Durham Bulls?
O.: Right.
H.:
O.: So anyway, I quit.
H.: You quit?
O.: Yeah, I got offered a big fat major league contract.
H.: You were going to the Show?
O.: Goin to the Show.
H.: And you quit?
O.: Nothin in it but money.
H.: Money's not enough?
O.: Nah. See, I'd traveled to Germany the month before the offer came in. And I saw people playing stickball in the streets. It looked like old New York or something.
H.: Stickball.
O.: I played -- it was a blast. So I decided to devote my life to raising awareness of the great sport Stickball. I was going to © it and ™ it and ® it and make it a big thing. You know, the grassroots craze sweeping the nation sort of thing.
H.: What happened?
O.: Well, I showed up on Louisiana Street in Houston one day, all ready to play, and only, like, two guys showed up. And one was a bad player, and the other got hit by the Metro -- he was in the driver's blind spot, the moron -- and it was pretty much hard to play with all of the cars anyway. So I gave up and went back to Durham.
H.: Wow.
O.: Yeah, but they wouldn't take me back. Said I'd violated my contract by leaving the country.
H.: What'd you do?
O.: Oh, they were nice enough to give me a job selling hot dogs.
H.: Hot dogs.
O.: I got lucky -- the Glacier Pilots played there one time, and Mark McGwire was just a minor league guy then, and I caught his very first minor league home run ball.
H.: Really?
O.: Uh-huh. Sold it after the game to a collector who bought the first home run ball of every minor leaguer in case they made it big one day.
H.: For how much?
O.: Twenty-three dollars and a bus ticket.
H.: Oh.
O.: Yeah. It's pretty much worth a couple bazillion dollars now.
H.: Do you know how much, really?
O.: It makes me sad to say it.
H.: How much?
O.: The collector auctioned it off for nearly eight hundred thousand dollars. He had Barry Bonds' first home run ball, too. And that's probably worth less, just because Barry Bonds is a total -- well, you know.
H.: All-time single-season home run king?
O.: ... Yeah.
H.: So you don't care about baseball now, then?
O.: Well, I told you all of that to sort of make you understand why the game has disillusioned me, but it doesn't really make me seem disillusioned, does it?
H.: Not particularly. Want to go catch a game before baseball is killed forever?
O.: Braves are in town, right?
H.: Yep.
O.: Yeah, okay.
H.: You gonna miss baseball if it goes away?
O.: Well -- I'll miss the hot dogs. Best hot dogs ever, man.
H.: I'm going to take my children on a tour of all of the ballparks one day, when I have em, and they'll look at all of the ruined, burned-out skeletons and husks and ask what baseball was, and I think I'll cry.
O.: I think I'll cry now just thinking about it.
H.: I'll tell them, it was the thing that glued our country together. It was the one love a man could have and not be cheating on his wife. It was America.
O.: Okay, stop. That was over the top.
H.: I know. But it's baseball. Come on.
O.: Yeah, well. Stop with the sentimentality.
H.: I hear if baseball goes, football's gonna become the national sport.
O.: (screams)
...
Eclectica has just published a very bizarre short piece of mine, The Last Rail-Rider.
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