Dickey's Secret of Imperfection

June 29, 2012, 2nd inning

R.A. Dickey stands on the rubber. He knows Thole is there, 60 feet and a bit away, crouching for some reason. Behind him, an old guy wearing a mask. Funny old man, thinks R.A. I bet he wears mismatching socks on Tuesdays. All these peculiar fellows, Dickey knows they are there, but he doesn't see them. He sees that aggressive lad with the wooden bludgeoning object least of all. Sure, there are blurry forms whiffling and waffling in the air. Humanoid clouds, you could say. No, what R.A. sees are lines. They squiggle from the ball that rotates breezily in his hand and take a variety of lost-in-the-woods paths toward the white pentagon. Thole's dinner plate he calls it.

He selects one of the lines, yes, that will do splendidly, winds up and tosses. The ball follows the invisible line like it was on a train track arranged by a think tank of chaotic lunatics. R.A. feels a subtle breeze from that guy to Thole's left waving the stick. He had tried to study the various stick wavers, learn their particular dances, but there were so many dances with so few stories. Rarely a narrative solid enough to hang a hat on. Instead...


January 13, 2012

R.A. Dickey stands on the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Winds that could break the sound barrier if they really felt like it lash him from all sides, but he does not mind. He's made it to the top. It's more charming than he ever could have imagined.

"The mountain," he says, dashing a little whiskey in his tea, "it's got a real charisma."

"Sure," says Kevin Slowey, "nice view."

"It really gets to know you. Each step, is like a step the mountain takes into your soul. We've taken twenty-eight thousand nine hundred and fourteen steps on this mountain. It was the least I could do."

Their guide pointed out various landmarks, such as the Sphinx and Norway, but Dickey couldn't hear. He was having a different sort of conversation.

"Sup?" said the mountain. Only R.A. could hear.

"I didn't expect you to be so..." said Dickey. Everyone could hear him.

"I get that a lot. So what brings you here?" the mountain asked. Like a bartender, it had some stock questions to get people going.

"Well, I was sitting in the dugout one day, trying to figure out some stuff about will power and quantum probability, and I got stuck, so I said, 'Shucks! I'm climbing the highest mountain in Africa!' Turned out that was you."

"Oh," said Kilimanjaro. "Easy 'nuff."

A mighty gust blew straight at R.A. He absorbed it completely, though it did sting. Mountain wisdom is not to be turned away from.

He opened his eyes. The people around him were fuzzy orbs, but all the paths down the mountain appeared to him as squiggled lines scratched into space. They hung there, definite and clever.

"Oh, Dickey?" said the mountain, "one thing."

"Yeah dude?"

"The magic will wear off if you ever use it to perfection. In every adventure, there must be one stumble, one error. Do not deal in perfect forms. I mean, I did once and look at me. Now I'm a mountain!"

Dickey and the mountain chuckled (which for a mountain means a small earthquiake).

"Nice one!" said Dickey.

"Sorry, a little cheesy mountain humor," it said.

"No, that was good. I'm going to tell that one to friends back home."

"Nah, it only makes sense if you're a mountain. And remember, at least one baserunner every game or you have to climb back up here to re-up."

"Cool," said Dickey. "Later."

Kevin Slowey stopped taking pictures for a moment. "Hey R.A., great view huh. By the way, who were you talking to?"


June 29, 2012, 3rd inning

Aaron Harang hits a catchable bing bong to centerfield. As Dickey watched it from the mound, he felt perfection welling up within him. The discoball of pure excellence rotated invisibly, threatening to reflect its beam directly into Dickey's forehead.

Just then, Andres Torres thought about his recent trip to a mushroom sorting plant. Well this is interesting, he recalled himself thinking. And then he realized that he had had that EXACT SAME THOUGHT about a falling palm frond that he had observed from a Los Angelos taxi cab. Ain't that somethin'. The ball dropped in front of him for a lazy single. Perfection averted.

R.A. Dickey took the ball again, ready to throw it perfectly straight and bend the world a few inches this way and that while the ball was mid-flight. Somehow Thole always caught them.

Mt. Kilimanjaro watches the game on its laptop.

"Hey Nile," it says, "I taught this guy everything he knows."

"What are you talking about?" gurgled the River Nile.

"This pitcher. His name's R.A. Dickey. I'm the reason he's so good."

"That doesn't make any sense," was the bubbling reply.

"Whatever. Hey, could you throw me a beer."

And then, Mt, Kilimanjaro drank a beer.

Fact: Johan Santana Pitched a No Hitter

Johan Santana awoke. He was in a room: that much was clear. Little else was. There were pictures of...himself...and others...others...fimm...flami...flamy...faaaamm...family members. Him and family members. He looked out the window. Cars. Streets. Honk honk. Humans traversing, conversing, commercing. Fair enough. Foul enough too. Fair is foul and foul is fair. I really need to cut my hair, he thought, catching his reflection in a mysterious snow globe of a made up land called New Yorkci.

A phone. Well now isn't this interesting. How satisfying the plastic felt in the intelligence of his hands. So brassy. Clean jazz. An uncountable number of buttons gleamed at him with enough upward jut to catch the rays from the gigantic sphere of fire, so far away. Zero seemed a fine number. He pressed it. He examined the other numbers, wondering which to pick next, when the ear piece purred, and then said, "Morning Johan."

"Yes, that is who I am," he recalled. "Can you tell me where I am?"

"You are on the 57th floor of the Met Tower," said the voice. "And you shouldn't be for long. You are pitching tonight."

"Pitching? Pitching..."

"Johan, why don't you come down to the lobby. It sounds like you need some explaining done."

The doorman of the Mets Tower was mysterious, in that it was ambiguous just how mysterious he was. He was a scruffy old man they called "Pops." He read the paper. When a stranger entered, he said, "Be you Met or be you not? For only Met shall pass." But questions hovered. What was his real name? Where did he live? What plane did he arrive from?

The elevator door opened in the lobby. Santana stayed in it, examining the buttons, dissatisfied.

"Over here," said Pops, absentmindedly scruffling his newspaper in his hands. The consonants started to slide off, leaving a bunch of shapeless vowels, but Pops brushed the consonants back on, and most of them found their original spot.

Santana wandered into the lobby. "See this?" said Pops, holding up a baseball. "You throw these?"

"Do I?"

"You used to be the best at throwing these," said Pops.

"Was I?"

"Observe," said Pops. He stood up into an awkward pose, his legs too far apart, his arms an unmixing combination of ragdoll and robot. "See the wall?" he asked, getting a little trancy, "pick the spot you don't like."

Johan had no trouble with this task. There was a spot eleven inches off the ground that was grimy without grime, shadowy without shadows, cynical without sentience. Johan pointed to it.

"Me too," said Pops. His arms seemed to rotate in slow motion. Torque itself was visible. His legs jimmy-jambled with incredible precision. He released the ball. Somewhere in the world, at that moment, a match had begun to spark. It was in that impossible moment between spark and flame. The ball flew across the lobby and hit the worst spot on the wall. Only as dust erupted around the ball did the flame splash into existence.

"Now you," said Pops.

Johan Santana, his memory empty except for sprinkles of this and that, and the memory of the pitch Pops had just thrown, took the ball, walked back, jimmy-jambled his legs, flamble-rambled his arms, released the ball just so. It thunked the spot with a pleasing boom. He threw another that glammered upward before thunking into the spot. Another swooped to the side and then sashayed into the spot.

"Thanks Pops," said Johan.

"Call me Sidd," said Pops.

This way and that, the ball snarpled and dove against the Saint Louis Birds of Fire. They were under and over it like amateur bettors with too much money. Beltran was cool to fate's peculiar draw. Yadier of Doom waved his doomstick, but Mike Baxter became Achilles for a moment, knowing that he would succeed and then die, and was okay with that. If ends up on the DL, Odysseus will visit him and ask if it was worth it, and won't it be interesting to hear his heart beat as he ping pongs those cliches. To us, however, Mike Baxter is another fly in this non-ending Ninja Turtle drama. On the day that Johan awoke without a history, he changed all of ours. A fire forever unlit in all the backwards of time before Johan's 134th pitch now burns in our memories until infinity walks out or the buggers finally win one.

Getting to Know Zack Wheeler

Mets Fan Fiction noticed that there had been very little coverage of the newest Mets prospect Zack Wheeler, so we devoted our entire 400 person staff to tracking him with light waves (eyes), sound waves (ears), echolocation (ears, skin (bats, dolphins)), television waves (eyes), hidden device (ears) and psychic impression (aura). Here is a log of our findings.

Sunday, July 31st, 2011
7:03am: Wheeler throws 173 fastballs all at 93mph. He throws them against rocks. The rocks are connected to guitar strings which twang each time he hits a rock. Over three hours, he plays Stairway to Heaven. Musically it was tacky, but damn he can pitch.

11:17am: Wheeler orders a fresh coconut juice from a nearby establishment. "Gotta start getting in the habit, y'know?" he tells the cashier. The cashier says "Yeah, I hear ya," and carries out the transaction, all the while completely unnerved by the utter stillness of Wheeler's head and torso.

3:33pm: Wheeler rides a bus. He is one of many anonymous busriders, unnoticed by the others. That changes when, seemingly unprovoked, Wheeler shouts: "Woodwind! Brass! Percussion! Strings! THOSE ARE THE FOUR CATEGORIES OF INSTRUMENTS MOTHERFUCKER!!"

9:42pm: Wheeler adorns spectacles and lightly grasps a fountain pen. He writes a letter to the local paper about the need for more fire hydrants. Then he burns the letter and chuckles at the irony.

Monday, August 1st, 2011
7:03am: Wheeler throws 173 fastballs all at 93mph. He throws them against rocks. The rocks are connected to guitar strings which twang each time he hits a rock. Over three hours, he plays Stairway to Heaven. Musically it was tacky, but damn he can pitch.

3:22pm: Wheeler chews the first bite of his lunch for eight minutes before realizing it is a piece of bark from a birch tree. "Wait, where am I?" he says. "Dunedin," says R.A. Dickey, who wasn't there before. "Where's Dunedin?" asked Wheeler, but Dickey was gone, and Wheeler had already given up three runs.

6:18pm: Wheeler rides a bus with his new teammates on the St. Lucie Mets. He converses with them, keeping things light, friendly and respectful, until, seemingly unprovoked, he shouts "Aeschylus! Sophocles! Euripides! THOSE WERE THE THREE BEST ANCIENT GREEK DRAMATISTS MOTHERFUCKER!

9:00pm: Wheeler attends the ballet. "I'm not following the plot at all," he whispers to the person next to him.

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011
Wheeler is undetectable by all means other than psychic impression for the entirety of the day. He is "fuzzy, ethereal," and then for a period of twenty minutes, "Crisp and clear like a large ball bearing in an empty desert." After that, nothing.

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011
7:03am: Wheeler throws 173 fastballs all at 93mph. He throws them against rocks. The rocks are connected to guitar strings which twang each time he hits a rock. Over three hours, he plays Stairway to Heaven. Musically it was tacky, but damn he can pitch.

Gee and Turner Tell Dickey Their Secret

Dillon Gee kicked back a cold one, feet on the ottoman, gazing out the window of the 35th floor of the Mets building. He had just shut out the Braves. He felt like 400,000 bucks. Yeah.

R.A. Dickey descended the stairs from the 43rd floor. His mind was a quagmire of quibble sticks. Every restaurant he went to was booked. Strangers coughs would arbitrarily point toward him. He received parking tickets, though he did not own a car. Something was amiss.

As he stepped out onto the 35th landing, a thunderous trample was heard by both ears. It was Justin Turner, crashing about like a friendly rhino. He was knock knock knocking on Dillon Gee's door before Dickey could get there. R.A. faced a choice. He had hoped to pick Gee's brain, but the exuberance of Turner would likely prevent this. Justin had made a name for himself by "turning into a monkey" at random throughout the day. He would drop a conversation on the team bus to climb precariously onto the back's of the seats. Hooting and demanding bananas. One time, while standing on second base in a spring training game, Turner dropped let his arms swing down by his knees, and while everyone was waiting for the pitch he scampered over to the opposing dugout, jumped on its roof a number of times, then ran into the crowd, spilling people's drinks whenever he could. "I just have to be me," he explained.

R.A. thought about turning back, but he had come this far, and his only plan for the evening was to read Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which he had already done several times before. When the door opened for Turner, he followed him in without a word.

"R.A.? No way!" said Turner. "We've been talking about you! You're like a stegosaurus!"

"But I have lost my thunderous stego-stomp," said R.A. wistfully.

"We've been talking about it," said Gee. "You know what you have to do?"

"What?" said Dickey.

"It's easy," said Turner.

"What is it?" Dickey asked.

"Real easy," said Gee.

"Stupid easy?" said Turner.

"Easy as the third bite of pie," said Gee.

"And that's the easiest one," said Turner.

"Because you're not too full," said Gee.

"And you've already established that it's your pie," added Turner.

"You just gotta..." Gee started.

"You gotta you gotta you gotta," said Turner with a mini-headbang.

"You gotta just look at the batter's face," said Gee.

"You have to notice the pitcher's nose," said Turner.

"You gotta really see his face," said Gee.

"Like it's more than just knowing that there is a face there," said Turner.

"You gotta really see that face with your eyes," said Gee.

I'm not going to write out the whole thing, but this went on for literally 44 minutes, which is a really long time for that sort of thing.

Dickey thanked them for their high energy, if incomprehensible advice. He got in the building's not especially fast elevator and went down to the ground floor to take a walk.

"Greetings Richard Alan," said Pops the doorman. "A late night stroll?"

Dickey looked his way. He saw eyes. He saw a nose. He saw a mustache that covered most of Pops' mouth. He saw his face. He saw his face. Then, instinctively, he walked out the door like a gila monster.

What Jeffrey Toobin Did Not Report... Until Now!

Mets Fan Fiction is best friends with Jeffrey Toobin. Before either was famous, they would take long canoe trips in which Toobin would probosculate on the legality of the hidden ball trick and MFF would sing loud arias to the pine cones. Because the bonds of friendship are stronger than those of money and career (most people think that the Brooklyn Bridge is held up by really intense cables, but it's actually friendship), Toobin has allowed Mets Fan Fiction to break into his home and procure his notes from the fateful interview with Fred Wilpon.

"What I never told my son," Wilpon said between bites of ravioli, unprovoked, abandoning a previous diatribe about mittens, "is that there are seven suns in the world, and each shine in various intensities and bandwiths. I have named them "Money" "Hair" "Nasturtian" "Sunglasses" "Honor" "Winning" and "Agbayani." I really thought he was the one. I probably should have told Jeff that. It's a big part of my deal."

Then he reclined, and sat in silence. Tracking a recalcitrant fly with his eyes. Jeffrey Toobin agitated in his chair, trying to attract the waiter for water and coffee refills. 90% of Toobin's diet is water and coffee. The rest is sand.

"I'M THE KING DAMNIT!" Wilpon shouted. Toobin was taken aback, but then he recalled something. He pulled out his blackberry and called up an email he had tagged. It was from Einhorn.

"Toobs- Be advised that Fred Wilpon has occasional Tourettic outbursts from time to time expressing monomaniacal desires. Do not worry or be offended, and above do not mention it to Fred. He doesn't know that he does this. He does not notice, in much the way that we do not tend to notice our digestive processes or the circulation of the air. Regards- Einhorn"

Einhorn. Was he Bruce Wayne or Batman? And when will we see the other one?

Wilpon, two-thirds of the way through his ravioli, ordered a full lobster.

"You see," he explained. The trick is to wait until what you have taken for granted [indicating the ravioli] has a little more left in the tank, and then you spend big for a marquee item! That's the secret to my success!"

The waiter, simultaneously filling up Toobin's water and coffee, coughed a cough that sounded very much like the words "Mo Vaughn."

"This guy Einhorn, though. I don't like his face. It's a face that says 'glarb glarb glarb. I have a cat. I have a dog. blarg blarg blarg.' You have to watch out for people like that. And here's another thing. He gets advance reports on everyone. And I mean everyone. He told me you eat sand."


The waiter placed the water container and the coffee bullet on the table: an unusual action, and one that attracted the attention of the two sitters. "Wha-" Fred started. "I'M BIGGER THAN THE MOON!" he shouted, but the waiter did not flinch. Instead he reached for his face... and pulled off a mask.

"Dinner is served," said a face that said blarg blarg blarg and so much more.

"Damnit Einhorn!" Wilpon cried.

Mets Win Over Astros is Mysterious and Invisible.

I heard darkly that the Mets had played the Astros. It was one of those nights that seems to escape from nighthood, a rogue evening, a lonely whisperer. Silent people rapped mad flows as you walked down the street and doesn't that sandwich look right, but it's just one kind of right, and on nights like this, right drifts out of its normal situation.

The Mets were confused. The sphere had obvious patterns. It came toward them leisurely, asking questions along the way, not so much because it didn't know or did care, but just to interact with the community. Jose Reyes had initial success (he is the initializer after all), but after that the ball was like a ball of glue: sticky and undesirable. Thole flailed. Wright wronged. Beltran went off the rails. Bay wasn't where we thought he was. Murphy got cancelled. Turner went the wrong way. Pridie felt ashamed. Gee H'd.

Longly they groggled. Quietly they looked at the moon. Grayly they traced shapes with the ends of their bats in the on-deck circle. Winsomely they beckoned at curveballs. Forlornly they returned to the Mets scrabble-letter-holder-shaped station (MSLHSS).

It was Beltran with arrows for eyes and a pocketful of                . As Dr. Norris delivered his diagnosis, Beltran tossed the silence from his pocket like a cloud of powder. This is against the rules of baseball, but he wasn't caught, because silence is mysterious and invisible. Needless to say he hit a double. It could have been a real groovy inning, but Bay was still looking for parking, so that didn't work out. However, the lightning bolt of possibilities provided by Beltran's fine whack painted the whole scene in watercolors and all of a sudden the Mets were chatting to each other, saying boy was that interesting! Pridie, how's things going with that girl. Huh. Reyes tell us about that time you accidentally hypnotized someone. Someone call up Pedro in the bullpen and get him to beatbox over the phone. Are you going to drop some rhymes? I just might. Ike you're really confident these days.

And surely now they will score runs they thought, but it was not they who responded. Astros streaked around the bases like cool demons. The Houstonians were pretty into it but frankly it wasn't my satchel. The Mets, meanwhile, glorped along for two innings. After the second one, in the field, they chatted about what they would get if they got a master's.

As they jogged back to the MSLHSS, Richard Alan Dickey had that fire in his eyes he gets sometimes. Thole felt a rush of excitement and anxiety until he remembered that R.A. wasn't pitching that day.

"Beltran's coming up this inning!" he declared. The Mets didn't know that, and they buzzed with conversation about the latest development. He struck out, as Wright did before him. Just then, Bay arrived at the stadium (up until then, the opposing pitcher had just been pitching to a generic strike zone with no one standing in the batter's box, and the Mets had been playing without a left fielder. He was handed a bat, and he looked over at the Mets in their MSLHSS. He saw the glimmer of the hope they once held, and that worked for him. Unburdened by the history of the game, Bay hit a home run. The ball did not go to the moon, of course, but an odd number of people said it did.

"Hey guys," said Thole. "This is totally corny, but I'm just going to say it. The past doesn't matter. We can all hit home runs off anyone. Even the pitchers!"

The Mets high-fived like they weren't getting paid. As Dickey connected with Thole, he said "You just turned all these 0s and 1s into 4s."

The next inning, Fernando Martinez appeared like a ghost materializing and hit a home run. Fantastic. When Wright came up, he turned to Angel Hernandez, the homeplate umpire and head of the MLB Botanists Conference. "Hey" said Wright. "When he starts his windup, ask me who's right." Angel complied, because there are rules, and then there is going with the flow, and he understood that. The pitch approached...

"Who's right?" he asked.

"I'M WRIGHT!" he roared into the ambiance of the crowd, and the ball sailed over the wall.

I heard that the Mets stayed up late walking across Houston that night. They went down alleys, they checked out hidden pubs. They chatted up the populace. Later, Thole wrote an email to his grandmother, Bay and Ike hit up the taco truck. The bullpen played mafia (the party game). Wright and Reyes ended up reenacting most of an episode of Firefly to some middle aged ladies who had never seen the show. It was one of those kinds of nights. It was one of those kinds of nights.