A piece of Julio Rodriguez

For those of you who don’t follow the sportsball, Julio Rodriguez is a terrific young outfielder for the Seattle Mariners.

This weekend this happened:

I have a book coming out next month on the nature of fandom, sporting and otherwise, and I just realized that a striking lacuna (I love that word — it’s so twee and affected; and have you ever noticed that the word twee is itself twee? OK back to the subject) in the narrative is the whole world of memorabilia, which I know nothing about, but which from the outside looks really interesting in a twisted sort of way.

From a purely pecuniary standpoint, Julio Rodriguez could end up being Mickey Mantle II, in which case I suppose this card will be worth millions 30 years from now assuming man is still alive, or he could be Claudell Washington, in which case it . . . won’t.

So I suppose this could be a rational investment, for very specialized meanings of the word rational.

I do think one interesting feature of this is that the sabermetrics revolution has made it much clearer than it was previously that a 21-year old rookie gold glove centerfielder with a 135 OPS has a really good chance of having a Hall of Fame career, even though his current batting stats are superficially not that eye popping.

Anyway I was looking through Darren Rovell’s twitter, and even a brief glance revealed that there’s a whole esoteric world of enthusiasms that I know nothing about, but that seem pretty weird and kinky.

BTW Michigan won the 1976 Ohio State game 22-0, even though the game was scoreless at halftime and Ohio State nearly scored in the last minute of the second quarter but Jim Pacenta’s pass was picked off by Jim Pickens in the end zone. Rick Leach attempted only one pass in the second half and it was intercepted. And it’s totally normal to just know stuff like this. Wapner at 4.