You can’t really know what your life’s great work will be when you begin it. Our days are full to overfull with work, but so little of that feels important. This is not to say that all of it is bullshit, although for most everyone some significant portion of it is invariably bullshit. It’s just that, when you pick up the task that’s pursuit will shape you and your life, that fact will not necessarily be obvious in that moment. Anyway, this is how it was for me with Remembering.
There are baseball cards and basketball cards and some strange history-related cards stuffed into a closet and otherwise scattered around my home, mostly because I bought/received/liberated a great deal of cards during the years in which I was writing and editing those cards for Topps. I wouldn’t say that I break them out very much, but they’re something I helped make and I am glad to have them. Had it not been for this website’s demand for videos, and more specifically for the viewer/reader who sent a massive box of garbage 1990s baseball commons across the country for Lauren and me to enjoy, I might never have Remembered Guys in the way that, I now know, I was always meant to do.
But I am here, and so are you, and the great work has begun. In our latest dive into the garbage card treasure trove we are visited by the pale and mustachioed ghosts of utility infielders past, a towering busted draft pick who transitioned seamlessly from walking too many guys to selling pirated karaoke songs, a Deadspin family favorite, and Eric “Cool Breeze” Yelding. I say the words “fuck yeah, Steve Jeltz,” and I mean all of them. This is it. This is the work.