Everyone agreed that it was imperative, before she left the building and all of our lives forever, that we exact some kind of revenge on Megan Greenwell. But what? What unpleasant experience could even begin to approach recompense for all the times that she looked various staffers in the eyes and said horrible things like “The A’s have won three of their last five and are just two games back of the second wild card,” and “Looks like Frankie Montas will be back in time for the stretch run, you just hope he kept in shape during his PED suspension,” and “Daniel Mengden.” There is nothing to say in response to things like this, things which are both factually accurate and not at all the sort of things that one friend should ever say to another. So we took this punishment, and we waited.
In time, an answer presented itself. There is no punishment more readily available or painful to endure than the pleasure of my company, and so the Let’s Remember Some Guys studio was readied, Jorge sorted through our jumbo box of baseball cards, the potted plants misted and put into place, and Megan was invited to join us. The trap was set, and then the trap was sprung.
Regular viewers of Let’s Remember Some Guys have seen me in both Host Mode and Remembering Mode, and while I am irritating in both, as a general rule I try to be ingratiating when I’m the host and kind of heelish and superior as the Rememberer. This generally doesn’t work, because I am not a great performer and generally excitable and because I enjoy Remembering the Guys and generally revert to acting something like myself pretty fast. In this case, Megan blithely avowing that she’d never watched Seinfeld took me pretty well out of the moment, and not just because of how disrespectful it was to the legacy of iconic mustachioed slugger Ken Phelps. On balance, though, what you will see in the video above is me doing my level best to irritate Megan and, in my estimation, mostly succeeding. I suspect it was more irritating to her to be faced with a bunch of obscure-ish to frankly obscure Oakland A’s who played in the dimly remembered days of her childhood, but I did my best to add to the effect and believe the results speak for themselves.
It is only now, in the fullness of time, that I have stopped to think about why we all wanted to irritate Megan in this way. Some of it is clearly just the gentle and even good-natured sadism that exists in some friendships. Most of it, though, was because it seemed both easier and more appropriate to let the Guys—their blank stares or stilted poses on cards worth somehow less than the paper pulp on which they were printed—say thank you on our behalf. I think she understood what we meant, and how much we meant it.