If you’re not remembering, are you forgetting? It’s a question that has vexed and divided the Guy Remembering community for centuries. Our work, in Remembering, is fundamentally about sustaining—about keeping alive the memory of Steve Jeltz’s very wet hair, or a terribly rude song that someone sang about Rob Deer like 27 years ago in the bleachers of a now-demolished stadium, or about the fact that Todd Worrell had a brother who also pitched in the Major Leagues. Is this vitally important work? I will be honest with you: It absolutely and in no way is vitally important work. But all these dumb and inconsequential memories still serve in some way to keep a series of experiences and performances and moments alive. In the silence or absence of those memories, are those experiences and performances and moments then not alive? Is that, then, a sort of death? Anyway, none of that really matters in this case because Jeff Katz remembers absolutely fucking everything.
Katz, a baseball historian and author who was also the literal in-real-life elected Mayor of Cooperstown, brought his own box of 1981 Fleer baseball cards, and at the risk of spoiling the video above, the man did not just Remember the Guys therein but remember all kinds of actual things about them. This is the difference between an enthusiastic but deeply lackadaisical Guy Rememberer such as myself, who mostly recalls that the players in question 1) played baseball and 2) appeared on baseball cards I once owned. An actual historian, someone who was the duly elected mayor of the town in which the Baseball Hall of Fame is situated, can actually tell you a little something about not just one 1980s baseballing Dave Roberts, but also tell you about the other 1980s baseballing Dave Roberts, who somehow appeared in the same pack.
It was an honor to be sitting in the next seat, nodding along and periodically making Jim Halpert Faces at the producer. The existential questions surrounding Remembering remain. But in this case, they were decidedly moot.
Senior Producer: Kiran Chitanvis, Producer/Editor: Jorge Corona