Will Clark's 50th birthday reveals a dark surprise

Happy 50^th Birthday, Will Clark!

As the world knows, he's my favorite baseball player of all time. For my recent birthday, he sent me an autographed baseball.*  We're pals.**

So, for his 50^th birthday, I thought I'd use my status as one of the top social-media voices on the planet** to once again celebrate his greatness. The first thing I did was visit his Baseball Reference page.

Now, I've always been able to block out advertising. It's a skill I developed at an early age during "Knight Rider" reruns. I'd play with my toys during commercial breaks, eat a bowl of cereal, consider how our self-awareness is an accident, et cetera. And you? You probably developed similar skills while growing up in this information age. Before there were ad blockers there was impatience. I'm not sure what caused me to pay attention to the obligatory yellow sponsored ad this time around, but I did.

/stares

/slowly opens large black ledger book

/begins taking detailed, you might even say obsessive, notes

Have you ever seen anything like this before?

Bask in the passive-aggression. Admire it. Oh, the team is okay they guess.

Inhale the bouquet of jealousy. Absent from the ‘Stick, but they do love the Cove.

Consider the implications of But Will would never have approved of...

Did Will Clark die? And what Reaganesque memory of Thrill does this guy have that would compel him to believe a baseball player would approve or disapprove of "legions of newly converted fans"? Converted from what? A'sdom? From nothingness?

... when Will earned his respect. Will Clark exists as a character in the sponsor's hate play. The Thrill's place in Giants history makes him a great choice to appropriate and shape into his Locutus, a mouthpiece for a mindset that denigrates anyone who would enjoy baseball in a hospitable environment.

#22 was a real masher... A subtle dig at Barry Bonds.

Say No to the SF Giants Bandwagon. A warning. A call to action. A threat.

I didn't seek out the darkness. I didn't touch the darkness... but the darkness found me.

A fanatic had at his disposal the means and the opportunity to sponsor any reference page that belonged to a player from his favorite team. Instead, he chose to spend $100+ of his own real money to sponsor a well-known player from another team in order to denigrate fans of that other team. It would be easy for us to believe this an act of a man with a passive-aggressive personality disorder, that his actions stem from an upbringing where he could not properly express his anger. But anger is caused by fear. How can we express an emotion we are forever desperate to remove?

How can we live in a world where our joy brings others misery or where our team's success inspires jealousy in the fans of other teams, causing them to sanctimoniously prank us? Why should we live in such a world?

Someone once told me success is a flat circle. Of everything a team's ever done or will do, it's gonna do over and over and over again. And those Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants... they're gonna win and lose, be good at the same time, bad at the same time, one good while the other's bad, both in a nice stadium, neither in a nice stadium, or only one in a nice stadium again and again and again. Forever.

Have you ever heard of A's-theory? It's like, in this universe, we process success linearly, forward. The A's haven't won a World Series in a long time, they don't play in a nice stadium. But outside of our space time, from what would be a 3rd & King perspective, success wouldn't exist. And from that vantage point, could we attain it? We see our space time would look flattened, like the outfield after a Raiders game... the game of Baseball cycling through our lives like a Kirk Gibson highlight reel. See everything outside our dimension, that's the Giants. The Giants looking down on us. Now, to us, this is fear.

But to the Giants... it's a circle.

*-True!
**-False!!