CLEANERS 9, DEALERS 7: DEALERS JUMP OUT TO EARLY LEAD, REMEMBER THAT THEY'RE THE DEALERS

"Your guys' kid is going to have a blog dedicated to Flogging Molly."

-Elias Perez, bizarrely insinuating a romance between

me and Cameron from the Cleaners

The legendary English actor Charles Laughton, star of early talkies such as The Private Life of Henry VIII, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Barretts of Wimpole Street, liked to eat shit.

"Bowers brought over a young man to Laughton’s house, and Laughton proceeded to carefully wash crisp lettuce leaves and tomatoes and place them on two slices of bread while the young man was told to strip completely and perch up on a counter top. He put the sandwich on a plate and grabbed a pot. He told the young man to follow him, and they were gone for 15 minutes. When they came back, Bowers could see that the lettuce and tomatoes had been smeared with a light brown substance. Bowers writes, “It looked like gravy or peanut butter or some sort of sandwich spread."

Unlike Laughton, the 0-3 Dealers took the field against the scat-brown Richmond Cleaners looking to break this habit. The consensus that's built up around the Cleaners in the past few years is that they're alcoholic Irish construction workers who are short on talent but periodically recruit ex-MLB prospects to pitch for them, possibly for money. To their credit, we haven't seen many of those guys this year, possibly because the Cleaners ran out of money. Taking the mound against Jesse was Steve Kerwin, an OG PCHLer and Good Guy who has never been known to tuck his t-shirt into his baseball pants. Jesse, who wears tight black jeans on the mound as some kind of encoded sexual signal to somebody (me) easily dispatched the Cleaners with three weak ground balls in the top of the first. In the bottom half we jumped on Kerwin for three runs, coming by way of a Spoon walk, a Chris "topher" Adams double, a single by your reliable wordsmith Sam Bull (for that self-description, Crizzle just artfully implied that i have a vagina), and then a fucking RBI TRIPLE by Jesse, which made me tired. Jesse dispatched the Cleaners in the second with another effortless inning, and then S.K. was replaced by Hank Seaman, a man whose name pretty much does my job of making fun of him. Jimmy led off with a single, John walked, Rob Spector flied out to center as he's been stubbornly doing since the dawn of time, Abe walked, Moss singled, and then Spoon, Mickey and I walked with the bases loaded for a total of four runs. Hank was yanked for Cleaners manager Shawn "Boof" Wyman, who struck out Jesse in a creepy portent of things to come.

A WORD ON THIS FUCKING GUY

There's been a lot of noise about jocks and ringers and PEDs since this league started, but this asshole somehow transformed himself from an unremarkable pitcher with poor control into Steve Carlton, and I feel justified in calling him out. Piss in the cup, Boof.

u still can't hit tho

After going up 7-0, we became relaxed and magnanimous, swinging at bad pitches so as to speed up the Cleaners' inevitable defeat and get them home in time for the tail end of the Warriors game. What can I say: we're not very bright. Seven runs turned out to be the limit for us, as Boof was lights out for the next six innings. The Cleaners scored four runs in the fifth thanks mostly to some heartbreaking defensive near-successes, then another three in the seventh to tie it up. I rarely delve into the details of the opposing teams' offensive success, because it always looks cheap and lucky to me, so all I'll say is this: I really hate that little scrunchy Rickey Henderson guy on the Cleaners who crowds the plate in the hope that he'll be hit by a baseball.

In the bottom of the eighth, Crizzle led off and quickly went down 0-2 with his patented "'Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman" technique of swinging really hard with his eyes closed, but then Boof plunked him. I came up and duplicated Crizzle's at-bat, wildly swinging and missing twice and then taking a breaking ball to the knee which I'll admit I did not try very hard to avoid. Jesse was next, and he roped a solid single to the right-center gap, only it was different than most singles in that the center fielder caught it on the fly and doubled Crizzle off second. (No finger-pointing here, I was also a mile off first base and could conceivably have been "tripled" off.)

In the top of the 9th, the Cleaners, well, they scored twice, in excruciating fashion, aided by some defensive confusion involving potential double plays that weren't and some sketchy calls. I really hate talking about this stuff. I still felt hopeful about a comeback until I realized the Cleaners have fucking Danny as their closer, a guy who actually wears the "washed-out MLB prospect" jacket WITHOUT hyperbole. We are, let's face it, on an insufficient plane of time and space and perception to hit a guy like Danny, even though John managed to get on base by catching a pitch with his leg. We lost. 

Way to clean up yer crap, "Cleaners" where are

the Chinese when you need em

The Cleaners brought this in case anyone needed

to terminate a pregnancy mid-game

(joke credit: H. Lando)

JESUS H. CHRIST PLAY OF THE CENTURY: Abraham "El Patriarca" Nunez. Based loaded, one out, one-run game, fly ball smashed to the right-center gap. He's not gonna get there. No fucking way he gets there. The ball is about to drop and he's still five miles away. Then he dives into the air, fully extended-like Superman, or my dick right now-and somehow bends the fabric of space, Warp Drive-style, and catches the ball. Best Dealer play I've ever seen. I wish somebody could have captured it for the ages. Oh wait, I totally fucking did.

Honorable mentions: Mickey's demented backhanded absorption of a screaming shorthopper hit deep in the hole at short, and Eric Rosen somehow spearing that line drive from Danny that was hit so hard I didn't even see it. 

HARLEY-DAVIDSON DRIVE OF THE GAME: jesse's triple it was good his hair is nice i'm over him tbh

PURPLE HEART OF THE GAME: This suppurating infected wound on my thigh, the result of a play at the plate and inadvertent spiking from some dirty Cleaner. If this thing gets amputated Louie Rappoport is really gonna have the last laugh

CRIZZLE PUFF RAGE OF THE GAME: When we picked off a Cleaner at second via the classic "center fielder creeps up quietly" move (we had this in Little League-it was code-named "Mizuno"-it never worked) but the guy was called safe. Crizzle has more passion than the rest of the team combined. Sometimes I fall asleep listening to a looped mp3 I made of Crizzle screaming

PLAYER OF THE GAME: I haven't been doing this because you're all such amazing snowflakes that it hurts me to rank you in any way. 

MARK MOSS OF THE GAME: Mark Moss

STATS

(please lmk if I fucked these up, I trust y'all)