Baffoe: A Letter By Kris Bryant From Iowa
By Tim Baffoe--
(CBS) Note: Kris Bryant didn't actually write the following letter. I have to make that disclaimer because they let stupid people on the Internet.
Dearest Mother,
I write you from Des Moines, Iowa, having arrived yesterday at the behest of masters Epstein and Hoyer. This is a French outpost inhabited even in this day still by the most vile of native savages — the squatters in Rod Beck's trailer. And insurance company representatives. It's more than a day's ride from Chicago, but I am sure that I feel I have been banished to a certain purgatory forgotten by all of America save for Panda Express.
The barrenness of my current environs leaves me with scarcely anything but my thoughts. I find myself wondering if I have disappointed you and Father. Be assured that I have tried to make you and everyone back home at the mission in Las Vegas feel worthy to call me kin and comrade, but I find myself at an emotional crossroads of sorts.
My superiors tell me that they appreciate all my work, that the future is bright, yet I have been left behind, castigated for some reason that has Master Boras quite vexed. He tells me some injustice has been done to me, that the game I love has betrayed me. "A bad day for baseball," says the Union I'm not a part of.
This is not why I don the uniform each day, Mother. I did not ask for this, and it troubles me. To be a pawn in some greater battle over the perils of forced unjust servitude, debated to and fro between middle-aged sports columnists and arithmeticians hell-bent on measuring the game the way the traveling wagoneer might measure your skull and tell your fortune at the fair. To be cast out down Interstate 80 not because I am inferior but because I was born into a situation that allows elder, more powerful men who wield pens, not bats, to send me at will to risk life and limb on the fields of Iowa — oh, Mother, never were more frightening yarns round a desert fire some years ago spun.
Word around the camp says the people back home and abroad are polarized about an issue with little ol' me at its center. This gives me pause as it is those very common people for whom I toil and wish to make proud. I know in the deepest regions of my soul I will. To be honest, a fit of the giggles fills me from time to time as well. For as sure as the cock crows, I aim to leave this place in a mere few weeks. Such a to-do over my service time across state lines merits not some greater philosophical debate better suited for the podiums of the great academies. I am a mere man tasked with a job, one in which I shall contribute my best efforts for the sake of a cause that history will prove greater than myself.
And yet I realized that I am truly blessed. I know there are boys in every town in the great country of ours who lie awake nights craving the privilege I have to fight to one day end over a century's worth of history's greatest scourge. All I ask is to wear the blue uniform proudly and ply my skills wherefore a manager general directs. If that is to be amid the cornfields glistening each morn with fresh blood, sweat, tears and Sudafed from a meth lab explosion, I say that I can only emerge a purer soul at each dusk until my superiors see fit to place me in a more prominent theatre.
Lest your head be full of worry, Mother, I promise you I am getting along. Javier Baez was dispatched here as well, and we sustain one another with words of encouragement, knowing full well we both will be in the big city in due time. We have taken to amusing ourselves by batting from the left-handed plate side or using our bats upside down against these green pitchers. Poor things are learning hard lessons here but fair ones at that.
And it is not all what one should expect the post-apocalypse to look like here in Iowa. There is talk of the first pitch of an upcoming game being thrown by a prominent local political mistress known for castrating hogs and fashioning boots from bread bags. Could you imaging such a thing? Surely I shall accumulate more tales of wonder and whimsy that I will be too eager to share with you when we meet in Chicago. My breath bated until then.
Please give my love to the little ones. To that rascal of a dog I hate, too.
Yours most faithful,
Kristopher Aloisius Bryant
Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe.