Allow Me to Introduce Myself...

Dear friends and gentle hearts: Attend to me a while, and allow me to tell you my story, humble though it be. Perhaps when we're through here, you won't think any better of me, but I mean, in the short time I have allotted, to tell you something of myself so that you might say not that Basebally was a good man...but just a man.

I can't remember now (perhaps I never knew!) whether it was I who found the Baseball, or the Baseball who found me. This I know: It was the Baseball who made me what I am, and what I forever will be. Can I call my beginnings ordinary? Certainly that which bears the dust of memory in the corners of our minds may seem ordinary to us; but to others, newly found, may have the freshness of discovery. In the little town on _______ where I served my childhood, I was surely much less than ordinary. Unnoticed, I floated ghostlike through my younger, and adolescent year, unremarked upon even by those I called my family. Would it surprise me to know that not a single soul was troubled when I slipped out, unseen, on that warm June evening? No, it would not.

By then, I had already taken to hiding my features. Ashamed and disgusted with my plain, featureless face, I had begun wearing a burlap sack to hide it. No one seemed to notice. It was only years later, in a town far from where I had begun, while scrounging beneath bleachers for discarded change and half-clean food, that the Baseball came to me, and I to it. What second-rate, corn-league mascot had cast him off, I'm sure I'll never know; the truth was that He never belonged to another just as I had never belonged to my home. We found a home in each other, and I became Basebally...my old, false name lost in the dust beneath those bleachers.

Now, for the first time, the world took note. As long and uneventful as the time BEFORE had been, so just as short was my meteoric rise to mascot stardom. I found that I was not just a good mascot, but a great one. Demanded across the country, I became a free agent, playing for the highest purse. With money in my pocket, and the cheers of fans ringing daily in my ears, one would think I would have found satisfaction at last. But it wasn't enough. It was never enough. However, i grow tired now, and the bare bulb in this dimly-lit motel room is burning into my brain and giving me a headache. I must retire. More later, goodnight friends,

Basebally