When Harry Met Stabby
Or: A celebration of depth batters and drag bunts.
A note from the Flabbergasters’ omniscient god: You might have noticed that there’s been a three-month gap between the introduction of Ada Robertson/Thighs Fitzsimmons and this next chapter. That’s because fall is football season, and football season is when the omniscient god is required by law — well, not “law,” but “some sort of vaguely binding agreement” — to put a lot of words down elsewhere that unfortunately get in the way of Flabbergasters flabbergasting. Don’t worry, she is a merciful lord, and didn’t just abandon her subjects nor you all for an entire business quarter.
To Stabby!
If you were to find yourself in Seattle circa 1920 and wanted to remain un-beaten up, a good piece of advice with which to start would be “Don’t call it Pike’s Place.” (This is actually true to this day.)
Mister Pike doesn’t own it! It isn’t a place belonging to him! Who even is this Pike person who supposedly possesses this place? Shut up you cud-munching buffoon!
Is how Rutherford “Stabby” Myrvang could’ve responded.
Unfortunately for one Harry “Armpits” Davies, assistant to the New Westminster Capitols’ director of operations, that was not the path Rutherford chose. Although, unlike what you probably expected, he also did not stab Mr. Davies. Actually, at this point Stabby had never stabbed anybody. People weren’t even quite sure why they called him Stabby at this point, but they were pretty sure it was due to his pointy elf ears.
No, Stabby was more of a blunt force trauma kinda fellow. Ya know, a real baseball type: contact hitter, push batter, and all that jazz, blues, and NPR news.
Still unfortunate for Mr. Davies was that it turns out a good old-fashioned rake to the clavicle will leave your arm dangling around like a jellyfish, and it just so happened that that was what one Stabby Myrvang was carrying when he challenged Davies with the following:
“Call it ‘Pike’s Place’ one more time, motherf-[redacted].”
An offer Armpits Davies smugly accepted, and then immediately regretted.
Due to a clerical error, the New Westminster Capitols organization only knew two things about the assailant of Harry “Armpits” Davies:
1) He was a Pukey Swede.
2) His name was Nils Sasaki.
Part two was, of course, Stabby’s out.
No one knew how that detail came to be in the mind of the Capitols’ staff; there was neither a “Nils” nor a “Sasaki” on Ballard’s roster, nor had there ever been. They once had a Sassy K. Nelson (christened name “Cornelius”) at shortstop, but he only played with them for half a season in 1917 before being shipped out to the Somme. (Shockingly, Sassy survived the war without a scratch and, per his annual-ish letters to Pukey Swede second baseman Alf Leroux-Van Donk, he’d wound up afterwards as a cheese monger in Alsace preaching the good word of a Munster-laden charcuterie board.)
To this day, Nils Sasaki remains a mystery.
Regardless of how New Westminster brass became convinced of the existence and guilt of this fictional person, Stabby now had a second chance. A lease to start anew, un-vengeance-murdered by New West’s extensive network of enforcers who shockingly were not the “let’s talk it out” type but more of the “actually into stabbing” type.
Unfortunately for Rutherford Myrvang, this second chance came with one unwavering caveat: It wouldn’t be in Ballard.
Stabby had spent his whole life in Ballard. His family was in Ballard. His pyro sister had accidentally started three fires in Ballard. One of his cousin’s feet had been chopped off in a mill accident in Ballard. His dad died of cholera in Ballard. Stabby himself had stepped in no fewer than 200 piles of cow crap in Ballard. One of them probably was the one that gave his dad cholera – in Ballard. Ya know – home things.
But of course, while New Westminster didn’t know his identity, they’d certainly be able to pick him out of a batting lineup.
The safe move would be to go far far away. Over the mountains, to join Walla Walla or Pendleton or Spokane maybe.
But far far away is far far away, especially when your one-footed cousin, widowed mother, and indebted-from-accidentally-burning-down-buildings sister are all not far far away until you’re far far away. He’d probably only be able to see them but once or twice a year then; any more than that and his Model T would just start rolling backwards trying to get over the pass’s sweet 8% grade on account of they hadn’t invented all-wheel drive yet. They hadn’t even invented the iconic 1980s video game, Oregon Trail – how on Earth were they supposed to invent cars that could go over mountains if they couldn’t even invent pretending to die of dysentery?
At this, Stabby did what any reasonable person would do: He went to Tacoma.
Then he did what any reasonable person would do again: Listen while the president of the Tacoma Tugboats told him that alas they’d love to have him on their team and actually they could really use some contact hitting deeper in the order but tragically too much of their payroll was tied up in tugboat capital at the moment and to reach out again in a year. This wasn’t shocking seeing as their club was just as much funded by the tugboat tycoon as New West’s was by gin and kneecap-breaking, but it did seem antithetical to the whole “tycoon” thing. Weren’t tycoons supposed to have boatloads of cash already? (Tugboatloads, if you will.)
Which gave him but one choice. Begrudgingly, against all instincts, disposing of the one sacred loyalty he’d held dear since his own toddlerdom: the Everett Flabbergasters.
When, three years later, Stabby Myrvang got in the fight with Victoria’s whole dugout and stabbed a guy, it set off the chain of suspicion at New Westminster that maybe, just maybe, they’d finally found their guy
While he would later sign with New Westminster years after this initial incident, rumors snuck out bit by bit that it was all because they finally found him, hanging out harmlessly (or, mostly harmlessly, although Victoria would beg to differ) on Everett’s roster, dragging bunts down the third baseline, and decided he still had some atoning to do. And that atoning would be under the watchful eye of the New Westminster Capitols.
But for now Stabby was safe deep in the clubhouse of his dearly hated new team, the Everett Flabbergasters.