Remembering Some Guys has always been a pastime among men. Guys sitting around the table or a campfire or a stoop or a schoolyard or a ballpark or wherever, drinking beers, talking about the good ol’ days of sports, back before we had social media, back before there was a hot take industrial complex. Even now, Remembering Some Guys is a thing dudes, especially dudes who rock, like to do, because sometimes, just recalling dudes who used to play for various teams in various scenarios is an easy source of dopamine. Sometimes, you just pull a name out of your hat, and you and the bros just wax poetically about it, even though sports are not the domain of bros alone, and sometimes, the name you pull out of your hat is not at all as good as you make him out to be in your memories.
Still, even in the age of rapid information at your fingertips, Remembering Some Guys can be cathartic, exhilarating even. David Roth has made it part of his podcast repertory, and it’s one of his biggest hits for the sheer reason that sports fans - again, I dabble in the shorthand that men primarily like sports but that’s wrong and all genders have affinity for them - just love remembering old players, be they boring and great like Ken Griffey Jr. or Randy Johnson or incredibly obscure like Phillies legend Danny Tartabull or that time Jose Bautista played for three NL East teams in the span of a couple of months.
Josh Wardle in 2018 created a game called “Wordle” that was a neat twist on the hangman game. It blew up around the time the pandemic hit, and the New York Times bought it out. After that, everyone and their mother tried creating a clone, and it was fun for awhile. Guessing words, or four simultaneous words, or Pokémon, or anything else that cloned off the game, is good for some. For others, it doesn’t have the longterm hook. The others here refers to me. I’m others.
The current biggest thing taking over social media circles combines the spirit of Wordle with the proclivity for the guys and the gals and the non-binary pals to Remember Some fuckin’ Guys:
Immaculate Grid
The game is simple. There is a three-by-three grid. On the top of the columns are a lineup of three teams or conditions, like an award won or a statistical plateau reached. On the left of the three rows, a similar lineup. Your job is not only to fill in the grid perfectly with players who fit the intersecting blocks, but to have an added degree of difficulty, the more obscure the player, the better score you receive. Immaculate Grid in this respect is like golf where the lower score is better. For example, here’s the Grid for August 9, which if you’re reading this on the day this issue was published, was yesterday’s:
The impulse for the intersection between “Yankees” and “Rookie of the Year” would be to put in Derek Jeter, right? Well, sure, but then you’d be rocking with the most people who think to connect a Yankee with that award at 44 percent. Right there, your rarity score will probably be somewhere north of 100. You wanna get granular. Maybe you’re a sicko who pored through baseball books and memorized stats and awards and know any number of Yankees who won the award in the ‘50s. Maybe you’re an old-timer. Or maybe you cheated and looked on Baseball Reference. Either way, the goal is to get to peak Remembering Some Guys, but sometimes, even the most obvious answers can escape you.
Whether or not you complete an Immaculate Grid is irrelevant to the point of the game, which is, of course, Remembering Some Guys. The folks behind the game put a whole other level on top of it and gave the practice even more depth. Now, instead of just talking to the sports nuts about the Guys of Yore, you can share your completed grids (behind content warnings if you’re on Twitter, of course, no spoilers) and see how your Guy Remembrance stacks up against your friends. They’ve even developed versions of it for the other three major American sports leagues, but even though I’ve become a true NFL sicko over every other sport over the years, no other game is more conducive to reminiscing about players and their weird trajectories over their careers like baseball is.
It’s even weirder but still heartwarming to bond over just naming players. People who might use the term sportsball…
…might find it offputting, but honestly, they treat politics like we treat sports, and that carries way more ick. The world has become an increasingly insular place thanks to trolls on social media gamifying our personalities to be combative and short-tempered to the point where it spills over to our friends. COVID-19 ruined an entire year or more of socialization, mainly because of the botched government response to it, but what’s done is sadly done. If Remembering Some Guys is what gets a quadrant filled with some of the loneliest, most socially and emotionally walled-up people in the world habitating in it, back in the swing of things, then it can never be a bad thing.