Darrel Chaney keeps coming back to me, even now, in a fractured world. And I keep coming back to Darrel Chaney. I first encountered him when I was eight years old. That’s when the world started showing its cracks to me. I had no way of processing this consciously, but around that time, 1975, not long after my father stopped living with the rest of us and the rest of us moved to a new place, I started having night terrors, which we called nightmares, not knowing there was a term for what I was experiencing. That was how the cracks in the world showed themselves to me in the middle of the night, and that’s more or less how terrifying it was to me—as if I was seeing that the world was not sturdy or constant. It not only could all fall apart but was falling apart right before my eyes. This is what I woke up to in the middle of the night sometimes, and I’ve never been able to describe what the world looked like to me in those moments, not then, not since, but it sent me screaming through the house every time until my throat was hoarse from the screaming. Eventually the terror came to an end, tenuously, in exhaustion, and I was able to slip back into unconsciousness, sometimes waking again to the terror, sometimes making it all the way to the morning. And so in the sunlight hours I came to bright things, things I could hold in my hands, things with stories and numbers and solidity. Darrel Chaney’s 1975 card was among the cards that came to me that first year of coming to the cards. I returned to that 1975 Darrel Chaney card over thirty years later, in 2008, during the first couple of years of the broader return to these cards that started in 2006 with the start of this blog. And then I returned again in 2010 to Darrel Chaney, when the return seemed as if it might be running its course. That was the focus of that second return to Darrel Chaney, that I maybe had nothing left to say, that the stories were all told, the flavor all gone from the gum, so to speak. But then just this morning, while playing Immaculate Grid, here came Darrel Chaney again. If you don’t know the game, it’s a simple, daily exercise in remembering journeymen. Remembering the guys who were one place for a while, then someplace else. Guys like me, or most of us, because who is ever anyone in one place and one piece anymore? Anyway, today’s game asked in one of its nine squares for a player who appeared in major league games with both the Cincinnati Reds and Atlanta Braves, and after a few beats in which tumbleweeds rolled through my mind, I thought of a card that I’d been keeping along with a few others in a loose pile on my desk because there was something in them that made me smile. It’s not difficult to see why this one made me smile. Darrel Chaney himself is smiling, in a way that I choose to view as sincere, especially given the batting glove on the hand he’s using to prop up his chin. This card is from 1977, and so the photo was taken in 1976, when Darrel Chaney, a longtime backup infielder on the Big Red Machine (which at that time on that superstar-laden team was probably a little like being an understudy in Hamlet to Sir Laurence Olivier), was traded, World Series ring in hand, to the Atlanta Braves for Mike Lum, and in 1977, Darrel Chaney played regularly for the first and, as it turned out, only time in his career. He got to wear that batting glove all the time, four or five times a game! And he did pretty good! His batting numbers for that year may seem pretty humble now, after so many years of juiced muscles and superball-hearted baseballs and shrinking parks and everybody having putting up numbers Jimmie Foxx would have been proud of, but at the time a .252 batting average with 54 walks, 20 doubles, and 8 triples was better than the majority of regular shortstops in the league at that time, which was still more or less the Era of Belanger, when everyone was fine with shortstops hitting .200 or thereabouts with no power, as long as they could field their position. On that latter subject, Darrel Chaney had some struggles in 1977 with his other glove, the one for fielding, leading the entire league in errors with 37, but he was also fifth among shortstops in putouts and sixth in assists, suggesting that he was giving it his all and possibly even adding some value with his glove. On the other hand, according to the minus rating (-.2) in an advanced statistic that I don’t really understand, dWAR [defensive wins above replacement], except in that it is an attempt to quantify fielding in a more complex way than just tallying errors, Chaney was not really adding much value in the field. But that’s not the point, goddamn it. The point is the world is falling apart, literally on fire, literally melting, a waking nightmare. The point is I don’t know how to fix it, or if it can be fixed. The point is I still need bright things, things I can hold in my hands, things with stories and numbers and solidity, things with sunshine and tenacity and joy. I still need Darrel Chaney.
Cardboard Gods 
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