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| THE GREATEST DAY OF MY LIFE! |
I never thought I’d be standing on the mound at Wrigley Field. I thought I’d be in the comments arguing with some guy named @CubsTruthSeeker88 about whether a raccoon sitting quietly in a chair counted as “prestige content.” Instead, some intern at the Cubs watched my YouTube channel—the patient raccoon, the bear floating toward heaven, the cheese-stick heist, the occasional gorilla in a Cubs shirt—and decided I was the face of the franchise now.
So they invited me to throw out the first pitch.
I showed up in my favorite Milli Vanilli t-shirt. The faded one. The one with Rob and Fab still looking like they believed the Grammy was real. I’ve worn versions of that shirt since high school, which is also when the bullying started. Kids called me “Playback.” They called me “The Human Cassette.” One time they duct-taped a boom box to my locker that only played “Blame It on the Rain” on a four-second loop. I never stopped wearing the shirt. Loyalty. Also spite.
I walked out of the dugout expecting the traditional Wrigley welcome for a man in a Milli Vanilli shirt: a low, rolling boo that starts in the bleachers and ends in the parking lot. I had practiced my dignified nod. I had practiced looking unbothered.
Instead, the crowd stood up.
Not a polite golf clap. A full, drunken, mustard-on-the-shirt, “this is our weirdo now” roar. Somebody in the upper deck started chanting “GIRL YOU KNOW IT’S TRUE.” The organist, God help him, played the opening of “Baby Don’t Forget My Number.” A guy in a Bartman jersey held up a sign that just said “PLAYBACK KING.” I stood on the mound in my scandalized-duo merch and felt something I hadn’t felt since 1990: the universe briefly agreeing with me.
I went into a windup that looked like a man who’d practiced behind a Portillo’s. Then I threw.
Ninety miles an hour. Strike. The catcher’s mitt made that expensive leather pop that sounds like money and destiny. The pitch didn’t just catch the corner. It owned the corner. The radar gun operator looked at the number, looked at my shirt, and quietly sat down.
That’s when Steve Bartman stood up in his box.
Not the young, haunted Bartman of 2003. This was 2016-ring-owning, peace-with-the-universe Bartman. He climbed over the railing like a man who’d waited thirteen years for a better story. Security didn’t even move. The crowd parted the way crowds part for prophets and people who might have more rings than they do.
Bartman jogged to the mound. He looked me in the eye. He looked at the Milli Vanilli shirt. He looked at the radar reading still glowing on the board.
“That,” he said, loud enough for the first few rows, “was the best first pitch I have ever seen. And I have seen some first pitches.”
Then he pulled the 2016 Chicago Cubs World Series ring off his finger and pressed it into my hand.
“You wore the shirt,” Bartman said. “You threw the heater. You didn’t flinch. Take it. I’ve been waiting for someone who understands what it means to be publicly wrong and still show up.”
I stood there holding a World Series ring and a three-decade-old lip-sync scandal on my chest while 40,000 people lost their minds. Somewhere in the bleachers a man started crying into a hot dog. The organist played “Girl You Know It’s True” again, slower this time, like a hymn.
I, Jimmy Fungus—YouTube raccoon guy, high-school Playback victim, first-pitch assassin—walked off the mound with a championship ring I did not earn and a shirt that history had already tried to bury.
Wrigley Field, for one night, decided the scandal was the point.
And the rain, for once, had nothing to do with it.
