Young Kevin Youkilis is the only varsity athlete to be bullied by an asthmatic National Merit Semi-Finalist.
Young Kevin Youkilis uses flashcards to remind him of his deepest regrets and of the specific ways in which he will one day show them all.
Young Kevin Youkilis will not be voted “Most Handsome” or “Most Likely to Succeed”; Young Kevin Youkilis, in an informal and unsanctioned straw poll, will be voted “Most Likely to Try So Hard It’s Almost Adorable.”
Young Kevin Youkilis, if he’s honest with himself, is probably too old to identify so strongly with the full complement of male Peanuts characters. But sometimes he does so much it hurts. “Linus, man, I know. Shit,” he says at night while reading his tattered copies.
When Young Kevin Youkilis needs to half-smile for photos, he thinks of that time he saw Meghan Connelly’s bra. And baseball.
Young Kevin Youkilis’s hair has been called “frustration’s pelt.”
Although Young Kevin Youkilis’s hair is the only thing holding the sweat in, he still wishes his stupid hair would just go away.
It shall.
On Young Kevin Youkilis’s Trapper Keeper, which is festooned with images of geometric shapes and planetoids in determined orbit, he has written, “My heart and will are too big and mighty for Cincinnati.”
They are.
(This piece originally appeared at FanGraphs. It has since been revised and made even worse, probably.)