15 March 2021: Yuma, AZ — The following letter was received by the Yuma Sun. A copy was apparently sent to the Commissioner’s office:

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Dear PEBAverse,

Help the suffering Yuman Beings.

The clock on top of the Wells Fargo Bank in downtown Yuma is stuck on midnight. The calendars inside the bank still show the date as October 31st, 2020. Even the computers are stuck, frozen by some Y2K glitch that prevents them from advancing from October to November.

And the bank isn’t the only place this bizarre déjà vu-like trance has taken hold. The whole town of Yuma seems frozen in time.

The lights on the phones at the Suicide Hotline light up, hour after hour, with the same callers in the same plaintive voices expressing the same aching needs, threatening the same desperate plans. The hotline volunteers haven’t slept since Halloween, the ringing phones won’t let them. Bo and Rainie have nothing left to give to callers. They say anything, violating every rule of the Hotline Training Manual, promising return calls, visits, better weather, anything and everything, even that life will get better and the Dozers will win the 2021 Rodriguez Cup, anything to talk the callers back from the ledge, away from the razor, down from the abandoned railway bridge outside town. But who will rescue the rescuers?

David Goode, former Dozer player and current bench coach, stumbles down the empty streets of Old Towne, dizzy from hunger and dehydration, relieved to have escaped his kidnappers, surprised they simply abandoned him when they heard the Dozers had lost. At every corner he comes to, Goode is accosted by the Yuma police, who see only a dangerous looking man in the middle of the street. Armed to prevent riots that never happened, bored and anxious, their fingers itch against the triggers of their automatic weapons as they line Goode up in their sights. When they don’t fire, Goode staggers to the next corner and the next, replaying the little drama at each corner until he is bored by the strident orders of the cops to lie down on the ground, perhaps wishing they would just shoot him and put an end to the tedium. Deep down he wishes the Dozers had never made the playoffs, never survived to game seven of the championship series, if only so he could stop walking down Main Street, stop the threats of the police, stop the ringing in his head that torments him and get some sleep.

But no one sleeps in Yuma. The town is filled with sleep-deprived zombies sentenced to chase their tails like rats caught in some Escher-maze, some crazy landscape where steps going up lead you back down, again and again, over and over, in an optical-illusion prison. Only, the illusion in Yuma is not optical, but chronological.

Time has gotten stuck. And like characters in some wild Vonnegut sci-fi thriller, they can’t unstick themselves alone. They need help. Your help, friends in the PEBAverse.

You see, the Yuman beings can’t get beyond the night the Dozers lost the PEBA championship. They’re trapped in their misery, recycling the disappointment, prisoners to the pain of defeat.

There’s only one way out, one chance to jostle time back into its rhythm, one trick to tease Yuma into 2021.

Box scores! 

Seeing box scores of PEBA games played in the spring of 2021 may just shake the time-warped reality Yumans are stuck in. Proof from beyond the Dozers 2020 defeat that baseball continues, time ticks forward, and a new season of promise and hope has arrived may just be enough to loosen the chains that keep Yuma tied to the night of October 31st, 2020.

It’s worth a try. Save up all your box scores and mail them to: 

Postmaster, Yuma, AZ 85364

Thank you. And keep your fingers crossed.

Yours for the Yuman Beings,

Taffy Slummings

President, End is Nigh Coalition