Mets Card of the Week: 2015 T.J. Chism

2015 TOPPS PRO DEBUT T.J. CHISM

Editor’s Note: The results of a recent reader survey are in, and it has come to our attention that the Card of the Week column is doing a poor job of connecting with the Millennial demographic. Feedback indicates that the feature is mired in references to obscure and semi-obscure cultural ephemera, too much of which predates the Millennial experience. In an effort to address this, Card of the Week will be making every effort to keep all such references up to date, and will provide helpful footnotes as appropriate in an effort to elucidate and inform.

Well, they’re telling us it’s all about the yutes [1]. The young Americans [2]…

We are young [3], the market screams, and Topps is there with a response.

That response is the 2015 Pro Debut set, an MiLB-licensed offering that features future big leaguers and future gym teachers in equal measure.

Take T.J. Chism for example, pictured here as a member of the St. Lucie Mets.

If you’re like me, when you first see the name “T.J. Chism” you might wonder whether Tommy John surgery has finally become an organized religion [4].

But in the words of Iggy Azalea, it is nothing quite so fancy. Chism is merely a 26-year-old lefty who bounced around the New York farm system, getting as high as AA in 2014, where he logged a 7.65 ERA in 20 innings. He has spent time with two different Independent League teams thus far in 2015.

So it would appear that T.J. Chism is more likely to become “Mr. Chism” and referee middle-school dodgeball games [5] than he is to take the bump at Citi Field.

And speaking of bumps: Iggy Azalea. Amiright?

The good news is that the Pro Debut set also highlights many of the Mets higher-caliber young guns [6], including prospects such as Michael Conforto, Brandon Nimmo, Dominic Smith, and Steven Matz…

[1] The title character of the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny, played by Joe Pesci, spoke in heavily accented English that resulted in him pronouncing the word “youths” in this manner.
[2] This 1975 album/song by David Bowie found the Britisher singer/songwriter in his “Thin White Duke” phase.
[3] While Millennial readers might recognize this as the title of a 2011 hit by fun., it is also a recurring lyrical motif in Pat Benatar’s 1983 million-seller Love is a Battlefield.
[4] This is a riff on the fact that the player’s surname is spelled the same as the second half of the word “catechism,” which in Christian traditions is a summary or exposition of doctrine meant to serve as a learning introduction to the Sacraments. So in application here, a devotee of Tommy John surgery would undertake a “tjchism.”
[5] The phrase “referee middle-school dodgeball games” is a somewhat elliptical callback to the previous mention of “future gym teachers.” The game of “dodgeball” was a violent, Darwinian athletic activity, once common in elementary/middle school gym classes, but since outlawed from all civilized institutions due to its basis in sheer bloodlust.
[6] Young Guns is the title of a 1988 Western starring members of the “Brat Pack.” The Brat Pack was a coterie of young, mostly male actors, who styled themselves as a Reagan-era version of the Frank Sinatra-led Rat Pack of the early 1960s. Brat Packers featured in this film include brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, and Lou Diamond Phillips. Young Guns was also the title of the first UK hit by synth-pop duo George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, aka Wham! Wham! went on to great worldwide success in the 1980s, and Michael later enjoyed a stellar solo career. No one was ever quite sure what Ridgeley did in Wham!, but whatever it was, he made a ton of money doing it and now races cars or something, sleeping soundly each night on Scrooge McDuck-style piles of gold coins. Please note, however, that your writer was referring to neither the movie nor the band in his usage of the phrase.