THE CHILDREN'S THEATRE CEO IS STILL IN FIRST PLACE, THE LAWYER HAS THE MOST WINS BUT IS SOMEHOW LOSING, AND I JUST FOUND OUT TWO OF THESE GUYS WERE IN A HIGH SCHOOL BAND THAT MADE ACTION FIGURES

There's a scene at the end of "The Godfather Part III" — the one nobody likes, which is how I feel about this column — where Michael Corleone slumps in a chair and whispers, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." That's me. That's this. I was out. I was free. I was re-watching the 2008 Celtics championship run and eating a perfectly reasonable amount of pasta, and my editor called and said the words "WLB standings" and something inside me died in a way that modern medicine cannot explain and that no amount of Larry Bird footage can repair.

This is my sixth column about a simulated baseball league run by six men in their mid-fifties who went to high school together and decided, apparently collectively, that the best use of their remaining years on earth was to manage imaginary rosters with names that would get you escorted out of a naming-rights meeting at any real stadium in America. Five of them are fifty-four years old. Chris Broyles turned fifty-three on Christmas Day, which means his birthday has been overshadowed by the birth of Christ for over half a century, and I think that explains a lot about a man who names things "Huanca Wankers" — when you've spent your whole life competing with Jesus for cake, you tend to swing for the fences on everything else.

I threw up in my mouth a little just typing that paragraph. Let's go.

THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS, WHICH REMAIN OFFENSIVE TO ANYONE WHO CARES ABOUT EFFORT

I need to present the standings as of June 6th, and I need everyone to understand that what I'm about to describe is the competitive equivalent of a participation trophy beating a résumé.

The Iron Knob Explosions are 37-18, a .673 winning percentage, and alone in first place. Andrew Harris, who runs a Children's Theatre company — and yes, he spells it "Theatre" with the -re, like a man who read one too many playbills during his formative years — is leading the World League of Baseball. He is leading it despite having made zero roster transactions this season. Zero. None. Not a single pickup, drop, trade, or waiver claim. He set his lineup before the first pitch of the season, presumably between rehearsals for whatever truncated version of "Annie" his organization was staging that week, and has not touched it since. His roster is the same. His manager profile is the same. He is the "Weekend at Bernie's" of franchise management — propped up, motionless, and somehow still the life of the party.

The Rick Astleys are 38-22 and in second place, a game and a half back. I need you to read that again. Jeff Burris has won thirty-eight games — the most in the league — and is in second place. He has the best run differential in the WLB at +120. His team has scored 345 runs, which is not just the most among human-managed teams but an absurd number that suggests someone in the simulation is getting paid by the run. And he is looking up at a man who has not logged in since March. Jeff Burris makes more roster transactions than anyone in the league. He is constantly tinkering, adjusting, acquiring, cutting — managing his simulated franchise the way he presumably manages pharmaceutical contracts at work, which is to say with suffocating thoroughness and a highlighter in each hand. Meanwhile, Andrew Harris set his lineup and went back to casting eleven-year-olds as trees. Jeff is in second. Andrew is in first. Effort is a lie. I've always suspected this, and now I have proof.

The Nicaragua Crepe Wrappers are 34-23 and four games back. The Huanca Wankers and Knockemstiff Slap Daddies are tied at 34-24, four and a half back. The Fugging Honey Badgers are 33-24 and five back, which is the radiological equivalent of a scan that looked terrible three weeks ago but is now merely concerning. Garth Graham has stabilized the patient, even if the patient is still in the ICU and doesn't know what month it is.

WHAT HAPPENED FROM MAY 27 TO JUNE 6: A TEN-DAY STRETCH THAT ANSWERED NO QUESTIONS AND RAISED SEVERAL MORE

Let me walk through the ten-day stretch with the precision of a man who has been contractually cornered into doing exactly this.

The Rick Astleys went 7-2. Best record of the stretch. Jeff Burris's squad scored 75 runs in nine games — that's 8.3 per game — and allowed just 23, a run margin of +52 over nine games that is so dominant it borders on prosecutorial. The Astleys went 3-0 on the road during this stretch, which means Jeff travels well, or at least his simulation does, which is more than you can say for most pharmaceutical attorneys whose idea of an away game is a conference in Orlando. And yet: still in second. Still looking up at a man who treats his roster like a crockpot recipe — set it, forget it, go direct a play.

The Iron Knob Explosions went 7-3. Four-game winning streak to close. Andrew Harris's team alternated wins and losses for the first six games like a metronome operated by someone who could not commit to excellence or failure, and then rattled off four straight to finish the stretch. The Explosions scored 55 runs and allowed 49 — a margin of +6, which is not exactly the kind of dominance that makes you rethink your life, but it's enough when you're already in first and your competitive philosophy is "don't touch anything and see what happens." Harris is in first by a game and a half. He has done nothing. His team went 4-0 at home during this stretch and 3-3 on the road, and for the season his road record is a staggering 25-9 — the best in the league — which suggests that the Iron Knob Explosions are the Away Team equivalent of that guy who's boring at home but charming at parties. Andrew Harris, Children's Theatre CEO and self-described "Spectacular Failure," is failing so spectacularly upward that I'm starting to think he misspelled "Success" on purpose.

The Nicaragua Crepe Wrappers also went 7-3. Chris Carpenter, Discipleship Pastor, is 34-23 overall, which puts him four games back but trending in a direction that should concern everyone ahead of him. The Crepe Wrappers outscored opponents 67-41 in this stretch, good for a +26 margin, and they went 3-0 on the road. Carpenter's team is 11-10 in one-run games for the season — the tightest record in the league — which makes sense for a man whose professional training involves navigating situations where the margin between salvation and damnation is a matter of personal commitment. Every one-run game is a sermon, and Pastor Carpenter is delivering them with the consistency of a man who has been preparing for this his entire ecclesiastical career.

The Huanca Wankers went 5-5. And here's where I need a moment. Chris Broyles's team won their first five games of this stretch. Five straight. The spaceship was ascending. The Core Pathways Model was humming. The transformation narrative was driving change. And then — and I want you to picture the moment the spaceship's warning lights start blinking on the bridge — the Wankers lost five straight to close the stretch. Five wins. Then five losses. A perfect, symmetrical collapse, like a business parable that forgot to include the chapter about the second act. Chris Broyles, the man who creates "strategic visual communications for high-stakes moments" and whose website promises to "turn resistance into momentum," watched his team generate tremendous momentum and then meet tremendous resistance and lose to it, five consecutive times.

The Wankers went 5-1 at home and 0-4 on the road during this stretch. Zero and four. On the road. The Wankers cannot win away from home, which is a sentence I refuse to examine for subtext. For the season, they're 22-9 at home and 12-15 on the road, which means b-degree.com operates exclusively in the home office and does not travel to the courtroom, the conference room, or the boardroom — it stays in whatever room has the WiFi password and the familiar desk chair. The Wankers are currently on a five-game losing streak, which Chris Broyles would describe as "a transformation opportunity" and which everyone else would describe as "losing."

The Fugging Honey Badgers went 5-5. Garth Graham's squad had a rocky ten days: they opened with a win, then a loss, then dropped four in a row — four! — before rattling off four straight wins to close the stretch and claw back some dignity. The Honey Badgers are five games back, which is a long way from where they were a month ago when Garth was in first place and the world made slightly more sense. But the four-game winning streak to close the stretch suggests the radiologist has finally identified the anomaly on the scan and is beginning treatment.

The Knockemstiff Slap Daddies went 4-5. Brett Houlberg's team closes the stretch on a three-game losing streak, and I have to be careful how I describe Brett's situation because the layers of his professional existence now rival the most complex D&D character he's ever 3D printed — and yes, Brett Houlberg manufactures Dungeons & Dragons figurines on a 3D printer in what I can only assume is a dedicated room in his house that smells like melted plastic and broken dreams.

Here's what you need to know about Brett the Vet: he sold his veterinary practice to a Private Equity firm. This is a thing that happens in America now — a man spends decades building a practice, healing animals, explaining to crying families that Biscuit needs surgery, and then one day a twenty-eight-year-old in a Patagonia vest shows up with a term sheet and a handshake and suddenly Biscuit's heartworm test costs four hundred dollars and there's a "Director of Client Wellness Experience" where the receptionist used to be. Brett took the money. Brett signed the papers. And then — and this is the part that would be funny if it weren't so specifically bleak — Brett kept working there. He sold the practice and then continued to show up. He is an employee of the company that bought his company. He is a tenant in his own house. He is the guy who sold his car and then asked the new owner if he could keep driving it to work.

The Slap Daddies went 4-2 at home and 0-3 on the road, because apparently nobody in this league can win on the road except Jeff Burris and Chris Carpenter. Brett's team has scored 355 runs this season — the most of ANY team, more than the Astleys — and has allowed 306, which gives them a run margin of +49, which is mediocre for a team that scores that much. The Slap Daddies are a dog that brings home a different dead bird every day: prolific, enthusiastic, and fundamentally incapable of doing it without making a mess. Brett understands this. He's a vet. He's seen the dog. He's treated the dog. He might be the dog. The dog is in fourth place and 3D printing a halfling rogue after dinner.

THE MILK CARTON BABIES: A DETOUR INTO THE ORIGIN STORY NOBODY WAS PREPARED FOR

I need to stop talking about baseball. I need to tell you something about Andrew Harris and Chris Broyles that reframes everything you thought you knew about this league, and possibly about the American high school experience.

Andrew Harris and Chris Broyles were in a band together in high school.

The band was called the Milk Carton Babies.

Now, I've covered NBA Finals. I've watched Kobe drop 81. I once sat courtside for a Game 7 that made grown men weep. None of those experiences prepared me for the moment I learned that the CEO of a Children's Theatre company and the author of "Can't Stop the Spaceship" once stood in a garage somewhere and said "What should we call the band?" and someone — and we will never know who, and it doesn't matter, because both of them are equally responsible — said "Milk Carton Babies" and the other one said "perfect" and that was that.

Milk. Carton. Babies. A name that combines dairy packaging with missing infants. A name that would be rejected by every Battle of the Bands competition on the grounds of basic human decency. A name that two teenage boys in the late 1980s thought was edgy and provocative and that two men in their fifties presumably look back on with the kind of fondness that should require a licensed professional to process.

But here's the part that broke me. Here's the part where I put my head on my desk and did not lift it for a while.

The Milk Carton Babies were not particularly interested in the music. They were interested in the merchandise.

THE. MERCHANDISE.

Andrew Harris and Chris Broyles — the man who now runs a Children's Theatre and the man who now creates "persuasive media for high-stakes moments" — spent their high school band career designing, manufacturing, and presumably attempting to sell action figures. I have seen the product. I have photographic evidence. The Milk Carton Babies produced blister-packed action figures with hand-drawn cardboard backing, a logo that reads "MCB," and the promotional promise "AGES 4 AND UP — ACTIONIZED! FULLY POSEABLE — COLLECT 'EM ALL!!!" in hand-lettered bubble text that looks like it was drawn during study hall by someone who should have been studying.

One figure is called "Chancy Chauncey." He comes packaged in a red-and-blue outfit that appears to have been sewn from the remnants of a clown's estate sale. He comes with a FREE FIREBALL, which is an actual Atomic Fireball candy sealed in a blister pack. And he comes with — and I need you to brace yourself — a FREE LOCK OF CHAUNCEY'S HAIR. Real hair. Human hair. Glued to cardboard and shrink-wrapped for retail. Two teenagers in a garage looked at their action figure prototype and said, "You know what this needs? Hair. A sample. Something tactile. Something the consumer can hold." And then they cut some hair off of someone — or something — and put it in the packaging and called it a feature.

There's also "Radical Ralph." Red-haired. Tie-dye. Green shorts with ripped hems. He also comes with a free fireball and a free lock of hair. The production values on Radical Ralph are suspiciously higher than Chancy Chauncey, which means either someone's older sibling helped or they figured out better manufacturing processes between units one and two, which is exactly the kind of operational improvement that Chris Broyles now charges Fortune 500 companies to facilitate.

These two men — who currently sit atop the WLB standings in first and fourth place, respectively — spent their teenage years not practicing chord progressions but perfecting blister-pack adhesion and arguing about whether Radical Ralph's hair sample was the right shade. This is the Rosetta Stone. This is the explanation for everything. Why does Andrew Harris run a Children's Theatre? Because he's been in the production business since puberty. Why does Chris Broyles create "strategic visual communications"? Because he was doing it at sixteen, on cardboard, with markers and Elmer's glue, for an audience of no one, with a free Fireball as the closing argument.

THE HIGH SCHOOL ARCHIVES: BECAUSE APPARENTLY I'M AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER NOW

Since we've opened the vault on these men's adolescent histories, I might as well empty it.

Garth Graham — the radiologist, the Chief of Staff at a hospital in Loudon, Tennessee, the man whose Fugging Honey Badgers have dropped from first to fifth and are now clawing their way back with the desperation of a man who has read too many of his own scans — was the lead in his high school musicals. Not a supporting role. Not "Third Townsperson." The lead. Garth Graham starred in "Kiss Me, Kate" and "The Sound of Music."

The man who now sits in darkened radiology suites reading CT scans with clinical detachment once stood under a spotlight and sang. About love, presumably. About the hills being alive. About something with feeling and volume and theatrical commitment. And it gets better. Because Garth Graham and Chris Broyles were in "Grease" together.

The radiologist and the spaceship author. The Honey Badger and the Wanker. Together, on stage, in leather jackets or poodle skirts or whatever the costume department could afford that year, singing about summer loving and greased lightning and the eternal high school tension between being cool and being yourself. Neither of them will say what role they played, which is either modesty or shame, and in the context of this league, those are the same thing. The Grease roles are the last great mystery of the WLB, and I swear on everything I've ever written that I will crack this case before the playoffs.

And then there's Chris Carpenter, the Discipleship Pastor, the man of God, the thin-pancake franchise owner, who played tennis. Not just high school tennis. College tennis. At Lincoln Memorial University, which is an NAIA school in Tennessee, which means Chris Carpenter competed in the division of college athletics that exists in the same relationship to the NCAA that the WLB exists to Major League Baseball — technically real, theoretically competitive, and watched by a number of people you could fit in a moderately sized van.

And Jeff Burris. What do we know about Jeff Burris's formative years? We know he lost at Pictionary. Repeatedly. Consistently. The Chief Legal Officer of a pharmaceutical company, the man who makes more roster transactions than any other owner in the league, the man whose Rick Astleys have the best run differential in the WLB — that man cannot draw. He could not draw in high school and he presumably cannot draw now, which means every game of Pictionary was an exercise in futility: Jeff Burris, sketching what he believed was a recognizable depiction of "elephant" while his teammates stared at what appeared to be a ransom note drawn by a malfunctioning seismograph. This is the man who manages the most successful offense in simulated baseball. The man who can't draw a straight line has created the most artful roster in the league. He has found his medium. It just took him thirty-six years and a simulated version of Rick Astley to get there.

THE LOOK-AHEAD: JUNE 7 THROUGH 17

The schedule from June 7th to June 17th is the most important eleven days in WLB history. The Flagship Series pits Jeff Burris at Iron Knob. If Jeff sweeps, the Astleys pull within spitting distance. If Andrew Harris holds serve, then the argument that doing nothing is optimal becomes irrefutable.

Iron Knob faces nine contender games in eleven days. If they survive with their lead intact, Andrew Harris will have proven that a man can win by doing absolutely nothing. If they don't? Then first place changes hands and Harris has to decide whether to make a roster move for the first time all season, which would be like watching a man who's been meditating for six months suddenly try to sprint — the muscles are atrophied, the instincts are gone.

The Wankers open with four games against Oak Ridge CPU (11-47), which is a participation trophy tournament. Then they travel to Fugging for four games against Garth Graham's Honey Badgers. Two men who were in "Grease" together thirty-six years ago, now meeting on a simulated baseball diamond. The Honey Badgers are 18-6 at home. The Wankers are 12-15 on the road. Those numbers do not favor Chris Broyles.

The Slap Daddies get three against Panama City Beach CPU to start, then four at Iron Knob. Brett's team is 9-13 on the road this season. If the Slap Daddies can't win on the road, this stretch will bury them.

Chris Carpenter's Crepe Wrappers open with Honey Badgers on June 8-9, then three against Oak Ridge, then close with two at Iron Knob. The Crepe Wrappers are 11-10 in one-run games, 5-2 in extra innings. They are built for the close game. Chris Carpenter has been training for this his entire life. He just didn't know the court would be a server rack.

Jeff Burris closes with two games at Fugging on June 16-17. If the standings are tight by then, these two games could be the difference.

THE FINAL WORD, WHICH I DELIVER UNDER DURESS

Here is what the World League of Baseball has taught me after six columns:

A man who made action figures with free fireballs and human hair samples in his high school garage is in first place without having done a single thing since the season started. His former bandmate, who made the same action figures and now charges large corporations to "turn uncertainty into opportunity," is on a five-game losing streak. The man who reads X-rays by day and once played the lead in Kiss Me Kate is five games back and refusing to discuss his role in Grease. A veterinarian who sold his practice, kept working, and 3D prints fantasy figurines at night has the highest-scoring team in the league and is in fourth place. A Discipleship Pastor who played NAIA tennis at Lincoln Memorial University is managing a team named after a Nicaraguan breakfast food and is four games back with serene confidence that borders on terrifying. And a pharmaceutical lawyer who has never successfully drawn anything in Pictionary has the best run differential in the league and is still behind a guy who doesn't make roster moves.

These are six friends. They went to high school together. Two of them were in a band. Two of them were in Grease. One of them played NAIA tennis. One of them still can't draw. One of them still shows up to a building he sold. And all of them, every single one, are spending their fifty-fourth year on this planet — or their fifty-third, in Broyles's case, because Christmas — refreshing a box score on a server that doesn't know they're alive.

The next eleven days could decide everything. The simulation keeps simulating. And I sit here, watching all of it unfold against my will, in a column that continues to happen to me with the regularity of a chronic condition and the severity of something a vet would charge four hundred dollars to diagnose.

I'll see you next time. Assuming I survive.