The Name on the Jersey

A transaction record is a very quiet way to move a life. In the space of a few weeks, an MLB catcher named Jake Rogers was traded from Detroit to Baltimore, then to Boston, and finally to Chicago.

The public record treats this with wordplay and humor, and the league treats it as a routine paper transaction. But beneath the transactions is the physical reality of moving: four clubhouses, four sets of staff, four temporary apartments, four sets of keys, four new routines, all in a matter of weeks. It is a very mundane, very comic sort of displacement, where a person is treated as professional equipment.

What stays constant is the name stitched on the back of the jersey. The city underneath it is the only thing that keeps changing.