Thanks to commenter Bryz, who posted a link to these jerseys in the comments section of a previous post.

This is one of three player jerseys under the “Men’s Fashion Jerseys” section of the Twins store on MLB.com’s shop. There’s a jersey for Nick Punto (above), Kevin Slowey, and Justin Morneau, and each incorporates parts of the player’s personality in making the jersey. For example, the Justin Morneau jersey includes references to his home country of Canada as well as his (super predictable) favorite sport of hockey. Punto’s jersey is red, white, and green to accentuate his Italian heritage and shows his grit in picture form. Kevin Slowey’s is black and yellow in the spirit of his hometown of Pittsburgh.

It’s an interesting concept, but I just can’t imagine anybody (who isn’t a family member) blowing the $95 that it costs to own one of these. The concept of these as “fashion” is interesting to me as well, as I can’t see anybody coming down a runway wearing one of these nor being taken too seriously in any public setting. Some of the designs – particularly on the patches, as well as the number design on Morneau’s jersey – are pretty cool, but for that kind of cash, I’ll stick with the real team colors.

If there’s one thing that men aged 18-34* like to do, it’s champion glorious facial hair. Like, if instead of Republican or Democrat, a candidate ran as a member of the Sweet Mustache party, that candidate would almost definitely dominate the aforementioned demographic. That’s just good, common-sense thinking.

*That is, the demographic we’re attempting to indoctrinate here at NotGraphs.

Anyway, on account of this true truth, you can imagine the sort of outcry that cried out when a Fanshot very similar to the following appeared at Brew Crew Ball yesternight:

Read the rest of this entry »

Coors Field humidor room: “These aren’t the super-dry baseballs you’re looking for.”

I’m not attending the Orlando Winter Meetings, but personally I would be sorely tempted to skip out and catch a show or two at Disney World. For the benefit of any GMs that might be reading this, perhaps our NotGraphs readers can help prioritize between “Fantasmic” and “Philharmagic?” Pat Gillick and Ed Wade will be watching the comments section and thank you in advance.

In the meantime, our heroes are hard at work discussing issues like the Rockies’ baseball humidification process. Background: this September, the Giants (and apparently at least one other team) complained to Major League Baseball about the level of independent oversight surrounding the Coors Field humidor. The Giants were bothered by the fact that, since a batboy periodically brings balls out to the umpires during games, the Rockies could theoretically be providing humidor balls when visiting teams were batting and then carrying out non-humidified baseballs when the Rockies were up.

The Rockies responded by letting umpires personally collect the entire stock of game balls from the humidor, but it looks like this issue isn’t dead yet. It’s tempting to chalk it all up to gamesmanship on the Giants’ part; they were just starting an important September series against the Rockies when they made the complaints which initiated the change. Of course, lots of people had that reaction when the Patriots Spygate allegations first came out, and that stuff kind of turned out to be semi-true.

From a pure baseballing perspective, there are few reasons — outside of Starlin Castro and maybe Geovany Soto — to like the Cubs. They are, generally speaking, an assault on the senses.

Well, turns out that the Cubs are objectionable for other reasons, too. Wading through the most recent news cycle, careful readers will notice that not only is it possible that the team gave former Cub star Ryne Sandberg less than the fairest of shakes while hiring for their managerial vacancy, but also that the club — fronted by new owner Tom Ricketts — is asking for some $200 million dollars in bond-backed funding from the State of Illinois.

Now, it needs to be said: I, Carson Cistulli, am nothing like an expert on the economics of sport; however, having read just enough Andrew Zimbalist to be dangerous, I know that public-funding for stadia is rarely of any benefit to the states/municipalities/whatever that are doing the funding. Moreover, Illinois appears to be in the midst of a fiscal crisis — so, that’s a thing, too.

Former MLB GM and current crack TV personality Jim Bowden details for the unwashed the exact goings-on of the GM Meetings, taking place this very second in hell-on-earth beautiful Orlando, Florida.

If you don’t have time for — or can’t access — the video, here are some things I learned from it:

• Every GM is permitted one weapon.
• The film Caligula, starring Malcolm McDowell of A Clockwork Orange-fame, was actually based on the sordid events of the 1978 GM Meetings.
• When he was a GM, Jim Bowden didn’t play golf during the Meetings because he was always, and I quote, “bangin’ in the rooms.”

H/T: The Real Dirty

Larry Granillo at Wezen-ball.com has quite the imagination. He followed up his odes to the World Series teams with this gem, a graphical representation of the current Hall of Fame members set to the tune of the periodic table. You’ll want to click here to see the full table in its resplendent glory.

Highlights of the table include the fact that he managed to group the 500-home-run, 3,000-hit, and 300-win clubs by color code, and the fact that the top-tier Hall of Famers are mostly in the top three rows of the chart. He also grouped the relievers and the defense-first HoFers, which serves to show how rare they are. In general, the best players trend towards the top and the right in most groups, too.

There’s plenty of smaller choices to bicker about, but one major choice – fundamental to the layout of the chart – concerns the baseball equivalent of ‘radioactive.’ Granillo goes with temperament, and that works to an extent. The ‘highly radioactive’ group consists of notable hothead Reggie Jackson, tough-as-nails Rogers Hornsby, and twitter superstar Old Hoss Radbourn.

But it’s a little strange to see the relievers right next to the ‘radiocative’ crew, and their placement on the left does not provide for a graded move from nice to nasty when moving to your left. In fact, that wouldn’t even be possible. And thinking about the chart in this way makes you wonder if the definition for radioactive may have come from a different place that could have served the chart better.

One of the most explosive conversations two fans of different teams can have is whether or not a player that once belonged to one of their teams belongs in the Hall of Fame. This only becomes more true when the player is borderline. Wasn’t the candidacy of Jim Rice one of the most talked-about and intense candidacies of modern times?

What if ‘radioactive’ was instead defined by the energy expended around a player’s inclusion in the Hall of Fame, and perhaps how borderline their candidacy was? Then we wouldn’t have to make decisions about the personalities of the players involved. Then we might be able to grade the chart from the most deserving on the right to those less deserving on the left. Then it would also suddenly make sense that the relievers were on the left, too.

Then again, this may be a little too much thinking about a moment meant for fun. At the very least, it’s certainly a chuckle-worthy chart.

Norifumi Nishimura leads his team in pregame calisthenics.

Yesterday it was announced that Norifumi Nishimura, manager of the Japan Series-winning Chiba Lotte Marines, had won the 2010 Shoriki Award. Nishimura may not have been entirely shocked to receive the call¹ though, because apparently since 2001 the Series-winning manager has received the Shoriki Award every year, with the one exception being Trey Hillman in 2006. Presumably Japan foresaw the mustache.

This Shoriki Award is given to the person who made the most outstanding contribution to Japanese baseball in the last year. It is named for Matsutaro Shoriki, a very interesting fellow who founded one of Japan’s largest newspapers and one of its first television stations and last but not least for our purposes its greatest baseball franchise, the Yomiuri Giants. In 1935, a politically charged time in Japan, Shoriki arranged for Babe Ruth and some other Americans to play an exhibition game in Tokyo, and for his trouble somebody tried to assassinate him with a sword.²  As far as I know, this exact thing never happened to Connie Mack.

Returning to the Shoriki Award, I haven’t been able to identify a comparable “outstanding contribution to baseball” prize in the United States. Considering the diverse spectrum of interpretations that American baseball writers and fans manage to project onto comparably well-defined awards such as most valuable player and best fielder, I can’t begin to imagine the ensuing discord if we did have something like the Shoriki Award (assuming people cared about it). How would you approach the question of who made the most outstanding “contribution” to American baseball in 2010? Maybe Roy Halladay — playoff no-hitters get people talking — or Josh Hamilton, with his great story. But probably I’m not thinking about this in broad enough terms.

¹ I always imagine people being informed that they won prizes by means of 5 AM phone calls like American Nobel laureates get because of the time difference with Sweden. Surely that’s not always how it works. I will win a prize and confirm — stay tuned.

² This article was originally printed in a 1935 issue of Time Magazine, so please excuse its regrettable language.

2K Sports, makers of sporting video games, have announced via their Facebook page (and maybe some other places, too — I don’t know) that Roy Halladay will grace the cover of MLB 2K11.

The news demands at least three questions, which I ask below and attempt to answer:

Q. Is it possible to announce that Roy Halladay will be on the cover of MLB 2K11 without making it just seem like a giant advertisement for the game?
A. That’s tough. I’m going with “yes,” though.

Q. Is grace only ever used as a verb to describe how someone’s on the cover of a book or album or periodical or something?
A. I don’t think so. It’s also common to say that so-and-so has graced us with his/her presence. Still, its usage is pretty specific.

Q. How will the game compare to MLB ’11: The Show?
A. Probably not excellently. Also, Kevin Butler won’t be in the commercials for it.

The thing I like about poems — one thing, at least — is how you can describe interesting texts without actually having to write or read them. Dave Berman does this in his poem “Piano and Scene,” for example, when he invokes a “Russian novel / whose 45 chapters are set / on 45 consecutive Valentine’s Days.” There’s a chance — a strong chance — that the concept of such a novel is better than the novel itself ever could be. At the very least, it requires way less effort merely to write/read the description. And effort, as you’ll know, is the enemy of the enthusiast.

Nor is this merely the case with books; the idea is applicable to all manner of texts. Certainly, it can apply to video games, as Kenny Powers’ Home Run Fiesta: Deep Inside Mexico — an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch — demonstrates.

The game, it needs to be said, never claims to be much more than a thinly veiled promotional tool for Season Two of HBO’s Eastbound and Down, so any criticism leveled against it must be tempered duly. The thing is, were you to tell me about a Kenny Powers-inspired baseball game, were you to say that it featured Powers himself spewing all manner of invective, and were you to continue by noting that said game featured some heavily pixelated and equally tube-topped Latina cheerleaders — well, “excellent to that,” is what I’d say.

Unfortunately — as in the case of Berman’s hypothetical Russian novel — the game itself is unable to live up to the concept. Perhaps its greatest flaw is that the game makes use of the device’s accelerometer. “To swing,” read the instructions, “flick your phone forward. Time your swing carefully, and the faster you flick it, the harder you’ll swing.” Perhaps life is different in your tax bracket, but I, personally, don’t feel comfortable thrusting my iPod all around. Furthermore, there doesn’t necessarily seem to be a strict correlation between the timing and strength of said “flick” and the swing it produces.

Conclusion: promising concept, probably impossible to realize. Use of accelerometer is awkward and unnecessary.

As mentioned previously in these electronic pages, Rick VandenHurk — along with Oriole teammates Jeremy Guthrie, Adam Jones, and other ballplayers — is currently holding instructional camps in VandenHurk’s native Holland.

Of course, this is hardly the first time Major Leaguers have made an effort to spread the gospel of baseball. In fact, there’s a long history of players either introducing the game, or merely seeing the sights, abroad. Below is a list of in-no-way fictional instances of such travel.

1927: For reasons unknown even to him, player known only as “Marlow” — an outfielder for the Marshall Indians of short-lived Lone Star League — is compelled to take symbolically charged boat-ride into heart of Congo.

1948: Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain take tour of pre-MLB Pacific Northwest, where less popular phrase “Spahn, Sain, and definitely rain” is coined.

1988: Recently retired slugger Reggie Jackson takes ambassadorial tour of West Africa, where he’s addressed by locals as “Mr. Hori.”

2008: Very wealthy Red Sox John Henry owner does own grocery shopping for first time in quarter of century. Is surprised by “life-like quality” of everything.

2010: Before each start, Colby Lewis pays visit to Interior Castle, a journey detailed by Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila in book of same name.