If there’s one thing that gets Carson Cistulli excited, it’s probably, like, fried cheese curds or unwatched episodes of Community or, of course, the ladies. But if there are, say, ten things that get Carson Cistulli excited, one of them is certainly the application of quantitative analysis to matters aesthetic.

Dave Dancis has submitted for the public’s consideration what likely represents an important step forward for this niche scientific field in his recent post on performance enhancing beards at Fantasy Baseball 101.

Below are the fruits of what one imagines were probably the entensivest of labors. However, in the spirit of serious peer review, I’ll also suggest that Dancis’s research might suffer from some sample-size issues.

Regard:

H/T: Sons of Steve Garvey

This was a home run

Luckily, Baseball-Reference’s blog was all over it.

As the B-R blog covers exquisitely well, Steve Balboni was not a very good baseball player. However, he was an extremely entertaining baseball player. For one, he looked pretty funny. For two, and most importantly, the dude could hit some home runs.

The reason that I care about Steve Balboni goes back to a game in which I attended in the womb: this June 4th, 1989 game between the New York Yankees and the Milwaukee Brewers at County Stadium in Milwaukee. My mom shares some of my love of baseball, and she shared her love of Steve Balboni with me, which, if I recall correctly, was born from this game.

This game featured a few collectibles, including a home run from Yankee Deion Sanders (off of the stalwart Bryan Clutterbuck) and a two-homer game from Jesse Barfield. However, it was Steve Balboni’s sole at-bat (replacing Don Mattingly in the field) which makes this game live on for my family. Balboni saw 12 pitches in that at-bat, and nine strikes. That means that Balboni fouled off at least 6 balls in a row (my mom described it as 17, which unfortunately can be struck as exaggeration from the B-R box score) before blasting a home run into the seats.

Sometimes, it takes a player’s skill or one magical postseason moment for him to live on in a fan’s mind. In this case, it was simply one heroic at-bat in a game between two bad teams in a Milwaukee summer. For that, Steve Balboni, we (specifically, my mom) thank you. And happy (belated) birthday, Steve.

If you squint and tilt your head and stay very quiet and have a heart as pure as driven snow, you can sorta kinda see Opening Day headed for us. That’s a blessed thing, of course, and, in keeping with the spirit of the season, the royal we here at NotGraphs would love for you to oblige us with your declarations of loyalties and disloyalties. Since you asked, I’ll start …

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Commemorate the occasion.

Palash Ghosh of the International Business Times has a question for the world: Why does everyone wear baseball caps?

This seems like kind of a low-stakes query. I mean, hats are pretty harmless. Everyone might just stop wearing baseball caps tomorrow! That would solve the problem, whatever the problem is. Right?

“What began as a harmless and humble exercise in showing support for one’s favorite local baseball club has mushroomed into something so gargantuan and irreversible [emphasis added] that I fear baseball caps will never vanish from the sartorial landscape.”

Whoah.

While Mr. Ghosh’s tone is a little grumpier* than I can defend, I do sympathize with his perplexity. I wear baseball caps when I need protection from the sun. But lots of people (ok, dudes) wear caps EVERYWHERE. Like sit-down restaurant, wedding reception, college seminar everywhere.

*Maybe ironically?

In fact, The Main Reason I Like Baseball is that when I go to baseball games, everyone has a good reason to be wearing a baseball cap, so I don’t get all apoplectic over people inappropriately wearing baseball caps. Which happens without exception everywhere else I go.

But back to Mr. Ghosh, who’s the really crochety one — his article speculates a little on why there’s this excess of caps. It seems multinational corporate marketing machines and the inexorable disintegration of modern society are somehow implicated. In conclusion: This baseball cap thing is gargantuan. And irreversible.

I’ve often referred to Lookout Landing’s Jeff Sullivan as the Charles Schulz of his generation. Except angrier. And drunker. And less talented.

I’ve never had a reason for doing any of that until today, however, when Sullivan gave us this — i.e. a comic strip rendering of Brian Cashman introducing new Yankee Rafael Soriano, the relief pitcher whom he (i.e. Cashman) has reluctantly signed to a a three-year, $35 million contract.

Below are three select panels, but you should visit LL and let the magic surround you.

Mr. John Hodgman,

I hope this letter finds you enjoying life, preferably in some manner of overstuffed chair, drinking one of the more expensive fermented beverages available legally (or not so much) in this country.

Even if this is not the case, it’s how I plan on imagining you for the duration of this electronic message.

You don’t know me, sir, but — with the exception of some enormous differences in fame and riches and access to world leaders — we have a great deal in common. For one, we’re both native sons of New England. While I, for my part, am from the mostly unkempt part known as New Hampshire, I at least had the decency to attend boarding school as soon as I’d realized the setbacks my youth had leveled against me.

Additionally, we both have a strong affinity for Western Massachusetts, where I pursued my graduate studies and where you, the internet tells me, currently reside.

Finally — and most relevant to this dispatch, sir — we are both nerds.

It’s this last point that I’ll care to address here.

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Yesterday’s posts regarding both the potential improvement and imminent destruction of our fair sport elicited an order from the Dark Overlord David Appelman to run this documentary clip from the future — about a sport known to our distant and larger-eyed descendants as “Blernsball.”

Blernsball appears to be quite similar to baseball — except for all the differences, of course.

One note to make: the lady person suggests that something called the “7th Inning Grope” is a tradition unique to Blernsball; however, I’m sure that our readers from the Philadelphia part of the country will attest to that city’s long and nuanced history of unwanted touching.

The fearless leader of Team NotGraphs – our own Carson Cistulli – and I both highly enjoy a game of Northwoods League baseball at the Duck Pond at Warner Park, home of the Madison Mallards. Luckily for denizens of Madison and the surrounding areas, it sounds like the experience is going to get even better, according to what I heard at the University of Wisconsin Dugout Club Winter Baseball Banquet.

Madison Mallards GM Vern Stenman made multiple announcements regarding the field. Most exciting to me is the fact that the Mallards will be replacing all backless bleacher seats with actual seats from Baltimore’s Camden Yards. Instead of bleachers, that means that fans will be sitting in something like these:

The field will also be adding more seats closer the plate.

The second update may not directly affect the fans, but it should increase the quality of the games. The field at the duck pond has been re-done with Miller Park sod. Having played at Warner Park before, I already thought the field to be of a high quality, but my frame of reference (high school fields and another Northwoods League field near my hometown) isn’t great. Still, taking a good field and improving the grass should only bring good things.

I highly recommend Mallards games to anybody who lives in or around the Madison area. The park experience is great and the talent level of the kids playing is quite good – multiple MLB draft picks play on every team in the league. Try and make your way out for a couple of games this summer if you’re around.

Dig:

Contrary to appearances, a reanimated Highpockets Kelly did not punch his way out of the grave and find the nearest diamond. That’s actually Arnie Beyerler, new manager of the Pawtucket Red Sox.

I don’t know much about his dugout chops, but Mr. Beyerler certainly has central-casting appeal: the fully germinated mustache, the plunging sleeves, the exposed socks, the weapons-grade leather belt that seems better suited for determined Catholic spankings rather than holding up a man’s trousers, the stevedore’s jawline, the vaguely menacing “hunter-gatherer” way in which he carries the bat … He seems like a man who knows a thing or two about a thing or two but won’t tell you about any of it.

From this point forward, he shall be known as … “Blast Furnace O’Dwyer.”

Ol’ Blast Furnace may never win a World Series, but I fully expect him to take back the streets in his spare time.

(Curtsy: Heard It From Hoard)

Earlier today, my colleague Dayn Perry submitted for the readership’s consideration a plan to improve baseball. Though I can’t necessarily speak to the virtues of his proposal — one which, it needs to be said, involves praising, if only implicitly, the works and days of the American South — I certainly commend Mr. Perry for his efforts.

It seems only natural, given Mr. Perry’s submission, that we might turn our gaze in the other direction — that is, towards those rule changes which might destroy baseball immediately. One might note — and not incorrectly so, I think — that Major League Baseball itself has frequently been on the front lines of this effort, whether by instituting bizarrely significant rewards for winning the All-Star Game or proving notoriously stingy with their online media. Still, there are some means to the end of baseball’s destruction left unplumbed by even their tireless efforts.

Here are ten ways that the sport of baseball could be destroyed posthaste:

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