This Lenny Dykstra interview with Philly’s NBC10 contains multitudes. Por ejemplo:

In summary: Mr. Dykstra 1, Murderous Bankers of America 0. Winning indeed.

(Manly, punishing handshake: Deadspin)

This one comes to us via the Twitter account of FanGraphs’ own Jonah Keri. Have you bought The Extra 2% yet? It’s only tops among all sports books at Amazon.com.

Anyway, I had no idea Batting Stance Guy makes videos that don’t involve, you know, batting stances. But he does.

Check it out. Or, as the kids say, “peep this:”

The results of the poll are in: Andy Tworischuk hates fun.

You mess with NotGraphs, you mess with Joe West. At least that’s what Joe West told the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team.

I didn’t want to Andy, but Joe West insisted.

This is, of course, all in good fun. Pun intended. Let us in, Andy. As Roy Halladay once famously said: “It’s only gonna get funner.“

You know me: I don’t use the phrase “Eternal Hero of the Fightin’ Republic” lightly. But I’m calling Brooklynite Mitch Davie an Eternal Hero of the Fightin’ Republic. Why? Feast thine eyes …

It’s one thing to catch a bat in full helicopter mode with one hand. It’s another thing to catch a bat in full helicopter mode while, with the other, nobler hand, safeguarding your beer as though it were a Faberge egg, which in some ways it is. It’s still yet another thing to do all this while demonstrating reasonably good taste in wholesome, nutritious alcohol.

When I go to war with the dark forces that plague us — and it’s only a matter of time before I do just that — I want Mitch Davie at my side.

(Awkward fist-bump: The Seattle Times)

The idea is that some day in the distant, unknowable, far-flung future I’ll get around to thinking about the idea of pondering the vague possibility of the notion of perhaps considering doing one of these for each team. For starters, though, we have the proud history of the New York Yankees told in pictures and accompanied by the throbbing beats of Rock and/or Roll music …

We’ve all wondered it quietly to ourselves, but only BiS Video Scout and sabermagician Andy Tworischuk had the courage to render his musings publicly, as noted in the tweet above.

It’s a reasonable question, though, and the only way to get a totally accurate and completely unbiased answer is definitely to embed it as a poll here at NotGraphs.

Which, that’s what this is:

I’ll add, too, that, like pizza or the Ocean’s franchise of films, even the worst baseball-related thing is probably better than most other things this world has to offer. Like heart attacks, for example. Or junk sandwiches.

You can neither stop nor contain our feast-day celebration series, which continues right now with…

Life: From 1976 to 1980, J.R. Richard was an excellent pitcher and, from 1978 through the middle of 1980, was the best starter in all the majors, leading all starting pitchers in K/9 (9.7, better than Nolan Ryan’s 8.9) and FIP (2.28) over that stretch. However, on July 30, 1980, Richard suffered a stroke and collapsed while playing a game of catch before an Astros game. He was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery to remove a life-threatening blood clot in his neck, but never pitched in the majors again. After his professional baseball career ended, Richard became involved in unsuccessful business deals and went through two divorces, which led to him being homeless and destitute in 1994. Richard later found God and now lives indoors.

Spiritual Exercise: German polymath Gottfried Leibniz and Texan polymath Kris Kristofferson have both suggested that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” If that is the case, how ought we to understand the case of J.R. Richard? Or the proliferation of something called “Celebrity Apprentice”?

A Prayer for J.R. Richard

I have problems like
what’s the synonym for
delicious meal, again?
while you have problems like
instead of a doctor
a falcon accidentally
is performing my
important surgery.
I have problems like
please sign this petition
to help protect
the Oxford comma
in society
while you have problems like
that’s not a cork-type
bulletin board,
it’s the fragilest part
of my human psychology.
I have problems like
this shirt doesn’t wick away
moisture as advertised
while you have problems like
arterial thoracic outlet
gone wild.
I have problems like
wherever your heart is
that’s your treasure
while you have problems like
wherever your heart is
that’s your treasure also.

Biographical assistance courtesy of the Wikipedias.

If you thought the amazing Joe West Montage meant the end of the Adventures of Joe West, you were sorely mistaken.

The Soviet Union wasn’t there, on the moon, on June 20th, 1969. It was a race; beating them there was kind of the point. But their physical absence hardly mattered to umpire West, who promptly sent the Soviet space program to the showers.

There are ballplayers some fans admire to the point of wanting their autographs, and then there are ballplayers some fans admire to the point of wanting to wear them as pelts. Giants catcher Buster Posey, we must assume, has skin like fine Corinthian leather …

Awesome? On some level. Shuddersome? On every level.

(Curtsy: Big League Stew)

Headlines are a funny thing. They are designed to get your attention, or the attention of a search engine somewhere, while summing up the contents in a pithy way. Often they contain internet memes or SEO-optimization key words. Sometimes, like today, they contain both. /header #MLB #baseball

Over the years we’ve had some fun with the “Free Person X” internet meme, which most probably spawned from Free Mumia, but has since gone a little crzazlebeans, if you know what I mean, and baseball has taken the saying under it’s wing. Whether it’s Kila Ka’aihue that must be #freed from the clutches of the incompetent Royals, or Brandon Allen that must fight the good fight against the spaced invaders that wish to take his playing time, we’ve used that sentence construction to encourage young men to go against what’s wrong. Having been guilty of capriciously throwing the phrase around just last week, this is no finger-wagging piece, though.

Instead, call this piece the anthropological wanderings inspired by the title and subject of a serious piece by Larry Behrendt at It’s About the Money Stupid. In his latest, Larry examines the fate of young Lainer Bueno. The Venezuelan shortstop may not have a future in baseball, but attribute that mostly to a fateful combination of a lack of major-league talent (228/.336/.239 in Venezuelan Summer League) and the possibly unfortunate positive test for clenbuterol. The combination has him a free agent, and Larry thinks it’s an injustice.

Read the whole thing, do it. Afterwards, you may feel that our entry point to this article was all wrong today. Behrendt’s piece is a serious uncovering of the holes in MLB’s drug testing policy as it relates to Venezuelans and clenbuterol in particular. It looks like there’s a real reason the league may want to look at the fact that, according to “Scorecasting” by Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim, Venezuelan baseball players are about 4 times more likely to test positive for drugs than their American counterparts. It may not just be about skeezy agents in Latin America. The beef may be the real meat to the story.

But the title, and even the article, can make a mind wander to other “Free” movements in baseball. The parallels may seem stretched, and its continued use may even seem to cheapen the phrase. On the other hand, injustice exists. And whether the injustice at hand is an unequal appropriation of playing time, an unfair exclusion from the sport, or an incarceration surrounded by real questions, it doesn’t deserve to continue. And if it takes a hashtag, a slogan, a link and a few re-tweets to uncover and document that injustice, that’s about the least we can do.

Scratch that, it’s the very least we can do.