Archive for April, 2011

Want: Baseball Glove Chair

It’s not just any baseball glove chair, either. “Joe,” according to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art store, is:

… a full-scale leather chair inspired by the baseball glove of New York Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio.

You know, I’m not sure I ever really thought about it until this very moment, but Joe DiMaggio is a fantastic name. Joe DiMaggio. Perhaps the perfect baseball name. And now, while I’m thinking about DiMaggio, I can’t help but picture Jerry Seinfeld sitting at the coffee shop, saying, slowly, in awe, “The Yankee Clipper.” Helluva nickname, too. DiMaggio had it all.

But, the chair. The beautiful chair. More from the MCA Store:

Leather and foam, with the designers’ signatures etched into the heel of the baseball glove. 5.5″ tall x 10.5″ wide x 6″ deep. Made in Poland and packaged in a wooden Vitra Design Museum box.

For some reason, I’m intrigued by the fact that it’s made in Poland. I’m also a touch intrigued by the “Vitra Design Museum box” it comes in.

At $415, which is about $300 Canadian these days, thanks to the high-flying loonie (or is it the beleaguered greenback?), I find myself seriously consider purchasing “Joe.” Because baseball may never meet contemporary Italian design again.

Daps, as the kids say, to MightyFlynn, whose Tumblr blog brings wonderful things like “Joe” into my life.


Tim Lincecum By Phantom Flex

So this is Tim Lincecum as captured by something called the “Phantom Flex,” which I imagine is like a Polaroid with attitude:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2PBLcp9tWM&feature=player_embedded

That was quite pleasing to the rods and cones. Also, I know that biology textbooks — even the ones in Texas — say that we all have the same number of muscles, but, no, there’s no way I have as many muscles as Tim Lincecum. Also, Tim Lincecum’s disembodied hips could beat me in a footrace. Also, his cap, his soothing narration, his physical toil — at once grotesque yet very beautiful to me — and the industrial efficiency of the soundtrack all suggest that Red Bull can make me a better man.

(A Red Bull toast: BBTF)


Theoretical Pittsburgh Pirates Yellow Jerseys

As I detailed in this post on the advent of new yellow (“gold”) uniforms for the Oakland Athletics, I love the idea of yellow as a primary color for jerseys. Along with Oakland, the only other candidate for a yellow jersey would be the Pittsburgh Pirates. After all, they did it in the 1970s.

These are pretty good, I guess. But I think we can do better.

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Sam Fuld Makes Everything Better

If you’re the Rays marketing department — and, let’s be honest, there is a certain resemblance — then what are you to do about the approaching (and awkward and ill-timed) hoofbeats of Manny Ramirez Bobblehead Night? Like anyone else with nowhere left to turn, you send up the Fuld Signal:

That, brothers and sisters in arms, is a Super Sam Fuld Cape, and it will be presented to the first 10,000 fans age 14 and under who negotiate the turnstiles on May 29 to cheer on the Sons of Greg Vaughn.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with a Manny Ramirez Bobblehead, banal and outmoded though it may be. But it’s certainly no Super Sam Fuld Cape. I mean, a cape! Heroes wear capes! And so do oversexed barons! Capes!

And so the Legend of Sam Fuld grows and walks among us. My hope is that all of this soon leads the Franklin Mint to give us two things the people want and need: The Sam Fuld Numbered Commemorative Plate and The Sam Fuld Boer War Chess Set.

We love you, Sam Fuld. We love you so much.


Josh Hamilton’s Secret Injury History

It’s likely that readers of FanGraphs willn’t be surprised to learn that Ranger outfielder and 2010 AL MVP Josh Hamilton will be out injured for the next six-to-eight weeks. As SB Nation’s Jon Bois notes today, Hamilton has suffered frequent injuries since his 2007 debut.

However, as further and super-sleuthful research has revealed, Hamilton’s injury list is actually much lengthier than Bois — or anyone else, for that matter — knows.

Exclusive here, at NotGraphs, we’ve reproduced Hamilton’s complete injury history since 2007 — featuring some ailments you willn’t have seen reported on ESPN.

Regard:

5-19-07, 15-day DL, gasteroenteritis
7-8-07, 15-day DL, sprained wrist
8-23-07, day-to-day, cauliflower earring
9-17-07, day-to-day, hamstring soreness (listed again as “strain” on 9-13-07)
4-5-08, day-to-day, Mexican tooth
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For the Fantasy Baseball-Ist’s Consideration

I don’t play fantasy baseball in the traditional sense (I’m a Diamond Mind loyalist, and for that righteous cause I would lay down the lives of a number of acquaintances), but if I did …

I would spend a romantic evening or three at FantasyTeamNames.net, which is a series of related pages that have been fired through the Internet. There you can submit your fantasy team name to the teeming masses, which I refer to as “teeming” because they so often teem, and find out what they think of your squad’s name and, by extension, the value of your existence.

There’s also an Internet computer link that will reveal to you the highest-rated fantasy team names of all-time. Among the ones that give me chuckle and make me forget for a fugitive moment or two that we are all bound headlong for the abyss are: “Honey Nut Ichiros,” and, of course, “Black Sabathia.”

But then I remembered that all of us are going to die one day.


Joe West Clears Kevin Youkilis For Takeoff

(Hat tip to my boy Nick for the Youk pic)


Mustache Watch: Todd Helton’s Goatee

Allow me to preface this piece of investigative reporting with the following video, anonymously submitted to the Mustache Watch hotline. The accompanying message simply said: “Keep digging.”

Naturally, I was intrigued, so I complied and began looking into it, trying to find what the video meant and where it came from. What started out as a curiosity, though quickly turned into a high-stakes struggle between life and death.

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Thing That’s Happening: #LegendofSamFuld

If there’s one thing a man wants, it’s to be immortalized in the very permanent medium that is Twitter.

That thing is what’s happening right now to Tampa Bay Ray, New Hampshire native, and Member of the Tribe Sam Fuld.

After the jump, you can find some prime examples of Sam Fuld-related panegyric. Feel free to embrace all the magic by clicking here.

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Toward a Better Understanding

To hear the old guard tell it, our devotion to the numbers is slavish, stultifying, boundless and without bound, injurious to the Republic. You know whom I’m talking about. I’m talking about stout-hearts like blogger Murray Chass, who enjoys using his blog to blog about how bloggers are large and unrelenting meanies and are also unlike him. And there’s Dan Shaughnessy, the valet to human misery who hates each thing in the world more than anyone else hates any one thing in the world. I speak of them and their ilk.

But I come not to condemn. No, it is with some regret that I must say this: I am here to validate their suspicions and antipathies. Yes, I am here to confirm that what follows, as they have long suspected, is precisely what plays out in the mind of a devoted stathead when he or she takes in a game of base and ball:

It is in the interest of peace — a Glasnost of the press box, if you will — that I disclose this dark secret. It is our affliction, and we must own it.

And, I should add, the scene you see above, contrary to appearances, does not take place on a proscenium stage …

No, in the gnarled penumbras of our minds, all things come together in primordial affray to form one large mother’s basement — a mother’s basement buttressed by argument and brag, forged and soldered by our magma-hot Cheetos breath.

It is there that this lederhosen’d numbers dance, which we think is baseball, unfurls before us.

Are we to be pitied? Forgiven? Banished?