This post comes complete with poll. Because it’s America, you know.

Tiger play-by-play man Mario Impemba is most well known for his role as a Fratelli in The Goonies.

In a move that I believe underscores my commitment to the fledgling broadcast-review project here at NotGraphs, I’ve not only consumed three or four Tiger games ahead of the present review, but have actually traveled to the pleasant peninsula that is Michigan with a view towards truly understanding what it is to watch Tiger baseball*.

*That my wife’s family happens to live on same peninsula, and that we had been planning to visit them this past weekend, ought to be regarded as mere coincidence.

As I say, I watched parts of about three or four broadcasts on FS Detroit for the purposes of this review — including the May 24th game, at home versus Tampa Bay, with particularly close attention.

The FS Detroit broadcast team is composed of play-by-play man Mario Impemba and color commentator Rod Allen. Regarding the studio hosts, there are either one or 100 of them. But they’re all giant, large men with strange haircuts, is what I can say about them.

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In case the use of pronouns in the headline and the naughty letter to Burt Reynolds pictured above don’t tip you off, this is a post about Brian Fuentes. Mr. Fuentes is not a loser, but he’s lost things. To wit, he’s lost enough games this season to overwhelm something — maybe an over-sized bulk box constructed of triple-wall corrugated fiberboard or perhaps a a silo towering over the American prairies like a tensed phallus — designed expressly — and, it should go without saying, with expert craftsmanship and tantalizingly in excess of industry standards and best practices — to hold a great deal of losses.

Indeed: Brian Fuentes, despite being a reliever tasked with doing something besides recording decisions of any kind, is on pace to go 3-23 this season. Like others who make love to these pages, I’m aware that pitcher wins and losses are far from illuminating. Still, one can’t help but be impressed that a reliever has managed to be yoked with defeat seven times before June.

Getting to 20 losses will, of course, require another, greater conga line of foul-smelling performances on the part of Fuentes. That’s not difficult in a vacuum. The problem is that merely one or three more foul-smelling performances on the part of Fuentes will likely result in his being banished to the low-leverage terra incognita of the bullpen. And thus, the Republic’s dream of a 20-loss reliever will perish.

Not to place the dual burdens of Job and Frodo upon Mr. Fuentes and Bob Geren, who stands in the dugout and projects authority, but they simply must contrive a way to make this happen. This battered generation needs it. These beleaguered patriots need it …

So you say you stormed Omaha Beach, old man waiting for the bus? Adorable. I saw a reliever lose 20 games in a season.

You’re damn right I’ll take it from here.

This is slightly late, naturally, with the first round of MLB’s interleague play having concluded this past weekend. My Milwaukee Brewers were not involved, but we were still treated to some excellent rivalries that elude us during boring old intraleague play, including but not limited to: Seattle vs. San Diego! Minnesota vs. Arizona! and Detroit vs. Pittsburgh!

Ah, the memories. But I digress. One thing that caught my eye on MLB.com as interleague play raged onward was this largely hidden logo used for interleague play:

Via SportsLogos.net, click to embiggen.

The imagery is clear: two eagles, one representing each league, fighting over a baseball, much as the teams and leagues fight for superiority on the field. Personally, I think it’s a solid logo, although I think it would be improved by using more lifelike eagles as opposed to the semi-cartoony look employed here.

What do you guys think. Is it a good logo? Should it be featured more?

This chat will begin at 3pm ET; however, questions can be submitted any time beginning this moment.

For some idea of what might happen in a NotGraphs Chat, do considering briefly looking over this post from yesterday.

The third-ever NotGraphs Chat will take place tomorrow (Thursday) at 3pm ET. Here are some assorted thoughts ahead of same.

Allow us to re-introduce ourselves.

The attentive reader will probably know that we at NotGraphs have, in the course of the last month, hosted two chats (this first one and this second one).

Insofar as said chats have been mostly pleasant and have begotten other posts (like this one and this one), I’m prepared to describe the chat experiment as a success thus far.

Yet, it’s also clear that there’ve been some questions — both among the readership and inside my own brain — about what a NotGraphs Chat actually is and how it differs from other chats at FanGraphs.

For while, in the typical FanGraphs Chat, it’s generally the case that readers submit questions about specific players or teams — with the author answering them in turn — that’s obviously not a useful model for the authors of NotGraphs, for whom performance analysis is res non grata (which, I understand that maybe that’s not a real phrase).

To that end, I submit this post, wherein readers might suggest how these sorts of chats ought to go.

For my part, I assume some discussion of books and movies and other cultural artifacts is a possibility. Or the aesthetics of the sport, generally — including the quality of broadcasts, the best camera angles, or the very best in the mustache-related arts. Mostly, I suppose, I view it as an opportunity for people who like baseball and one other thing — whatever that thing is — to meet each other and have fun.

But, like I say, I’m curious if the bespectacled readership has any input on this matter, as well.

This image is presented to the world courtesy British gentleman and graphic wunderkind Craig Robinson, whose every post at Flip Flop Fly Ballin’ we would steal if it weren’t for our commitment to Utmost Decency.

Behold, fathom and regard …

No, contrary to appearances, that’s not the bassist for Grand Funk backstage in a Cards jersey. That’s Randy Poffo, vastly better known by his nom de guerre, Randy “Macho Man” Savage. As you can plainly see, even as a fresh-faced youth the Macho Man was fond of buccaneering sojourns at the gun show, albeit a gun show less enhanced than in later, more famous years.

The image comes to us via this thoroughly adequate SI piece on the Macho Man’s minor-league baseball career. Said baseball career was rather forgettable — inasmuch as quality time with Tito Landrum can ever be “forgettable” — but the recently departed Poffo’s legend within the squared circle is secure and will remain so until the mountains crumble into the sea.

And speaking of the mountains crumbling into the sea, any ideas as to what spared us from the tentatively scheduled rapture last Saturday? Yeah, that’s right, a certain former minor-league catcher spared us from the tentatively scheduled rapture last Saturday …

Oooh. Yeah.

It’s hard to imagine Hollis Mason, the first Nite Owl in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Hugo Award winning graphic novel Watchmen, being much of a fan of sabermetrics. He quit the hooded justice industry in order to become a mechanic, and he always did have a soft spot for the traditional values of Montana, where his grandfather learned the values he instilled into the young Mason.

Although the second Nite Owl, Daniel Dreiberg, exhibits a fair amount of similarities to his predecessor, he is less of a fighter and more of a thinker. Nite Owl II relies more on technology and gadgets than on toughness and physical prowess compared to the rest of his masked colleagues. His love for ornithology (the study of birds) is obvious given his bird-themed alter ego — not only is his costume designed to look like an owl, but so is Archimedes, his ship, named for Merlin’s pet owl in The Sword and the Stone.

To that end, Dreiberg contributed a piece called “Blood From The Shoulder of Pallas” to the Journal of the American Ornithological Society. In it, he discusses how scrutinizing over the details of birds can make us miss the beauty of it all.

Is it possible, I wonder, to study a bird so closely, to observe and catalogue its peculiarities in such minute detail, that it becomes invisible? Is it possible that while fastidiously calibrating the span of its wings or the length of its tarsus, we somehow lose sight of its poetry? That in our pedestrian descriptions of a marbled or vermiculated plumage we forfeit a glimpse of living canvases, cascades of carefully toned browns and golds that would shame Kandinsky, misty explosions of color to rival Monet? I believe that we do. I believe that in approaching our subject with the sensibilities of statisticians and dissectionists, we distance ourselves increasingly from the marvelous and spell-binding planet of imagination whose gravity drew us to our studies in the first place.

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As the learned reader will already know, there exists in life two kinds of mystery: a mystery, and then a Mystery. The main difference between them, as anyone can see, is that the latter one has a capital-M.

It’s hard to say exactly upon which kind — a mystery or a Mystery — Phillies beat writer Ryan Lawrence stumbled yesterday, but that he did stumble upon one is as obvious as the nose above Steve Lake’s mustache.

For it was yesterday that Lawrence submitted the tweet you see skillfully embedded (and embiggen-able by clicking) at the top of this post. Nor, as the photographic evidence directly below these words indicates, was Lawrence lying even one bit.

Regard, from Bronson Arroyo’s Baseball Reference page:

In fact, Lawrence is entirely accurate: the words “Saturn Nuts” are written here, plain as day. The real question, however, is why those words appear there.

For that kind of information, I turned to the wild frontier of the internet. It was there that I learned, via the Sons of Sam Horn (SOSH) Wiki, that the sobriquet was assigned to Arroyo in a SOSH game thread by then-teammate Curt Schilling during the 2004 ALDS. Even more research brought me to the primary source.

Regard, Schilling’s own words, under the pseudonym of gehrig38 (a common handle for the former pitcher):

The reader can click on that image to embiggen both (a) the image itself and (b) the joie de vivre on all of Earth.

While not as loin-stirring as, say, woodsy and mead- and pipeweed-fueled coitus with an elf, hugging a dragon would be quite nice, I think we can all agree. And if you were one of 5,615 fortunate souls recently meandering through a particular semi-major American city, you know this firsthand. And you helped Charlotte Knights mascot Homer the Dragon (pictured above, first from left) make Maximum History.

Indeed, Homer has approached, reached and overtaken the record for “Most Hugs by a Mascot Given in a 24-Hour Span,” which is a threshold as timeless and enduring as the trilobite fossils entombed deep within the bottommost sediment of the Yangtze. So bless his heart.

Sure, our dear, departed Gary Gygax might prefer the arms of dragons to be more murderous than loving, but Homer deserves your admiration for cutting a swath of unconditional affection through the boulevards of Charlotte. Know hope, citizens.