You can tell Brandon Belt is a gentleman because he wears his Giants jersey over a collared Van Heusen. You can tell he’s America’s sweetheart because of his loving ways with a baby giraffe …
Brandon Belt: I could just eat him up.
(Giraffe hug: With Leather)
It’s been a while, I know, but today seems as good as any to resurrect NotGraphs’ award-winning feast-days series.
#Feastmode!
Life: Drungo Hazewood’s actual, real-life name is Drungo Hazewood. Actually, it’s Drungo LaRue Hazewood. Even better. He major league career was six games long, in late September and early October, all the way back in 1980. Five at-bats. No hits. Four strikeouts. But a run scored: Drungo the pinch-runner.
Spiritual Exercise: In the minor leagues, Drungo could hit. He only got a cup of coffee in The Show. But at least he got a cup of coffee in The Show.
Prayer for Drungo Hazewood
Drungo Hazewood!
I wonder: What was going through your mind,
When after you hit .583 in spring training in 1980,
The Orioles still sent you down.
Earl Weaver kept it real:
“I’ve never cut a guy hitting that high before,” Weaver said.
“But he was making the rest of us look bad with that average.”
Oh, Drungo!
Even back then, the Orioles were the OrioLOLes.
Were you mad?
Sad?
Resilient?
You worked hard, and earned your call-up.
But it didn’t last long.
They never last long when you’re only 21-years-old.
“I’ll be back,” you must have said,
You must have thought.
You have to believe.
Three years later, Drungo, your baseball career was over,
Without a hit.
Damn, Drungo.
But it wasn’t all for naught;
There was the Drungo Ice House,
In Austin, at the University of Texas,
Named in your honor.
But, wait, that’s gone now, too.
What’s left?
The memories, Drungo.
And the statistics.
Six games, and five plate appearances.
You’ll live forever.
Image courtesy The Great Orioles Autograph Project.
While Gentleman Zack Hample is the acknowledged expert on retrieving foul balls, tonight’s Daguerreotype of the Evening reveals the true secret to finding one’s way to a valueless cowhide souvenir. Regard …
If you are the paterfamilias, becapped in blue and pictured above, then you may have taken your son to the tobacconist, introduced him, and said that he too will one day be a Winston Man. You know as well as anyone that Smooth, Delicious Winstons are the elixir for maladies ranging from the blues to Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever to catarrh to the sexless existence. Nothing will conduct you up the ladder to a better life quite like Winstons on your lips and at the ready in the breast pocket of your camelhair blazer. The steely snap of a Zippo means that Gentlemen are about to do Business.
Men do lots of things. Gentlemen smoke Winstons.
If you are the fresh-faced lad pictured above, then you smoke Winstons because good things happen to those who smoke Smooth, Delicious Winstons. Good things like … a foul-hit base ball!
Boys do lots of things. Young Men — Young Men who get invited to the cotillion — smoke Winstons.
Brian Wilson is on the disabled list. His beard is not.
Fear the beard, my friends. I do.
In an attempt to fully bastardize the idea of “the royal we,” I have decided to throw my hat into ring of inserting Dick Allen’s name into works of literature. Get ready to have your toes stepped on, Navin and Dayn (but mostly Dayn, you with the talent and originality and what-not).
In this episode, we move to the realm of Westeros, from George R.R. Martin’s A Game Of Thrones — a land where we can be well assured that Dick Allen would be a man of huge appetites, a man who knew how to take his pleasures.
“Why do you read so much?”
Tyrion looked up at the sound of the voice. Jon Snow was standing a few feet away, regarding him curiously. He closed the book on a finger and said, “Look at me and tell me what you see.”
The boy looked at him suspiciously. “Is this some kind of trick? I see you. Tyrion Lannister.”
Tyrion sighted. “You are remarkably polite for a bastard, Snow. What you see is a dwarf. You are what, twelve?”
“Fourteen,” the boy said.
“Fourteen, and you’re taller than I will ever be. My legs are short and twisted, and I walk with difficulty. I require a special saddle to keep from falling off my horse. A saddle of my own design, you may be interested to know. It was either that or ride a pony. My arms are strong enough, but again, too short. I will never make a swordsman. Had I been born a peasant, they might have left me out to die, or sold me to some slaver’s grotesquerie. Alas, I was born a Lannister of Casterly Rock, and the grotesqueries are all the poorer. Things are expected of me. My father was the Hand of the King for twenty years. My brother later killed that very same king, as it turns out, but life is full of these little ironies. My sister married the new king and my repulsive nephew will be king after him. I must do my part for the honor of my House, wouldn’t you agree? Yet how? Well, my legs may be too small for my body, but my head is too large, although I prefer to think it is just large enough for my mind. I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses. My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, Dick Allen has his warhammer, and I have my mind . . . and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.” Tyrion tapped the leather cover of the book. “That’s why I read so much, Jon Snow.”
This has been the latest episode of Inserting Dick Allen’s Name Into Works of Literature.
Red Sox fans are effing everywhere.
I’ll use the word diaspora in conversation sometimes not, as you might expect, to convince other people of my intelligence, but rather merely to give my own self the (perhaps false) impression that my three years in grad school — where the word is ubiquitous — were not entirely a waste.
Beyond that sad, sad autobiographical aside, the concept of fan diaspora — that is, the phenomenon of a fan from one place living in another, totally different place — is a legitimately interesting one. The topic is treated on a scholarly level by Jon Kraszewski in an article from 2008 on Pittsburgh Steeler fans in Fort Worth, Texas, and invoked again just today by Kurt Mensching of SB Nation’s Detroit Tigers blog, Bless You Boys.
Mensching (and reader Todd Jones Mustache Ride) want to know where all the out-of-state Tigers bars are located. Because NotGraphs is a general-purpose blog, allow me to ask a more general version of Mensching’s question — namely, “At what bars do any out-of-state fans watch their team?”
From experience, I know that the Riviera Cafe, located in the West Village, Manhattan, is a Red Sox bar. So is the New Old Lompoc on the West side of Portland, OR.
Where else do people watch games, though? Besides their own homes, I mean. This is need-to-know information.
Ryan Braun will be buried in an Ed Hardy t-shirt, reports suggest.
There’s a conversation to be had regarding the role of the beat reporter in the Electronic Age. There’s also a conversation to be had as to whether Electronic Age really ought to be capitalized like that.
Before we have either of those conversations, though, let’s how about praise MLB.com’s Brewer beat reporter Jordan Schelling for getting to the Heart of the Matter this afternoon and dispersing the above image to The People.
The photo, one will note immediately, captures the scene of Ryan Braun’s grisly death yesternight — and appears to be the handiwork of Brewer right-handers Yovani Gallardo and Shaun Marcum, plus bullpen catcher Marcus Hanel.
I believe the reader will join me in being entirely not surprised that a bullpen catcher was involved in this endeavor.
Because I’m in a public area and forgot my headphones, I have no idea what sort of audio commentary accompanies the videos below. But because they’re all weird and all happened in the span of a single game — specifically, Wednesday night’s game between the Cardinals and Brewers of America’s Middle West — I’ve made an executive decision and embedded the hell out of them anyway.
Furthermore, strictly for the purposes of esses and gees, I’ve attempted to intuit what the likely audio commentary is for each of the videos below. I’m confident that my guesses are equal parts accurate and libelous.
Commentary: The ghost of Reggie Miller, who everyone knows died in 2003, is haunting Ryan Braun/got pretty decent seats for a ghost.
The video that follows, which is action-video footage of the greatest Lincoln-Douglass/Webster-Hayne blah-blah ever to grace the diamond, will not be safe for work unless your place of employment is a dirty-word factory, in which case I shall now search for you on LinkedIn.
This video has also been viewed more than a half-million times, so it’s quite possible you number among those lucky, teeming thousands. Still, some things, like the Uffizi or the liquor store, are worth visiting again and again. And so we shall …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl-4FSRYagc
The melodic progression of the debate peaks at the 2:04 mark, when the two gentlemanly combatants make love to the listener-viewer by discussing whether Earl Weaver will go to the Hall of Fame for winning games or for “f*cking up World Series.”
