By now you’ve heard that legendary Marlins’ closer Leo Nunez (28) is actually Juan Carlos Oviedo (29). Eric Augenbraun has nicely filled in the details. It is a sad situation, and one hopes that Oviedo (who probably just didn’t want people back home in the Dominican to know he was playing for the Pirates and Royals) manages to resolve things and gets back to playing in the majors again soon.
However, the truth has to come out, and our crack Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has unearthed many other major leaguers players and even executives are working under assumed names. Read on for The Truth, and don’t say you weren’t warned. Your world may never be the same.
In the fourth inning of Sunday’s Seattle-Texas game, young Italian gentleman Alex Liddi hit the third home run of his young career off of Ranger lefty Derek Holland. Among the diverse reactions to Liddi’s homer, ROOT Sports’ cameras found this gentleman’s — whose behavior might be best described as “angry” and “shirtless.”
“But Carson,” perhaps you’re saying, “shirtless isn’t a sort of behavior.” To which I reply, “Sure, maybe I know that, but try explaining it to star of stage and screen Carroll O’Connor”:
Amen to the very shirtless and angry Michael Barr for drawing the author’s attention to the above.
Names have been placed into nomination, and fierce, charged, brawny, rippled, turgid, veiny, sweat-kissed back-channel negotiations have trimmed the list down to 10. Here, then, are your fortunate nominees for the nickname of “Victorian Sex Rebel.” Interested in the spittle-flecked arguments for or against the hopefuls in question? Don your parliamentarian capris and wade into the nomination thread. Then and as always, vote like no one’s watching …
The Diebold Robot and his Lidless Eye thank you for contributing to the appearance of honest democracy.
Last week, Carson bestowed upon us the brilliance of “Maybe it’s just society,” drawn from the mind of Vernon Wells and turned into pixels on this very space. For the uninitiated, observe, very much indirectly from the horse’s mouth (i.e. Vernon Wells):
Why would you waive your no-trade clause [to accept a trade to the Angels] and then opt out one year later? I never really thought about using it. You do a contract and you ask for certain things. That happened to be one I asked for and got. To be honest with you, I think about it as often as I think about the money.
Maybe it’s just society, but people put too much on struggling. All of a sudden, everything is negative — you’re a bad guy; you’re unhappy. It’s a struggle, yeah. But that’s all it is. I’ve struggled before. Baseball is such a different game. You can be an All-Star one year, struggle the next year and become an All-Star again. It is what it is. This is a great place to live, a great place to play. I’ve got a lot of good years left and I look forward to having them there.
Carson has created the meme, but what good is a meme if it is not sustained? So it is, without further ado, I present Some More Things That May Be Due To Society.
I’m not writing, here, about the stat that looks the best on your fantasy team’s roster. I’m writing about the most aesthetically-pleasing number that has ever appeared on the back of a baseball card. And here it is.
See it? I am of course referring to the bold, italicized 2.76 ERA that Jimmy Key led the American League with in 1987. It’s fast. It’s confident, but not arrogant, as if to imply “I know didn’t have to face George Bell and Jesse Barfield this season.” It even sounds good when spoken out loud: “two-seventy-six.”
Got something better? I don’t think a better looking number can be unearthed, but if you think you have one, leave it in the comments.
Prior to Saturday’s game between the Atlanta Braves and Washington Nationals at Nationals Park, our Investigative Reporting Investigation Team, in the U.S. capital to collect another one of our many awards, caught up with the always personable Thomas Jefferson. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the great United States, Jefferson is now well retired, save for a few part-time hours with the Nationals.
“I like to think of it as consulting work,” said the Man of the People.
Jefferson chatted with NotGraphs about the Nationals’ season, their second-best since moving south from Montreal, the return of Stephen Strasburg, and — most colorfully about — Jayson Werth’s disappointing campaign.
“Werth? I hate to go all David Ortiz on you, and it’s not very Presidential-like of me, but, well, f*ck. Werth’s awful,” Jefferson said. “I knew this was how this story was going to end. The contract was a mistake. Even Keith Lawagrees. And he’s arguably the most brilliant baseball mind at our collective disposal.”
Unfortunately for Jefferson, his comments were leaked to Werth, who, in the moments before the game began, confronted the President in the Nationals locker room. Werth was very animated, a season’s worth of frustration boiling over, and had to be restrained, after yelling: “I’m sick of [Jefferson]! Lincoln and Washington, too! I’ll take them all on! Except Teddy. Teddy’s my boy.”
Cooler heads prevailed. Until Saturday afternoon’s President’s Race, when Jayson Werth, with the help of some of his teammates, made through on his promise. Witness:
No word yet on the severity of the injuries suffered by Presidents Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington. Teddy Roosevelt has a mild concussion. He’s resting comfortably at home.
You’re familiar with the drill: In which the Royal We insert Dick Allen’s name into various works representative of the Western Canon, thus adding to those various works the patina of blessedness.
In today’s episode, Stanley Cup champion and Hockey Hall of Fame goaltender Ken Dryden, in his seminal work on hockey, The Game, rightfully called “The greatest hockey book ever written,” waxes poetic about Dick Allen, the best hockey player you never knew about.
It’s not easy for a hockey player to dominate a game. A goalie, any goalie, can make a bad team win or a good team lose, he can dominate a result, but that is not the same thing. He cannot dominate a game, because, separate from the action of a game, he is not quite part of it.
In basketball, one man can dominate: usually a big man—Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Willis Reed, Bill Walton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—able to play most of the game’s forty-eight minutes, and, as with any goalie, it might be any big man. It comes with the position. But in hockey, seventeen players are rotated more or less equally five at a time, and rarely does anyone play much more than half a game. A forward or defenseman, a special forward or defenseman, might with unusual frequency find the right moment in a game and make a play that will swing a result. But for too long periods of time, the game goes on without him, and his impact can rarely be sustained. In the 1970s, only two players could dominate a game. One was Dick Allen, the other Bobby Clarke. Clarke, a fierce, driven man, did it by the unrelenting mood he gave to a game, a mood so strong it penetrated his team and stayed on the ice even when he did not. Dick Allen did it another way.
While the tattoo is mostly commonplace in baseball, there seems to be (with the exception of journeyman reliever Justin Miller) a real dearth of knuckle tattoos — i.e. the classiest possible tattoo.
Perhaps, one thinks, the reason for so few knuckle tattoos is a lack of inspiration among their potential human canvases. It’s with said lack of inspiration in mind that the author submits here five proposals for specific and active major leaguers.
