By now, you guys have probably seen Getting Blanked blog:

Oh my. I do believe I am getting the vapors.

This is the best logo in baseball history. Yes, there’s the Brewers ball-in-glove logo. Everybody knows about it. It’s awesome. But there’s just something special about the color combination and the retro feel and the all around good vibes I feel when I look at this work of mastery and art and just fantastical niceness.

Please be real.

The team-name font is the same as the leaked Marlins logo. The MLB logo is placed in the exact same place. The Marlins logo has already been confirmed as real. I like our odds. Just please be real.

Here at NotGraphs, our fondness for base-and-ball-themed cakes is what all the kids are talking about. So tonight it is with enthusiasm that is at once half-bridled and half-unbridled that the writer presents your Daguerreotype of the Evening …

As you can plainly see, the above cake recreates some randy grabbing on the part of Mr. Rodriguez — a sequence of decisions and violations known among the moneyed and genteel as, “The Presumptuous Cad and His Discontents.”

(Unsolicited fondling: Sports Pickle)

Are you this man’s homeboy?

If there are two things you should take from the post you’re currently reading, the first of those things is that the author, Carson Cistulli, has listened to at least one hip-hop song in his life and won’t hesitate to leverage that experience into the title of a blog post about baseball.

The second thing you should know is how Brandon Phillips has an understanding of the free market and won’t hesitate to leverage that understanding into awesome quotes that an author like myself can steal for his own blog and get bigpageviewsuccess!!!

Despite the fact that Reds GM Walt Jocketty has made it clear he’ll be picking up Phillips’ $12MM option for 2012, Phillips was in a mind Wednesday to consider time future. Regarding life after his present contract, Phillips said the following within earshot of MLB.com’s Mark Sheldon:

No bueno. This is my last contract. There is no homeboy hookup. I just want to be paid what I am worth.

Just so we’re all understanding here, allow me to provide a glossary for the blockquoted text.

Homeboy Hookup = Hometown Discount

Paid What I Am Worth = Market Value

No Bueno = No Effing Bueno

There is a time for build-up, for laying the foundation for the dramatic arc. There is a time for rhapsodizing, for setting to thunderous poetry the miracles of this life. And there is a time stand in quiet, humble, human reverence as the marvels unfold. This is one of those times …

And now let us weep.

The Boston Red Sox have been in an intense, high-stress playoff race as their team has crumbled during September, allowing the Tampa Bay Rays to climb back into the Wild Card race. Although this is bad news for Boston, this is good news for everybody else. Not just because of schadenfreude (although largely because of schadenfreude), but also because this means we get to hear David Ortiz say The F Word (i.e., “fuck”), one of my personal favorite pasttimes and something Ortiz is actually quite experienced with. Observe:

August 2009, on not receiving an RBI on what he thought was a base hit: “Fucking scorekeeper keeps fucking shit up.”

April 2010, on what he thought of sportswriters making claims on small sample sizes, including bonus non-fuck swears: “You guys wait ’til shit happens, then you can talk shit. Two fucking games, and already you fuckers are going crazy. What’s up with that, man? Fuck. Fucking 160 games left. That’s a bitch (note: unsure which expletive actually goes here). One of you fuckers got to go ahead and hit for me.”

June 2011, on Joe Girardi’s disdain for bat flips: “Fuck that shit.”

Monday, on losing the first half of a doubleheader to the Baltimore Orioles: “Fuck this shit.”

Tuesday, on Curt Schilling: “Fuck off.”

August 2011, on leaving 16 men on base: “Fuck.”

A diverse usage of one of the English language’s greatest sentence enhancers from Big Papi. One can only hope the Red Sox remain mired in their struggles just to see where he’ll go next.

Were one to construct a sort of pantheon of modern religious thinkers, it would, of course, be difficult to neglect such personages as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, and — if you’re the sort of person who considers “Protestantism” a thing — Paul Tillich.

Another name you’d be loathe to forget is the one belonging to White Sox field manager and mouthy Latin gentleman Ozzie Guillen, who yesterday blew the entire world’s mind via his comments (rendered lovingly into tweet form by the Sun-Times‘ Chris De Luca) regarding a sort of cryptic hybrid polytheism as yet unconceived in extant scholarship.

Specifically, Guillen speaks of (a) a personal god belonging to White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf and (b) what Guillen calls the “real” god. Though Guillen clearly differentiates between the two, he fails — or, perhaps, coyly neglects — to note whether any other gods exist in this compelling and rich half-mythology.

It’s for his simultaneous brilliance and stubborn opacity that Guillen has frequently been referred to as “Derrida in a ballcap” and, other times, as “an effing a-hole.”

Via Deadly Don Hammack comes this find by Nats Enquirer. This find is also, quite understandably, your Daguerreotype of the Evening:

The grainy, sepia-toned image you see above, which was created using silver halide, heated mercury, cold-rolled cladding, and a dipping solution of sodium thiosulfate, is of the lotto ads at tonight’s Phillies-Nats tilt (and also what appear to be some lovely geraniums). The discerner will observe that the Pennsylvania Lotto would seem to be claiming that in excess of 1.2 billion clams and or pieces of cheddar are in play at the moment. But hold everything!

MASN’s F.P. Santangelo pointed out during Tuesday night’s Nats-Phillies broadcast on MASN that members of the Nationals bullpen had messed with the jackpot numbers on the PowerBall and MegaMillions boards out in the visitors bullpen at Citizens Bank Park. And suddenly, a couple of paltry $25 million and $75 million payouts become $521 M and $705 M, respectively.

I’m pretty sure Sarbanes-Oxley expressly forbids the manipulation of powerball boards by NL East relievers — even decidedly merry relievers such as those boasted by the Nationals — but sometimes the law must be broken in the service of comedy jokes.

This I roar: #estimatedannuity

I was all prepared to launch into a tenuously humorous explanation of the genesis of Peter Gammons’s latest mistweet. I was going to speculate that this tweet was actually intended to be received by Theo Epstein. Then, I was going to fabricate the text conversation between Epstein and Gammo. It would have looked something like this:

Theo (617-XXX-XXXX): Hey Pete

Peter (857-XXX-XXXX): Theo. What’s up buddy?

Theo (617-XXX-XXXX): Nothin much. I just need ur help wit sumthing.

Peter (857-XXX-XXXX): No problem.

Theo (617-XXX-XXXX): So Marie is sayin she wants 2 go on a cruise after the season is ovr. I was wonderin which company u think is the best cuz I kno u n Gloria have been on a few.

Peter (857-XXX-XXXX): Do you want to know what I really think?

Theo (617-XXX-XXXX): Hell yea!!!

Peter (857-XXX-XXXX): Come November there will be lots of rich people willing to take you on their yachts

But then it dawned on me that Gammons’s tweet looked very familiar. I had definitely seen it somewhere before. But where?

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On the one hand, the equation that is the title of this post doesn’t really make sense. On the other hand, the author — owing to a lack of training in what many have taken to calling “physics” — doesn’t know that.

What the author does know is what side his bread is buttered on. And he also knows that, in addition to eating buttered bread, he likes to watch PYT Mike Stanton jack the hell out of some dongers — which, that’s precisely what Stanton did in the first and third innings, respectively, of Monday night’s contest between the Braves and Marlins.

The first homer, embedded above, is the sort that would be, in the parlance of a fictional Cleveland Indian fan, “too high” — if it weren’t also “too far,” that is. The second homer (below), while lacking the sheer loft of Stanton’s first, in fact traveled over 50 feet further than its predecessor.

You can watch both homers here, if you have time in your busy schedule. If you have even more time after that, you might consider writing the Great American Novel, with Mike Stanton as the protagonist.

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This past weekend, I had the great honor of sitting down with two-time Academy Award nominated actor and star of the upcoming film “Moneyball,” Brad Pitt. In the film, Pitt plays Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, who used unconventional methods for evaluating baseball talent to construct a playoff team on a very limited budget. Incidentally, at approximately $47 million, the cost of making “Moneyball” was, in fact, higher than the payroll of the 2002 Athletics. So that’s something.

We talked about everything from his career, to sabermetrics, to his family life. 

Eric Augenbraun: Thanks so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule, Mr. Pitt. Before we start, I just want to say I’ve seen all of your movies and I’m a big fan of your work. 2005 sticks out in my mind as the year of two great snubs: Johan Santana losing the AL Cy Young Award to Bartolo Colon and you losing the MTV Movie Award for your performance in “Troy.”

Brad Pitt: Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you. To be completely honest, I had forgotten I was nominated for anything for my role in that.

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