File this one under “Songs, Breakup.”  Keep your chin up Milwaukee.

Once upon I time, in these very pages, I posted an RBI Baseball recreation of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. This would be a very Internetty occasion to link back to that post, but I don’t feel like searching for it. Apropos of this, this way comes an electric rendering of the famous home run by Kirk Gibson, one of our most hilarious MVPs, in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.

What follows is a thing that delights. What follows is a Thing That Contains Multitudes:

The highlight, you may have noticed, is not the home run itself, but rather what occurs at 8:16, when Gibson, in the words of Vin Scully, makes his leg “quiver like a horse trying to get rid of a troublesome fly.”

The simile, it inspires …

Adam Dunn was at SoxFest over the weekend, talking about his disaster of a 2011 season:

“I thought I’d be able to go back home [in the offseason] and blow it off and forget about it.”

Source: ESPN

Now, he admits he couldn’t quite forget about it, and he’s been hitting in an indoor cage, and ESPN reports “he may have dropped a few pounds, but nothing too significant.”

Is this a little less anguish than someone who hit .159 should be experiencing? He went 6-for-94 against lefties. That’s only 6 more hits than I could have in 94 at-bats against lefties. If I was Adam Dunn, maybe I would have spent my offseason trying to figure out how my year went so terribly wrong– do some research, watch some video, see some doctors, talk to a therapist, I don’t know. And maybe he did all of that, but, “I thought I’d be able to go back home and blow it off and forget about it” ??? That struck me as a slightly bizarre comment. Crap, I just had a season that may well indicate the end of my time as a productive baseball player, with really no indication in the statistical line that this was a fluke. But, eh, I thought I’d just try and forget about it.

Inside Adam Dunn’s head sounds like a very peaceful place to be.

In which photos of the base-balling Reuschel brothers, Rick and Paul, are paired with befitting movie titles …

These are they — i.e. the eight people you meet at TwinsFest.

Just keeping everyone informed.

In which photos of the base-balling Reuschel brothers, Rick and Paul, are paired with befitting movie titles …

In the first of a series of posts on ye old minor league teams, I’d like to examine some of the players associated with The Houston Buffaloes of the Texas League. The Buffaloes were originally founded in 1888 — although they were called the the Babies, the Mud Cats, Red Stockings, and Magnolias, and the Wanderers before settling on the Buffaloes around 1903.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I was drinking in a bar in Chicago, mostly because drinking in a bar in Chicago is what sustains me and allows me to suffer existence. So I was drinking a selection of German lagers when I saw this hanging above the bar:

I am aware that the photo is sideways. I have the skills and even the will to right things in this regard, but the awry-ness of it suggests a certain absurdity and even a soft defiance of a kind. So it shall stand.

Pictured above, I am told, is “the owner’s brother.”

The owner’s brother is not a man who uses “high tea” as a verb. He is not a man at all; lo, he is a damn man. There are damn men who smoke while fishing. The owner’s brother is not such a damn man. There are damn men who fish while smoking. The owner’s brother is indeed such a damn man.

He probably favored that shirt because it lets the guns breathe a bit on a summer day. He’s probably not sure that the Cubs really are America’s team. He’s entirely sure that he’s about to take a piss off the boat slip.

Owner’s brother, let’s you and I make it through another day.

(Gratitude most righteous to Noel for his beery companionship and flash photography)

If I learned anything from Moneyball, it’s that they do everything differently out in Oakland.

And, yes, this was my favorite part of the movie, and the reason why Jonah Hill is nominated for an Oscar. What a fist-pump. What a performance.

A fist-pump of my own to my man James. Yes, he’s the same brilliant soul that brought us the bunny-hopping Blue Jays. Keep up the great work, mate.

Although much of the presentation at the Bud Selig Distinguished Lecture Series on Tuesday was about the importance of baseball in Japanese-American culture, those of us who attended also got ourselves an excellent story about how certain white players did not particularly enjoy hearing Spanish on the field.

In a Giants-Reds game, Orlando Cepeda was on second with Matty Alou batting. Cepeda was shouting instructions of some sort to Alou at the plate in Spanish. Reds’ pitcher Joseph Jay wasn’t happy about it, leading to the following exchange:

JAY: Hey, don’t you speak any English?
CEPEDA: I think you’re a cocksucker.

Question answered.