I have one tattoo. It’s the tattoo equivalent of of one of those Best Friends Forever necklaces that thirteen year old girls buy at Claire’s at the mall: my best friend Mandy and I got them together and they both say “heart.” It’s on my wrist (get it? … I wear my heart on my sleeve) and I love it. It’s so cheesy and it makes me smile every time I look down at it and remember the insane personal pitcher drinking, jukebox memorizing, dive bar crying, talking shit about boys bender we were on together around the time we got them.

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It comes as no surprise that yesterday’s junket into the damnably handsome mind of Young Kevin Youkilis lit the Internet on fire and then made love to the flames. Were the writer’s interpretations chillingly accurate or nothing more than odious revisionism? On this matter, the Republic is as sharply divided as a fraction with rocky chasm running through it and within that chasm a painstakingly sustained demilitarized zone and within that demilitarized zone a river and a fence with razor wire and giant, violent border chickens — talons brandished, natch.

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The original fearsome facial hair.

Yup, Sergio Romo will get a bobblehead this year.

The facebook page that announced the event got 200-plus comments. The following sampling represents the entirety of those comments. Even Romo himself agreed.

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I’ll not bore you with the sequence of banalities that led me to do a Google Image search for “Don Russ,” but please know that I have done precisely this. In its origins it is, of course, an homage of sorts to the Donruss family of cardboard sports products. Google and its lidless eye sensed this straightaway:

No, I did not. I want Don. And then I want Russ. Herein fail not!

Thank you.

What follows are the two most compelling images that turned up, with the stipulation that the eligible photos must contain a guy named Don and a guy named Russ. First, we have this:

The caption tells me that the three men pictured above are, from left to right, Don, Russ and Higgy. It is 1957. Higgy appears to be a young Danny Thomas. Higgy. 1957.

Next:

Above you see Mark, Don and Russ. Russ is in favor of peace, while Don just wants a cold one and some barbecue chips. Ol’ Don. I like that guy.

This is the offseason, and I have been searching on the Internet for Don and Russ.

Return to Easter Mountain

Above is Luke Easter looking all bemused, badass, and Tunde Adebimpe at the same time. In these specs, it’d be difficult to tell whether he’d be prepping to weld scrap metal into an awesome toboggan for his niece, play a show in the Bowery with his genre-defying, brass-steeped side-project, or deliver a lecture on comparative literature — he seems equally capable of each.

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Here’s a very accurate pie chart of all the thoughts I had this morning — many of them, it turns out, concerning Pirates outfield prospect Robbie Grossman.

Dear Leaguemates,

As you all know, our fantasy baseball experience this past season was, well, less than ideal. After the death of two of our owners in separate trade-related incidents, I think it’s time we rethink some of our rules. Obviously adding a new provision prohibiting the killing of fellow league members in trade-related circumstances is a no-brainer, but I think we need to go even further than that. To that end, I’m proposing a series of reforms:

(1) The job of commissioner– as Joe’s devastating illness so vividly taught us– is too big a job for one person. I propose one commissioner for rules, one commissioner for transactions, one commissioner solely in charge of mediating e-mail based disputes, one commissioner responsible for mediating in-person disputes, one commissioner tasked with resolving disputes among the other commissioners, one commissioner overseer, one commissioner who just needs to hold onto the checks and not spend everyone’s money (and it won’t be you, Joe– no matter what your medical insurance premiums cost now), and one commissioner in charge of spelling. For the last time, one of them is Zimmerman, and one of them is Zimmermann. And if anyone screws it up again, you’re going to be the next one dead.

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Young Kevin Youkilis is the only varsity athlete to be bullied by an asthmatic National Merit Semi-Finalist.

Young Kevin Youkilis uses flash cards to remind him of his deepest regrets and of the specific ways in which he will one day show them all.

Young Kevin Youkilis will not be voted “Most Handsome” or “Most Likely to Succeed”; Young Kevin Youkilis, in an informal and unsanctioned straw poll, will be voted “Most Likely to Try Too Hard. So Hard It’s Almost Adorable.”

Young Kevin Youkilis, if he’s honest with himself, is probably too old to identify so strongly with the full complement of male Peanuts characters. But sometimes he does so much it hurts. “Linus, man, I know,” he says at night while reading his tattered copies.

When Young Kevin Youkilis needs to half-smile for photos, he thinks of that time he saw Meghan Connelly’s bra. And baseball.

Young Kevin Youkilis’s hair has been called “frustration’s pelt.”

Although Young Kevin Youkilis’s hair is the only thing holding the sweat in, he still wishes his stupid hair would just go away.

It shall.

On Young Kevin Youkilis’s Trapper Keeper, which is festooned with images of geometric shapes and planetoids in determined orbit, he has written, “My heart and will are too big and mighty for Cincinnati.”

They are.

(Thank you[k]: Ducks on the Pond and my man Navin)

Wow, I thought ads in U.S. sports were getting out of hand — you can hardly see Mr./Sr. Yoenis Cespedes after he whomps the ball.

Oh, and for all us non-Spanish speakers, just a moment after the advertisement disappears, we can hear a proper pronunciation for “Cespedes.”

In my mind (which is largely the only place I hear wOBA or WAR or BABIP pronounced), I have been saying ces-PED-ees. But it sounds more like the pronunciation might be CES-peddehz real fast-like, y’know, to make it look like you can actually with comfort speak a second tongue.

Well, congrats to Cespedes. How’s it feel to blast homers knowing each additional majesty-arch (a fancy new name for home runs) is like a crank on the cash register (except cash registers don’t crank anymore — plus team rarely pay from cash registers anymore; most use simple Funds Devices that transfer paychecks directly to the nearest Cadillac dealership)?

It feels good, I imagine.

Dear friends,

I’m sorry.  Today, I wanted to write an article about that sport we all love.  No, not professional jai alai.  That’s much purer at the amateur level, where gamblers have only managed to corrupt and fix half of the matches.  I’m speaking, of course, about baseball.  It was going to be a great NotGraphs post, full of obscure references to 18th century British architecture, 19th century German philosophy, great 20th century mustaches, and of course, Dick Allen.

Alas, my go-to (okay, lets face it, my one and only) source for research, Wikipedia, was blanked out all day yesterday when I wanted to be preparing for this post.  It was a total bummer.  There was something about Congress taking away my ability to ever use the Internet again….Meh, it was probably nothing.

Anyway, since I have no way of confirming the following information, here are some important facts that might be true that I can’t verify:
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