It was inevitable.

[Nerd disclaimer: yes, the 2012 movie Avengers, I love comics as well, but this is a topical post and getting into complicated world of gray Hulk or whatever, is too much for me right now. I did spend 15 hours watching Avengers movies yesterday.]

Alex Rodriguez IS Iron Man.

Listen, it hurts me too, but no one fits the description “millionaire playboy narcissist” like A-Rod does. Does he have the charm of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark? Maybe not. Does he have the ridiculous amount of money, the ego, the ladies, and the genius for baseball heroics? Yes. Also, steroids = the suit, obviously.
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Baseball fans of all stripes were disappointed to hear Thursday of an injury to Mariano Rivera that will keep the closer out for the remainder of what was supposed to be the last season of his storied career.

In Rivera’s honor, NotGraphs presents…

Three Epigrams Concerning Mariano Rivera

Epigram No. 1

Legend has it that Mariano Rivera once performed an area bris using only his cut fastball.

Pardon me, did I say “legend”? I meant “the Daily News.”

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A confession: I’m a user. Been using for years. Since high school, actually, the summer after grade nine, in 1997. I even let my friends use it.

I bought the “Perfect Curve” from a Lids store in Manhattan, for something like five, or maybe 10, American dollars, back when American dollars were actually worth something. Truthfully, I don’t remember how much it cost. It didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now. After using it once, leaving my hat it in it overnight, I was hooked. On the Amtrak back home to Toronto with my brother, my gloriously curved cap on my head, I overheard a kid a few seats up from me, looking back in my direction, tell his – presumably – brother, “Wow, look at that guy’s hat. The curve is perfect.” The irony wasn’t lost on me.

Today, almost 15 years later, we live in a different world. Kids no longer curve their caps. They leave the stickers on, too, something I’ll never understand. Even more disturbing: The “Perfect Curve” is no longer available at Lids, as far as I can tell. Hell, it isn’t even available at perfectcurve.com. When did we lose our way?

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A popular myth holds that George Washington once threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River. Right-minded people everywhere know the truth, of course — that it wasn’t a silver dollar but the testicles of British general Henry Seymour Conway, and that it wasn’t the Potomac River but the Atlantic Ocean.

Right-minded people are also aware that another strong-armed American, Nationals uberprospect Bryce Harper, has recently made his home at the mouth of the Potomac.

What we don’t know is which of the above-named and strong-armed Americans (i.e. Harper or Washington) is the strongest-armed.

To sort out this mystery, we turn — via poll — we turn to the metaphorical (and, in about 30% of cases, actual) sons and daughters of George Washington himself.

We turn to a poll like this one:

Probably all of my NotGraphs comrades, not to mention you, the erudite reader, have already read The Art of Fielding, a novel by Chad Harbach. The lovely website Poets & Pitchers hosted a reading group for the book when it came out last fall, to which NotGraphs heroes Carson Cistulli and Dayn Perry contributed.

I, a slacker, began reading said just this past weekend. So far (175 pages in), I am most taken with “the book within the book,” a collection of Zen-like adages with the same title as the novel, written by fictitious Hall-of-Fame shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez (who is at least a little bit based on Ozzie Smith). The central mantra of the book within the book, at least for character Henry Skrimshander, seems to be:

26. The shortstop is a source of stillness at the center of the defense. He projects his stillness and his teammates respond.

Of course, similar texts exist in our world:
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I’ve been suffering under a delusion. I had thought of the postgame interview as an exercise in pointless, redundant cliche-mongering. What I had not realized is that these quotes are not meant to be read in English. Return them to their native language, the tongue of Confucius, and their hidden wisdom unfurls like a flower.

Rocky Mountains 8, Dodgers 5
“This is a dream at the scene – and behind you the goods. It makes a tough decision. You walk my woods. The goods are loaded base? He has been so hot, I think I will take things to play.” – Jason Giambi
“He did what he should do. He gave me a hint to your hat.” – Scott Elbert
Notes: Give up a single Betancourt ancient Adam Kennedy started the Bureau, and then removed in the next two batters. Rather than challenge the big fight against Matt Kemp, Betancourt intentionally walked the face of Gordon Dee.

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What is the best baseball-themed Manga or Anime?

Gracias,
Yu Matsuichiro

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“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Jane Austen once wrote, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an impossibly elegant and sophisticated Franco-Italian heiress who is also a former supermodel.”

Milwaukee Brewer outfielder Ryan Braun, known to be a great admirer of Austen’s work, clearly agrees, as indicated by this totally undoctored image (courtesy the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team) of Braun and French first lady Carla Bruni walking hand-in-hand in front of people whose lives are less important than theirs.

The timing of the episode is notable, as Bruni’s husband, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, enters Sunday’s elections about eight percentage points behind Socialist candidate Francois Hollande.

More on this story as it develops.

This picture comes to us from Shorpy, which is a very fine web destination.

I beg you to click on the picture to enlarge and then spend some time staring at this young man’s bedroom wall. Several of the commenters at the Shorpy post have spent some time figuring out who is who in the selection of baseball cards behind him. There are so many things I love in this photo, from his dirty white pants to the canopy above his bed, the short broom on his desk, the mysterious note on the bed. I admire crisp, simple modern design, but staring at this room makes me want to wallpaper my studio in postcards, keepsakes, and — of course — baseball cards. This student was expressing himself through the art of careful, personal curation. He’s making a “what I like is what I’m like” statement with this room, something that is usually associated with the facebook generation, but is actually just a habit of privileged young people of all eras. Whether it’s picking out outfits, rearranging your bookshelves, making a mix tape, or gluing baseball cards to your wall, we have all, at some point in our lives, tried to find ways to viewed as the human embodiment of all the beautiful or interesting (or powerful or funny or obscure or…) things we have collected. By that standard, this kid might be the most beautiful person I have ever seen.

Seneca, quoting Epicurus, writes in his Moral Epistle No. 11 that one should — in order to conduct oneself as virtuously as possible — one should “Cherish some man of high character, and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you, and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them.”

Seneca continues:

Choose a master whose life, conversation, and soul-expressing face have satisfied you; picture him always to yourself as your protector or your pattern. For we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler.

While I won’t attempt to guess at which Master the reader has chosen for these purposes, allow me to take for granted that, for probably 50% or 70% of our readers, said Master is probably the fictional character Alfred Ogilvie of both 1976’s The Bad News Bears and 1977’s The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

Indeed, Ogilvie possesses the three virtues most cherished by this publication: he’s bespectacled, is facile with baseball numbers, and, as the above image indicates, enjoys the company of women in high-waisted fashions.

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