So this is how it ends. Will McDonald (now ExRoyalsReview on Twitter), longtime mainstay of Royals Review, has decided to call it a day after eight years of blogging about the Royals. During that time, Royals Review grew from just some guy’s blog to a team site on the fledgling SB Nation network to perhaps the most popular Royals blog around.

With the management formerly of Royals Authority taking the helm, things should be in good hands. Still, it is hard for many of us to imagine following the Royals without the incentive of knowing the referents for Will’s next brilliantly-written combination of anger and comedy. How will we get through the season without more Royals Bibliomancy or Mitch Maier’s Letters Home From Baseball Camp, or expressions of irritation over Royals prospect Wil Myers spelling his first name incorrectly.

Will has been a huge inspiration. Don’t hold it against him, but, while I never “worked” at Royals Review, I probably would not be blogging today if it were not for reading Will’s stuff. Will’s posts garnered attention far beyond Royals fandom — I think the first “big break” his blog received was when Keith Law linked to it in one of his ESPN chats. I cannot summarize Will’s work, but that is the nature of all good art. So as a tribute to Will (or “Freneau,” a moniker he adopted in recent times in tribute to a poet from the era of the Revolutionary War) and as a public service, I will briefly go through just a few of McDonald’s best moments of the last few years.

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Think of anything that challenges your moderating instincts, any signifier of the good life lived. Whatever that thing is, Dick Allen was through with it before you knew what to do with it.

Now shut up, sit down, genuflect, and watch as your better heaves a ceremonial first pitch for a strike as effortlessly as he once flicked aside mewling baby racists during the Hale, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Hale Administrations …

And now a relevant excerpt from Philip Kaufman’s screenplay “The Right Stuff,” adapted from the Tom Wolfe opus of the same name:

Unknown: Is that a man?
Jack Ridley: You damn right it is.

Wampum.

The well-seasoned NotGraphs aesthete is no doubt aware of Craig Robinson’s site flipflopflyball.com. Mr. Robinson is known (and should be even more well-known) for his insightful and beautiful infographics about our beloved game, amongst other things.

Some time ago, I was looking at the “First and Last” section of the site, which visually represents several players’ initial and final plate appearance in the Major Leagues; I was taken with how perfectly some of them seemed to encapsulate the careers of the players involved. Below are a few of my favorites, with brief commentary:
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H/T to Bryce Harper.

Q: How does one become a circus clown?
A: Clown school.

Q: Why are so many people afraid of clowns?
A: Coulrophobes are quite common, but there isn’t any clear data. Several theories exist, including: the childhood trauma of first seeing/meeting a clown and not knowing what is going on, the fact that their human emotions are obscured and impossible to read, and/or the “scary clown” theme in movies and fiction.

Q: Who are some famous people who are afraid of clowns?
A: P. Diddy has a no-clown clause in his contracts. Other famous coulrophobes include: Johnny Depp, Carol Burnett, and Anthony Bourdain.

Q: How does the “clown car” trick work?
A: There is no trick.

Q: How much money do clowns make?
A: Circus clowns make an average of 38,000 according to the internets in 2010.

Q: Why arn’t you allowed to incinerate clowns?
A: They burn funny.

Like all great correspondences — the famous one between John and Abigail Adams, for example, and the other famous one between noted 20th century pop sensations Milli and Vanilli — my own correspondence with my friend Ross will someday become the object of much literary interest in this country and abroad.

While the frenzied masses will have to wait for its publication (i.e. the aforementioned correspondence’s) until just after my own death, an excerpt from one of Ross’s recent electronic letters is suitable for blockquoting in these pages.

Ross writes (or wrote, seven days ago, I should say):

On another note, hunt down recent highlights of Edwin Encarnacion stroking a dongpiece (he did so in today’s matinee game at Milwaukee, so you can see fresh evidence on mlb.com). Notice that every time he’s shown rounding 1st, he is carrying his right arm in what might be described as a palsied t-rex pose. He seems to do this invariably.

Like any gentleman of taste, I need only hear the phrase “palsied t-rex pose” once to have my curiosity piqued duly.

Abiding by said curiosity, I not only sought out some representative clips of Edwin Encarnacion, but then proceeded to render those clips into GIF form for the enjoyment of at least 10 or 12 people, as follows.

From June 20th, at Milwaukee:

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Diamondbacks: Willie Bloomquist (who actually has a higher OPS, so, really, it’s a steal).

Braves: Julio Q. Teheran, cousin of prospect Julio A. Teheran.

Cubs: Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer, and PLEASE CAN WE COME BACK TO THE RED SOX? PLEASE?

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Ok, so after a full year of working in my basement office at Woodland Pattern Book Center, I finally noticed this decal on a (possibly nonfunctional) heating unit:

Download, print as stickers, and apply where appropriate.

Of course, I immediately interpreted the phrase with my baseball brain: “The Heater You Can Live With” is a heater (a fastball, and, in my mind, a four-seam fastball, specifically) that is passable, that gets the job but is not overwhelming; a heater that chips in but upon which a pitcher is not overly reliant; a heater that, looks like the average of all heaters in the game, so as not garner attention, but like I said, is still capable of getting an out, or setting up other pitches, or even causing the occasional whiff.
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Omar Vizquel’s dancing is chock full o’ life lessons:
– Don’t let rainy days get you down.
– Don’t let your age get in the way of living your dreams.
– Never be afraid of making a fool of yourself.
– Only boring people get bored.
– You can always fall back on “raising the roof” when you run out of other dance movies.

A video:

And an animated gif:

Gif courtesy reddit.

When FanGraphs founder and CEO and muscled champion David Appelman announced yesterday the launch of FanGraphs Q&A, it’s very possible that the reader — the reader of Important Internet Weblog™ NotGraphs — did not suppose that it (i.e. the launch of FanGraphs Q&A) would shake the very foundations of our society. Indeed, even the present author suspected nothing of the sort.

However, yesterday, in the course of my daily practice, I was visited by a light — not unlike that which visited Paul on the Damascene Road — a light accompanied by a voice which said, “Carson! Carson! Ask Appelman to add a category — namely, Ephemera — to that new FanGraphs Q&A page. Forsooth, it will amuse at least three or four people. Ask him politely, of course, lest he remove your testicles from your person and send them to opposite ends of the world.”

Upon the completion of said vision, I hurriedly composed an email requesting the addition of Ephemera as a category. And Appelman, sometime not too long after that, added Ephemera as a category. And now it can be said — without much in the way of hyperbole — that the very foundations of our society are decidedly atremble.

Even now, less than 24 hours later, one can find all manner of thought-provoking question.

Spelling questions, like:

Appelman or Appleman?

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Now that Youk has been traded to the White Sox, I thought I’d take a look at the other offers that teams had on the table…

Orioles: Bullpen catcher / batting practice pitcher Rudy Arias.

Indians: Charles Nagy.

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