When the Tampa Bay Rays revealed their “throwback” uniforms for a time in which they did not exist, a rip in the time-space continuum occurred, creating an alternate universe in which the Rays did in fact play in 1979. In a NotGraphs exclusive, a peek at some of the members of the 1979 Tampa Bay Rays:
A time-travelling Joe Maddon
What we have been doing is assigning cool nicknames to players rather than perpetuating the tired, lamewad practice of assigning cool players nicknames. We will soon stop doing this because all things — even things like this which are hopelessly played out and have been driven remorselessly into the ground — must come to an end. But not before one last dance, my love!
First, though, another glance at our Hall of Honouur, which is so stately, so regal, so much itself a celebration of the Norman Conquest, that an extra British-English unstressed “u” is required for proper spelling …
Shout-out to Dayn Perry.
In which the Royal We insert Dick Allen’s name into various works representative of the Western Canon, thus adding to those various works the patina of blessedness.
Today’s episode: In the afterword of Rohinton Mistry’s brilliant first novel, Such A Long Journey, Alberto Manguel writes, “Dick Allen is a creature doomed.” Aren’t we all?
Readers of a certain age will remember the righteous indignation they felt when so-called “sensei” John Kreese of the Cobra Kai dojo ordered star pupil Johnny Lawrence to “sweep the leg” of already injured protagonist Daniel LaRusso in the denoument of 1984’s Karate Kid. Those same readers will remember the overwhelming sense of justice they experienced just moments later when LaRusso performed the crane-kick maneuver captured in GIF-form above to win first place in the All Valley Karate Tournament.
Rangers baseball pitcher Derek Holland seems like a lovely young man. Part of that loveliness — a necessary part, I would submit — is that his Twitter predilections are as nude of airs and fronts as something that is just … nude, with silly, floppy genitals brandished like … something silly and floppy that has been brandished.
Witness:
You know who follows McDonald’s on Twitter? Yes, exactly: a gentleman secure in his tastes and station. Now let us McD.L.T.
“Slow news day.”
Along with my Starting Lineup figurines, I also salvaged these mini helmets from my mother’s latest rummage pile.
Taking advantage of my GF’s clean desk.
I used to get these for a quarter a piece from vending machines at grocery stores.
Once I had enough of them, I would play out entire seasons, the schedules scratched out in notebooks, each game decided by a coin flip. (I was never able to get all of the teams, so I just used duplicates to stand in for the missing teams, putting a tiny scrap of masking tape over the logo on the duplicate and initialing the tape to represent the missing team.) For the playoffs, I would do a coin flip per inning and keep track of the “score.” I sorta wish I still had those notebooks now. It was a life’s work, really.
In an effort to meld the past and the present, I decided to assign each of the helmets to an object/being in my current house. I made some effort to align some aspect of the team with the object/being it got placed with — but don’t read too much into that. Or do. There are some duplicates.
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Chipper Jones and Derek Jeter, elder statesmen of baseball and legends of slapstick, took a moment Tuesday at Yankee Stadium to plug their latest big-screen caper. (Click to embiggen)
There are some things that need doing in this life, and some of those things can only be done by someone with the given name Vincent or its derivatives.
Below are all the players in the FanGraphs database — so, mostly (if not every) major leaguer ever, and minor leaguers since some time in the later aughts — with a name either resembling, or actually being, Vincent. Said list of players is accompanied by photos of groups of men all of whom are probably also named Vince, if you were to ask them.
Davey Johnson on Joe Maddon:
“I don’t know him that well, but I thought he was a weird wuss anyways.”
When did Davey Johnson become a grumpy old codger? Wasn’t he the first guy with a computer, looking for every edge he could get? Or, as a commenter on Baseball Think Factory said: “On the Mets broadcast they were talking about this and they said ’30 years ago Davey Johnson was Joe Maddon.'”
While what follows does not apply to Algonquin Roundtable/Bloomsbury Group that is the NotGraphs commenting collective, it does apply to those who inhabit more brutish corners of This Our Internet.
Does that guy’s multiyear contract make you scream at your children? Is the latest outrage outrageous? Do all-caps value judgments make your heart and loins leap? Should pretty much everyone on that team go to jail? Were you serious about what you just said? Would you be able to play through that injury … for free? Can you discern a political morality play in a humpback liner? Do you have racist dreams?
Then this is for you …
