Q. Who has two thumbs and likes watching Trevor Rosenthal pitch? A. Cardinals fans who’ve avoided farming accidents.

— Carson Cistulli (@cistulli) September 22, 2012

Q. Who has two thumbs and likes watching Trevor Rosenthal pitch?
A. Cardinals fans who’ve avoided farming accidents.

Q. Who reads at a college level and likes watching Trevor Rosenthal pitch?
A. Not a plurality of Cardinals fans, one assumes.

Q. Who has two thumbs and harbors largely unfounded notions regarding the intelligence of the Cardinals’ fanbase relative to other fanbases.
A. The author of this post.

Q. Who might suggest, were he alive, that the author’s motivation for harboring such notions about Cardinals fans is a product of his (i.e the author’s) attempts to make a display of whatever he has in the way of “social capital.”
A. French sociologist, and author of Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu.

Q. And what are we to learn from this brief examination?
A. That human frailty is ubiquitous, grotesque.

Boucher warms up for his first inning.

“There’s no rules that say a pitcher can’t use a hockey stick,” said umpire Tony Randazzo before Friday’s game between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Tampa Bay Rays. “I don’t make the rules; I just sometimes enforce them.”

Two hours before Friday’s game, Andrew Friedman of the Rays signed Tampa Bay Lightning coach Guy Boucher to make his major league debut — as the league’s first hockey-stick pitcher. Boucher lasted three scoreless innings before being ejected in the fourth inning for throwing off his gloves and engaging in a five-minute one-on-one brawl with Blue Jays outfielder Colby Rasmus.

The event marks the first time in baseball history that not only an NHL coach has played in the majors, but also completed an inning using a hockey stick and wearing blue jeans.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Blue Jays manager John Farrell said after the game. “All you can do is tip your cap and say, ‘Well done,’ to both [Guy Boucher] and the Rays front office.”

(Author’s note: it’s late, and I’ve just consumed several glasses of port and several hours of Comedy Central’s horrible, repetitive advertisements. The mixture has put me in a melancholy mood. Verily warned, therefore, be ye.)

Last night, the Washington Nationals secured first place in the National League, bringing playoff baseball to our nation’s capital for the first time since 1932. Washington fans have been waiting their entire lives to see this day. Or, they’ve been waiting eight years.

The mark of Montreal has been effectively wiped from the franchise. After the departure of Livan Hernandez, no current National has ever donned the Montreal uniform. Only fourteen former Expos played in the major leagues in 2012; their most able veteran was Jamey Carroll, whose 2.2 WAR is reflected primarily through his ability to field grounders at shortstop. Eventually, they too will shuffle off.

Growing up, I never held strong feelings about the Expos. They belonged to a different league, different time zone, and their red-white-and-blue uniforms seemed a little garish. I couldn’t figure out their logo, and their best player in the late 80s, Tim Raines, was a threatening approximation of my own favorite player, Rickey Henderson.

But as a Seattleite, I can empathize with Montreal. We don’t talk about other sports here very often, what with it being a baseball site and all, but growing up I was a big Sonics fan. I watched as a struggling franchise with a decrepit home arena was dragged away by a loathsome owner. Of course, I was upset. Like many, I declared the NBA dead to me, swore my hatred of the OKC Thunder and their stupid powder blue uniforms and their ironic glasses and backpacks and their dumb faces.

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You listen to FanGraphs Audio, so you already know that Dayn Perry’s next critically-acclaimed book, for which he received a substantial advance, is titled Business & F*cking: Secrets to Crushing the Competition in the Boardroom and the Bedroom. I know; I can’t wait, either.

While we wait, though, I’ve got good news: Our diligent, award-winning Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has secured for us the cover of Mr. Perry’s latest endeavor. Witness:

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St. Louis, MO – The entire roster of the Houston Astros was fined Thursday by the Commissioner’s Office of Major League Baseball for what are being described as “actions detrimental to the team.” Details of the fine, including the actual amount and how it would be dispersed, were not disclosed.

Warnings had already been passed down to the Astros this season, after the team was caught performing lewd acts on the baseball field in August, but this is the first time an actual fine was put in place. This is also the first reported case of an entire team being levied a fine by Major League Baseball.

“We need to send a message that behavior like this will not be tolerated,” said Commissioner Bud Selig during a conference call with reporters regarding the incident. “We need to be firm in our stance that such actions are unacceptable and reflect negatively on the club, the fans, and all of Major League Baseball.”

“This is obviously very disappointing,” said Astros General Manager Jeff Luhnow through a veil of tears. “While we disagree with the punishment, we want people to know that we meant no disrespect by our actions on the field.”

Luhnow continued on, but his words were not distinguishable, as he was speaking directly into the mouth of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

Interim Manager Tony DeFrancesco chose not to speak with reporters, opting instead to bellow a laugh/cry hybrid in his office behind a locked door.

Team sources say that the Astros will appeal the ruling. Failing that, they will request that they be allowed to pay the fine in Altuves.

I can’t tell if this is FanGraphs or NotGraphs or even RotoGraphs material, so I’ll just say safe and put it here. My formula for expected RBI, supposedly a pretty simple stat:

xRBI = position-regressed indexed clutch score * league-indexed contact rate * position-indexed isolated power * health-adjusted and lineup-slot-indexed plate appearances * expected team OBP * projected raw plate appearances

I’m pretty sure I got something wrong.

Partial to embiggening? Try clicking, then.

The image on the left — which, it must be said, has been painstakingly assembled by the author via a freeware graphics editor from the relevant Twitter page — is of Diamondbacks outfielder Adam Eaton and his Intended astride a pair of horses. The image on the right is of Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett — also totally riding horses — in the roles of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, respectively, from Ridley Scott’s 2010 adaptation of what someone, somewhere has likely described as a “classic tale.”

Now here’s what the reader is being asked to do: compare and contrast the images above.

I’ll start:

Compare
Great Swedish actor Max von Sydow is just out of the frame in both images.

Contrast
Great Swedish actor Max von Sydow is adjusting his codpiece just out of the frame in only one of the images.

Now you.

On Thursday, Twitter lurched to a halt and then sloughed off into the murky fathoms of the sea when a single tweet embodied the entire essence of the very medium of which it was believed to be but an infinitesimal sliver. This is that tweet:

And this is the Internet.

Since I posted my advice on which NL team to root for if your favorite team was already out of the playoff picture, some interesting things have happened.

Most notably — at least for me personally — is that the Milwaukee Brewers have a record of 24-10 since I made that post (August 14), and are 13-4 in September. I did not include them in my “study” — for a number of reasons. Firstly, I needed a reason to write those posts. Secondly, I am a pessimist. (Not to be confused with a “fair weather fan”.) Finally, I really miscalculated what it would take for a team in the position that the Brewers were in at the time to get back in the wild card race:

Yes, my beloved Brewers could rattle off 15 straight wins and make a run for a Wild Card berth or even the NL Central title. But given that they traded their ace and that, even though they’ve been slightly unlucky in terms of how their run differential corresponds to their W-L record, they’re still only a .500 team at best, and that’s not going to cut it.

Apparently, all that was really needed was a 24-10 record accompanied by a massive slide from the now woeful Pittsburgh Pirates.

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On this past Monday afternoon, within twenty-two seconds of each other, Robert J. Baumann and I submitted to this weblog some thoughts regarding Mike Trout. We did not coordinate; we did not synchronize; nor have I ever enjoyed the slightest contact with Mr. Baumann. A trivial coincidence, you may say. After all, Trout has hooked, if you’ll pardon the wordplay, our collective consciousness like no other. Perhaps the truly remarkable thing is that a full twenty-two seconds could pass without two baseball writers uncontrollably ejaculating their thoughts on Trout. I congratulate my colleagues on their continence. I also contrive to concoct as much consonance as one composition can conceivably contain.

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