Until I found this Tweet:

@colelopez77 @joetribe_2012 good stuff guys. IMO I’d love demon young and Shaun marcum. Realistic, affordable. Makes us contender. Thoughts?

— Cory O’Connor (@CoryO24) December 27, 2012

Demon Young

Because he never made the majors and because he was out of affiliated baseball by 1990, Steve Sharts does not have a player page at FanGraphs. What he does have, though — by virtue of his amusing name, if nothing else — is a place in the heart of most every male in the coveted 18-34 demographic. Plus the author’s colleague Dayn Perry, one assumes, who’s not between the ages of 18 and 34 but who is contemptible and of low breeding.

Today is many things. It is Boxing day. It is the day after Christmas. It’s probably someone’s anniversary and an important date in history for some culture somewhere. It is a date of note for former baseball player Mario Mendoza, for today is his birthday.

Whenever I think of Mario Mendoza, I think – and stay with me here – of douche. I don’t bring this up to be crass, or to make a value comparison of Mr. Mendoza as a person. I am being truthful. It’s just what comes to mind.

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A few months ago, my colleague Joel and I introduced a new statistic called FAME (Fanfare and Acclaim Metric Extraordinaire) to measure not how good a player was, but how highly he was thought of during his playing days. In my first article, I compared the FAME results of great players to their WAR. The results: Yogi Berra was the most overrated player of the past eighty years, and Tony Phillips the most unsung. (After expanding my numbers for today’s article, Berra remains atop the leaderboard. Second place, amazingly, belongs to Manny Trillo.)

Today, my inquiries center on the upcoming 2013 Hall of Fame ballot. Having read the first seventeen pages of The Signal and the Noise, I believe I’m ready to turn my mental powers toward the art of prognostication. My goal: to try to predict the outcome for the first-year eligible hitter’s on this year’s ballot.

The natural first step would be to use each hitter’s WAR to estimate their chances at Cooeprstown. Remember that FAME only concerns itself with position players, because pitchers don’t get enough awards to quantify them properly, and thus will be omitted. Here’s a graph that correlates the percentage of every first-ballot hitter from 1993-2012 with their career WAR:

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Sometimes it’s hard to come up with a post.
And then I look at some of the actual articles on the main site.
Michael Bourn, Chopped Liver?

Oh, this:

Yes, that seems like just the right facial expression.

December 25: A big deal. The day Rickey Henderson was born. Let us feast.

Life: Rickey Henderson, according to Rickey Henderson, was the greatest. He truly believed that. And he was one of them. His career 113.9 WAR ranks 17th all-time among position players. We remember Henderson for his prowess on the basepaths, but it’s important to remember how often he got there, and how often he ran once he arrived. Henderson finished with an on-base percentage higher than Pete Rose, Joe DiMaggio, Cal Ripken, Joe Morgan, Honus Wagner, Hank Aaron, and Willie Mays. He could do a little bit of it all, but one thing better than any man before him, or since.

Spiritual Exercise: A couple of weeks ago, on Twitter, I read a quote from Rickey Henderson, from April 28, 1987, about Texas Rangers pitcher Ed Correa, who threw 7.1 innings of no-hit baseball that afternoon, as Henderson’s New York Yankees fell 3-1 to the Rangers: “He didn’t have anything.” Henderson went 0-3, with a walk. He stole two bases. Rickey Henderson never, ever doubted himself. Ask yourself: Are you the greatest? Perhaps it’s time you started believing you are.

A Prayer for Rickey Henderson

Rickey Nelson Henley Henderson!
One thousand,
Four hundred
And six
Stolen bases.
“Thou shalt not steal”
Never applied to baseball.

H/T: @mighty_flynn. Image credit: USA Today.

The four teams?

1. San Francisco Giant Imaginations
2. Arizona DiamondbackintripleAs
3. Philadelphia Philling Their Spring Training Invite Lists
4. Balti-More Outs Than Any Other Team

Merry Christmas from Heath Bell and NotGraphs!

Sometimes a gentleman prefers a leisurely lunch — one rich in aperitif and Algonquin Round Table-grade conversation. At other times, lunch is an act of war, in which food and surroundings are but blood enemies to be vanquished, raped and slaughtered. So it was with Eric Young Jr. and his recent trip to the finest in Oriental-themed Occidental steakhouses …

As you are no doubt aware, Eric Young Jr. is not a man of idle threats and vacant promises. When Eric Young Jr. declares that a restaurant shall be crushed, a restaurant shall indeed be crushed …

Eric Young Jr. will lunch the shit out of this shit.

As a member of the middle class, my childhood was in no way free of tragedy. My parents, thoughtful as they were, crippled my future writing career by failing to die or even divorce during my upbringing. Nor were even the holidays free from suffering: how I remember that fateful Christmas when, tense with anticipation to receive the NES game Baseball Stars, I ripped open that familiar rectangular present to find… Bases Loaded II. I still carry the pain of that moment to this day.

But despite the hardships that I endured, the fact that I never got a Pogo Ball and that my parents allowed me to watch Smokey and the Bandit at least a hundred times on LaserDisc, I would be remiss to leave you with the impression that my youth was unending disappointment. As proof that my parents did in fact feel some sort of affection for me, twenty-three years ago, they gave me this:

The picture sports an autographed rookie card and the prized Upper Deck headshot of 1989. Still, the eye is drawn upward to a pair of Ken Griffey, Jr. candy bars, made with 100% milk chocolate, which are probably still at least 98% chocolate today. But wrapped in its thin foil is more than just processed cocoa with alkali: they also trap in the heady potential of youth on the cusp of achievement. One sees them and imagines a group of boys sitting a patch of grass, biting down on Griffey’s head and tasting summer.

Thank you, Dad, and thank you, Mom. And a Happy Boxing Day to you and yours, dear reader.