Perhaps you missed this actual article a couple of weeks ago in Crain’s Chicago Business:

Groupon Inc. today announced a multiyear partnership with Major League Baseball to become the league’s official daily-deals site.

Using its GrouponLive events platform, the company will host deals from several ball clubs on tickets as well as special packages including access to batting practices, luxury box seats and clubhouse and ballpark tours. The deals will be offered on the league’s site, MLB.com.

Aside from Andrew Friedman’s recent use of the “Buy One Royals Prospect, Get Three Free” deal (limited quantities available), what else should we be expecting from this partnership? Your ideas in the comments, but a few of mine:

**Up to 40% off Alex Rodriguez’s 2013 season.

**$5 million for up to $20 million of pitching at R.A. Dickey’s team-friendly-2013-salary warehouse. (Terms of this deal are subject to change.)

**Buy one ticket to an A’s game, sit wherever the heck you want.

**Twenty-five Marlins for the price of… a quarter of Zach Greinke.

**Buy Josh Hamilton, get very worried.

Listen, we all have our own ways of showing pleasure. But it is worth a moment’s pause and reflection to realize that if you couldn’t see the clothes these men were wearing, you’d have no chance figuring out which one was the guy that just made $36 million dollars. Then again, you probably wouldn’t want to see these guys without their clothes, so that’s another thing you might realize.

Thanks to Patrick Newman for the picture, which came from Sanspo.

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.

In today’s episode, Mr. Dick Allen wanders into one of Christendom’s sacred texts — the Old Testament, which, much like Dr. Pepper Ten, is not for women.

A reading from 2 Kings 2:23-24, New International Version …

Elisha Is Jeered

23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then Dick Allen came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.

This has been the latest episode of Inserting Dick Allen’s Name Into Works of Literature.

Posted on Tampa Bay Rays blog DRaysBay, one will find the most curious analysis of the recent Rays-Royals super trade that send James Shields and Wade Davis to Kansas City for Wil Myers and every minor league pitcher in the Royals system.

The fair user dennet passes along this visual, extracted from Out of the Park Baseball 2013, in which A.I.-version Royals GM Dayton Moore reacts to the trade real-life-version Dayton Moore greenlit some 17 hours ago:

Click to embiggenize.
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By now you most likely have, being a baseball fan and all, heard of the recent trade between the Kansas City Royals and Tampa Bay Rays. You have also probably noticed a plethora of Hot Sports Opinions™ on the matter. I feel no need to offer more of these, but I do feel a need to talk about Chris Archer’s face.

With the subtraction of James Shields and Wade Davis from the Rays’ rotation and bullpen, respectively, there is a very good chance that we will get to see more of Chris Archer in some capacity in 2013. Archer is 24, and was listed by Baseball America as the Rays #1 prospect in 2012. He logged only 29 innings in 2012, and though his ERA was high, he flashed good strikeout numbers as well as an 86 FIP-. He may very well turn out to be a good pitcher, or not. Again, not my department.

What interests me about Chris Archer is his strange ability to make only two types of faces. The activities of the banal everyday may not coax a myriad of expressions from us lowly ne’er-do-wells, but Archer is a baseball player. He gets paid to play baseball. Surely, he can surmise at least a handful of expressions to portray the proverbial thrill of victory and/or agony of defeat. Nope. Behold the two faces of Chris Archer;

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My poor kid is sick and now it’s like a Madison Bumgarner start in here. #snotrockets

— Drew F (@DrewGROF) December 10, 2012

Baseball has offered to the English language a number of expressions with which to colorfully and compactly describe otherwise mundane or more complicated ideas. To say, for example, that something has “come out of left field” means that it’s surprising and unexpected. To “hit a home run” with a project means to do a great job with it. To “get to second base” with a special lady means — according to my wife, whom I trust implicitly — means to quietly read in the same room as her and not touch her or even look at her, if at all possible.

Most of these expressions, however, have lost their original vitality through repetition. In the face of this, however, the very kind and even more baritoned Drew Fairservice of Getting Blanked offers us the above-embedded message regarding the similarities between a Madison Bumgarner start and his own spawn’s ill health.

Now, NotGraphs is happy to release — in the same spirit as Fairservice’s missive — is happy to release today five (five!) new baseballing expressions for common use.

Five expressions like these five:

Expression: Delmon Young Career Arc
Meaning: Promise, followed by disappointment — also, then maybe followed by a very public display of anti-Semitism.
Example: “My college career was real Delmon Young career arc. I started with a scholarship, but flunked out by sophomore spring. Also: Jews, amirite?”

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In case you missed it in the Twitter explosion last night, Jay Mohr, actor and comedian (whose name is eerily similar to that of Kansas City Royals GM Dayton Moore), weighed in on the Royals-Rays trade that sent James Shields to KC.

The Kansas City Royals just pulled off a straight bank robbery. Shields and Davis for Myers is INCREDIBLE for #royals fans.

— Jay Mohr (@jaymohr37) December 10, 2012

He followed it up with several other tweets, all of which point to a non-idiotic (IMHO) opinion — but one that is very, very incomplete.

Consider this Tweet:

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Thou still unravished pride of quietness,
  Thou child of spectacle and facial hair,
Malign’d first baseman, how can time express
  Thy legacy, left in such sad repair
What die-cast legend haunts about thy shape
  Immortalized in resin, and in time?
    In some invis’ble Kingdome standeth thee?
  For semi-anonymity, what crime
Committed thee? By how didst thou escape
    The cavalcade of baseball revelry?

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Kevin Towers says Dbacks have lots of deals “marinating” but not “sautéing” becauae “sautéing is a little hotter. Where we are is cooler.”

— Jayson Stark (@jaysonst) December 6, 2012

“…or what I should say, if you want to get technical, is that we have a bunch of deals in the vacuum sealer, because we’re planning to sous vide them. If we suck all the air out of Trevor Bauer and Justin Upton, we’re hoping we can somehow make them more appealing to the Indians, and end up with a 6-team deal where we get a new shortstop. We’re also planning on roasting Daniel Hudson, to really bring out his deep, caramelized flavors and lower his ERA. Did you know Patrick Corbin is poisonous unless you boil him for at least twenty minutes?

“…that grassy, woodsy odor is probably Gerardo Parra. We’ve got him and some applewood in the smoker, and then we’re going to see if we can turn him into a third baseman. If we slice Wade Miley really thin, he’ll make a great #3 starter, but we’re just not sure that him and Jason Kubel on the same plate makes for a good combination. I guess you could say we have a bunch of deals in the ice cream maker, but it isn’t done spinning yet. Of course, Tyler Skaggs is stuck on the anti-griddle and we’re having a bunch of trouble scraping him off.

“…well, I actually shouldn’t have said ‘marinating’ at all. It’s really more of a brine. We thought about using a rub on Paul Goldschmidt but we were afraid it would just mask his natural flavors. We hear Asdrubal Cabrera is really tender and juicy. Of course, we’re worried he tastes too much like Stephen Drew.”

These distant titans of sport, both colossal when the doctors measure their height and weight and colossal in the most adhesive sense of human hero worship, have only a select few like David Price. He strikes the keen observer as neither too distant or too comfortable. He seems like just some tall man you might have known in college or while working as a meat slicer in a deli sandwich shop.

When not engaged in typical Rays dugout hijinks, David engages in atypical Rays dugout hijinks. He is a 6-foot-6 Jim Halpert.

And so on Sunday evening when David had to say goodbye to his long-time friend, now-Royals pitcher James Shields, and the jester giant’s veneer cracked, you will forgive your humble author for blinking back a tear and smiling for that clown, the one who laughs when he means to cry.
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