Again, as part of Villanelle Week here at NotGraphs, I offer:

A Villanelle about Villarreal

Villarreal shut down till spring
He has an elbow that is sore
Will he help the Tigers get a ring?

He throws it fast, the batters swing
In the pen, just Benoit struck out more
Villarreal shut down till spring

The heat mid-90s he can bring
But he was off the postseason roster before
Will he help the Tigers get a ring?

About his elbow he was complaining
It is inflamed, but nothing tore
Villarreal shut down till spring

They’re gonna have him stop throwing
He has had soreness there before
Will he help the Tigers get a ring?

To the bullpen this will sting
They thought perhaps he’d close the door
Villarreal shut down till spring
Will he help the Tigers get a ring?

Recent reports from myriad reputable media outlets all confirm: FanGraphs is the most popular internet site on the internet. What this means, so far as Fame and Riches and Fame are concerned, is that we can and do have more of them. What else this means, though — especially in light of the main site’s universally beloved redesign, which features NotGraphs perhaps slightly more prominently than before — is that NotGraphs is now being visited more often by a sort of reader who might not be prepared for the sort of charming falsehoods which are this site’s bread and also its butter.

To that end, CEO and founder and noted sexpert David Appelman has suggested that NotGraphs begin featuring disclaimers which speak to the site’s legitimacy, or lack thereof. “Might they be of an irreverent nature?” I have asked Appelman regarding said disclaimers. To which question he has responded by slapping me and cursing my existence. So, yes, is the answer I’m supposing.

The present author has composed five such warnings, each of which is likely to be eclipsed in quality by the bespectacled readership, who are encouraged now to submit their own amusing and legal-ish disclaimers.

1. NotGraphs: The Misleading Voice in Baseball Journalism.

2. NotGraphs: The Names Are Real. The Problems, Likely Fake.

3. NotGraphs: Lies, Damned Lies… End of List.

4. NotGraphs: Missing the Forest and the Trees.

5. NotGraphs: Exercising Due Negligence.

Back in October, The Colbert Report featured a special report on how a drought in the US heartland was threatening the prestige of the World’s Only Corn Palace, located in Mitchell, South Dakota.

Mitchell, South Dakota’s Corn Palace: More Decadent Than Las Vegas?

Due to reasons stemming from the fact that my significant other grew up in Mitchell, South Dakota, I am presently in Mitchell, less than a mile, even, from said (and World’s Only) Corn Palace. So, I’m going to write about it.

A Brief History of the World’s Only Corn Palace
The first iteration of the Corn Palace was built in 1892 “as a way to prove to the world that South Dakota had a healthy agricultural climate,” an issue which had been hotly debated in the very real agricultural climate salons of the 1880s prior to the erection of this first virile — and quite flammable — Corn Palace, which was then and remains to this day the World’s Only Corn Palace.

Since its inception, it has featured new murals on its outer walls on an almost yearly basis, with exceptions coming during the years of the World Wars (when some of the murals were partially painted to save valuable corn for the war efforts), and times of great laziness, like 1982.

What the World’s Only Corn Palace Has to Do With the World’s Only Worthwhile Sport, AKA Baseball
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A friend of mine from college — to whom I’ll refer as “Justin,” largely owing to how that’s his name — went to a dinner party at the Chelsea Hotel shortly after he graduated in 2002. He was surprised to find, among the guests of said party, Arthur Miller — as in the actual Arthur Miller, who wrote basically every play you’re required to read in high school.

“I seriously never thought of him as a real person,” Justin said about the experience — which sentiment I invoke here on account of that’s more or less how I felt about Rob Neyer before making his acquaintance at a meeting of the Northwest chapter of SABR in 2008, I think it was. In fact, “making his acquaintance” might be the incorrect phrasing. More appropriate might be “imposed myself upon” or “harassed in word and deed.” In any case, until that point, Rob Neyer had only existed for me as a popular and beflanneled internet evangelist of sabermetrics — someone, like Arthur Miller, with whose work I was quite familiar, but with whom I never expected to actually interact.

Owing to a series of events that are mostly the product of luck, I’ve had the opportunity to become something like close with Neyer — close enough such that not only (a) I have the privilege of receiving a birthday card (such as the one pictured here) from him, but also that (b) he willn’t feel entirely as though I’ve violated the terms of our friendship by rendering the receipt of said birthday card into a post on the absurd internet site of which I’m the editor.

Here, for the benefit of the reader, is a photo of the envelope of Neyer’s birthday card — with addresses obscured for Maximum Privacy™:

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As part of Villanelle Week here at NotGraphs, I offer:

Who Should Be In The Hall of Fame?

Who should be in the Hall of Fame?
Who do we think should get the call?
Should Bonds or Clemens hear his name?

Should we just say it’s all a game?
Not make Jeff Bagwell take the fall?
Who should be in the Hall of Fame?

Can’t we admit it’s all a shame?
But still reward who hit the ball?
Should Bonds or Clemens hear his name?

Should Mike Piazza take the blame?
Or does back acne say it all?
Who should be in the Hall of Fame?

Are speed and steroids all the same?
Does Raines’ cocaine use cast a pall?
Should Bonds or Clemens hear his name?

And does McGwire have a claim?
Do voters need more years to stall?
Who should be in the Hall of Fame?
Should Bonds or Clemens hear his name?

The winter season and its accompanying ham-based feasts have left all of us – yes, I mean all of us – somewhat indolent. The wire is quiet this time of year, the football playoffs are full of shouting and trumpet fanfares, and even hockey has crawled out of its burrow and glimpsed its own shadow, ensuring six weeks of a regular season. To stave off this baseball hypothermia, I issued a Villanelle Challenge to the esteemed authors of this fair site, its readers, and by extension, the world.

“What is a villanelle?” those of you with useful undergraduate degrees might ask. Wikipedia explains it best: “A villanelle (also known as villanesque) is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines.” Or, as Robert Wallace put it: “There are enough villanelles in English to convince us that poets like to make trouble for themselves.” Here are a few famous examples.

As with any real contest, the NotGraphs Villanelle Challenge offers no rewards and holds no serious purpose. Those who would like to submit their own poems can do so through the hotline; by the end of the week they will be read, judged with the utmost partiality, and the best of the best will be posted here on Friday. Think of the glory! Think of conquering the most imposing, ridiculous monument in English-language poetry! Think about finding a rhyming dictionary!

But first: a villanelle about the newly unemployed Rick VandenHurk.

The Tale of VandenHurk

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The offseason is the video game season — because unless we have the patience to find streaming footage of Australian or Latin American baseball, this is all the diamond action we get. And though we have not reached the apex of the video game season — thereabouts of Spring Training when new versions of The Show and OOTP and whatnot start pouring into our grateful gullets — we do have a game to review in the form of the MLB’s new Facebook game entitled MLB Ballpark Empire.

Vitals:

Game: MLB Ballpark Empire
Platform: Facebook (incompatible with Facebook mobile app)
Developer: MLB
Modes: n/a
Cool Features: …it’s free? This is normally where we list a series of facets unique to the game, but the strongest and most unique component of this here title may be simply its price.

Categories:

Realism: 4/10.
Graphics: 9/10.
Difficulty: 9/10.
Details: 4/10.
Playability: 8/10.
Intangibles: 40/50.

Total Score: 74/100 (C)
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Internet Hot Link Baseball-Reference.com confirms the existence of this player of baseball …

Thaddeus Philyaw played baseball, but he did not do so in the 19th century. Despite a name that, in Ohio Valley Protestantese, translates as “He Who Vacantly Surveys That Which the Colonel Has Raped,” Thaddeus Philyaw was not born in the 19th century. In point of fact, he played baseball in the 1970s, when we danced until the herpes overtook us …

Lo, Thaddeus Philyaw played baseball! That much is not surprising. What is surprising is that he did not play baseball in the moments before and after beating back an Indian raid in Lincoln County, Kansas.

What is surprising is that he did not play baseball in the moments before and after conceiving an heir on the hide of a coyote (read: “KAI-yoat”).

What is surprising is that he did not die of consumption while rounding third.

There are jokes, reader, and then there are jokes — the difference being primarily that one kind of them is italicized.

On a probably related noted, the editors of Tumblr account Baseball Card Vandals improve baseball cards via Sharpie-brand markers, with results that one might alternately describe as “grotesque” and “whimsical” — and even “Dadaist in spirit,” were one feeling emboldened.

Like in this instance:

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Yesterday, readers thrilled as Carson opened up what was seriously the worst pack of baseball cards of all-time. Though we each in turn smiled at the Phelpsness of life, the reader’s attention was inevitably drawn to the shattered dead-pink remains of the Topps Chewing Gum, that Proustian Madeline that instantly transports us back to our own childhoods. As is often true of the old and regretful, we tend to heap scorn upon the impetuousness of our youth and the gum that recalls it. This is in error.

We owe much to the gum of yesteryear. When Jonas Salk first tested the polio vaccine in 1952, he implemented it not through intravenous methods but through the distribution of an upstart baseball card company’s chewing gum. The success of the 1952 Topps set saved thousands of lives and paved the way for the elimination of the dread disease worldwide.

After this first success, Topps experimented with other beneficial effects in its chewing gum, and despite an unsuccessful 1956 issue partnered with Aldous Huxley to include mescaline in every piece, many of the results were positive. Topps fortified its gum ingredients with St. John’s Wort, riboflavin, and sawdust from a game-used Ted Williams bat. A scientific study in the mid 80s estimated that athletic performance of kids chewing Topps chewing gum was enhanced “at a level ranking somewhere between ingesting an orange M&M and a green one” (McCloskey, 1985). [Editor’s Note: The discovery of the home-run hitting effects and the general proliferation of green M&M’s, rather than steroids, proved to be the true cause of the inflated statistics of the past twenty years.]

Anyone still doubtful of the curative properties of Topps Chewing Gum need only look upon the following graph, and despair.

Clearly, there is a childhood obesity crisis in America, and we are in deep trouble. There is one solution. I beg you, dear readers, go find all the unopened 1987 Topps packs you can. Use a mortar and pestle, and stir the powder into your children’s milk or macaroni and cheese. Do it now, before it’s too late. This has been a NotGraphs Public Service Announcement.