Nice photographer baseball cards. But where are the stats?! DPI maybe, aperture, average pieces per year, maybe a weighted number of museum shows indexed to the number of museums showing that year?
A baseball card or ten to Patrick Newman for the link.
The following totally unaltered tweet from Jon Heyman is pretty much just him bragging that he knows people who:
1. Are familiar with Marlins front-office thinking.
2. Know how to find a sweet deal on a new whip.
Let’s not ask what circumstances have led the author to a Starbucks in Michigan City. Let’s, instead, open a pack of 1987 Topps — i.e. the rarest sort of baseball card there is in human society — at that same Starbucks.
While the modern fan is far too accustomed to hearing, say, Scott Stapp groan out canticles to God and country during what was otherwise a lovely game of American Rounders, there was a time when Great Men saw to the business of singing Great Baseball Arias. So it was during the seventh-inning stretch of a Red Stockings-Marlins tilt back in 1776, when Great Men of History Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Telly Savalas, Vic Tayback and Nathan Hale took the gullet-pipes not for a rousing walk, but rather for a proud cock’s stroll.
Come with me, won’t you?
Do you realize what just happened? Five men just hit the lights in what was previously a darkened city on a hill.
Welcome to 2013, gentle post-apocalyptic readers. 2013 is the future, and in the future, the image shall continue to supplant the written word. To prepare you for this, I have composed a rebus: a rebus pertaining to baseball, and also to a certain upcoming feast day. You shall have no further clues. And for full credit, because I am not the pushover I was last year, you must not only solve the rebus, but provide the names of all individuals represented therein.
As a New Year’s bonus, and courtesy of Wikipedia, here is a charming episode from the history of the rebus:
It is reported that when Voltaire was the guest of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci Palace, they exchanged puzzle notes. Frederick sent over a page with two picture blocks on it: two hands below the letter P, and then the number 100 below a picture of a handsaw, all followed by a question mark. Voltaire replied with: Ga!
Both messages were rebuses in the French language: deux mains sous Pé, cent sous scie? (= demain souper, Sanssouci? “supper tomorrow, Sanssouci?”); reply: “big G, small a!” Gé grand, A petit! (= j’ai grand appétit! “I am very hungry!”).
“…the best cure for fantasy baseball addiction is to force yourself to draft Colby Rasmus.”
“Without question, the Blue Jay is a far better bird than the Oriole.”
“…I hate to say it, but if you’re a Yankees fan and your son starts to root for the Red Sox, you have no choice but to take him to an open field, fifty miles away from home, push him out the car door and drive away, leaving him with only a Derek Jeter gift basket to remember you by.”
“Pass.”
“…a 62-inch flat screen TV, a subscription to the Extra Innings package, and an overflowing bowl of roasted kale chips, topped with black sesame seeds and Maldon sea salt.”
“One wife to go to the games with, and another wife to wait for you back home. Definitely.”
“…but only if she’s willing to wear a game-used Jim Leyland jersey.”
“Nine auctions, fourteen drafts, a random lottery, two auto-picks off an algorithm I created myself, and one league where I throw darts at a copy of the USA Today stats page from 1992 in order to pick my team.”
“…topped with mustard, sauerkraut, and the tears of the guy in your AL-only keeper league who owned Travis D’Arnaud.”
“Michael Bourn is definitely faster than a three-legged cheetah.”
“…with a pair of earphones hidden inside each arm of the protective goggles, so you can perform neurosurgery at the same time as you listen to the post-game show.”
“Alex Gordon Beckham.”
“…but don’t use an actual bat, because then you could really do some damage.”
Have a question for Ask NotGraphs!? Send! About baseball, not about baseball, doesn’t really matter, I’ll answer anything. E-mail me!
Things are never what they used to be. Take a moment, if you would, and think back on your own childhood. Saturday mornings teemed with cartoons. You would go off and play and your parents would have no idea where you were for hours, sometimes weeks. Cereal had toys in it. Trick-or-treating took place in actual neighborhoods instead of malls and parking lots. The summer movie season was full of films being made for the first time.
Given these facts, as well as the human tendency to selectively remember only the positive things about the past, it’s difficult not to read into every new piece of news as the next step in the inevitable decay of society. Change is lame, we must admit, but not all change is loss; there are things we don’t remember, or never knew, about our idyllic histories that needed to change for the better. We must struggle to see the inequalities in our society, to envision the entire equation, and not merely rage against our own minute sense of loss as time passes.
One knows this. One trains for this. One keeps it lodged near his heart, lets it hurt him once in a while to remind him that it is there. And then one finds this.
x Hall of Fame built atop ancient steroid factory (9 posts, 3 new)
x Michael Bourn, Shaun Marcum having secret love affair, scaring away potential suitors (21 posts, 20 new)
x A-Rod Dying of Natural Causes (110 posts, 71 new)
x Electric fence at Safeco stopping balls from leaving????? (3 posts, 1 new)
x New evidence Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell same person, also on steroids (17 posts, 14 new)
x Royals run by communists hell-bent on league-wide parity (2 posts, 2 new)
x Denard SPAN’s last name is NAPS backwards = he is fantasy SLEEPER! (44 posts, 29 new)
x Mike Napoli’s “hip problem” is code for SECRET PREGNANCY!!!!!!! (1 post, 1 new)
x Babe Ruth making comeback 2013? (26 posts, 25 new)
