Home-run legend and current Dodgers hitting coach Mark McGwire will sign anything, it appears — as the following (and necessarily) censored tweet suggests:

Periodically, in these pages, we have considered the blinking habits of the guests of MLB Network program Clubhouse Confidential, hosted by the robustly coiffed Brian Kenny. Dave Cameron’s own blinking habits have been considered with no little enthusiasm in these electronic pages — as have those of other, notable members of the sabermetric community.

Recently, godfather of sabermetrics himself Bill James appeared alongside Kenny. Below is the data concerning his blinking patterns.

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RIP, Nick Johnson’s career. Mourn ya ’till I join ya.

Three score and seventeen years ago, on this very date, the first group of inductees to the Baseball Hall of Fame were announced. You all know those five names, and you’d recognize most of the ballot: of the 47 guys who got votes, 40 of them eventually wound up in the Hall (and one of the other seven is Joe Jackson). This post is about one of the guys who didn’t. Norman Elberfeld got a single vote that year, and dropped off the Cooperstown radar altogether after picking up two votes in 1945.

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I don’t know why I liked reading this as much as I did:

When the Washington Nationals agreed to terms with one of the top prizes of the MLB offseason, signing closer Rafael Soriano to a two-year deal, it caught nearly everyone in the baseball world by surprise.

…

Storen saw the news online and immediately called his good friend and roommate, Tyler Clippard, who happens to be the other closer the team already had in the fold.

“I just saw it on Twitter and I called him and I said, ‘have you seen this?’ We were like, ‘what?’”

The conversation was short and speculative as neither player really had a lot of information about the signing, they knew as much as anyone else.
(Source)

I mean, it’s easy to forget that baseball players are real people. But stuff like this is a reminder that, sure, they are. You read some crazy news on Twitter that impacts your life, you totally pick up the phone and call a friend. I have no larger point to make, just that reading this makes me like Storen and Clippard. That is all.

Those concerned about creeping Maoism will recall that Four Loko — the drink that helpfully combined restorative caffeine with mind-clearing alcohol — was banned by the meddlesome crypto-Etruscans at the FDA. After all, taking our guns away is easier when we’re neither awake nor drunk.

Anyhow, base-ball-ing legend Boileryard Clarke, who has for years sustained himself on a diet of nothing more than hooch and punched-out constables, has entered the fray and wielded his celebrity like a sword that looks like a dick.

So please do drink deeply of first the following paid advertisement and then a high-reaching pour of Four Loko …

Play better base ball and beat back tertiary syphilis with Four Loko.

Bill Baer of Crashburn Alley has dedicated at least a portion of his evening to reminding us, the tired surfers of the internet, that Carlos Ruiz one time conspicuously mastered his opponent (in this case, Atlanta left-hander Eric O’Flaherty) in May of 2012.

What the present author has considered — and asks below in the form of a rather late quiz — is how much Carlos Ruiz actually cares about what just happened in the GIF embedded here.

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The author had occasion Sunday — during the Milwaukee Brewers’ On Deck fanfest event — to ask occasionally mustachioed and always Canadian John Axford three questions of considerable import. Below is an audio record of Axford’s answers — and a more or less accurate transcript of same.

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Yesterday, NotGraphs editor Carson Cistulli attended the Brewers On Deck event in downtown Milwaukee.

In the posts that Mr. Cistulli makes at Fan- and NotGraphs today, he might brag about how his time at said event was “behind the scenes” thanks to his new status as a member of BBWAA; he might write about a surprisingly witty comment by Ryan Braun; he might relay how very approachable some players were; he might even tell you that he couldn’t bring himself to talk to Bob Uecker for fear that the only question he could have possibly asked Mr. Uecker is, “Will you be my grandpa?”

Under less-informed circumstances, I would look forward to reading about any and all of the aforementioned topics, especially as Mr. Cistulli, who you might have noticed has a certain facility with language, might present them. What Mr. Cistulli does not have, is a sense of obligation to his readership, nor to the American public in general.

I know this because I know the following:

1. that Mr. Cistulli, yesterday, at the Brewers On Deck event in downtown Milwaukee, witnessed Dennis Haskins, AKA Mr. Belding;

2. that Mr. Cistulli did not take pains to discern why the fuck Dennis Haskins was just chillin’ with people in Milwaukee, at a Milwaukee Brewers offseason event;

3. Mr. Cistulli does not plan to even mention — in what might be an oppressive number of posts concerning Brewers On Deck — the appearance of Mr. Haskins at an event where both of them, presumably, held similarly exclusive access to things like a “meat-sandwich-only sandwich spread.”

When pressed as to why he would not even deign to mention Mr. Haskins’s mysterious presence at the event, Cistulli waved a characteristically limp and dismissive hand, saying, “It’s too easy.”

For prodigious talents such as Mr. Cistulli, talents for which entire subsidiary websites are created, it is too easy to give the public what it wants — nay: what it deserves. It is too easy to link Mr. Haskins’s connection to baseball. It is too easy to indulge in the blogability of a personality such as Dennis Haskins.

Well, I am no great talent; I am easy; I am not too good, Mr. Cistulli, to give the NotGraphs readership what they want.

And what they want is to more clearly imagine you, Mr. Cistulli, cradled in the arms of the man you dismissed so limp-wristedly.

The readership will also feel vindicated to know, Mr. Cistulli, that Dennis Haskins is a bigger man than you are — quite literally, though also figuratively. For even though you will not so much as acknowledge him, Mr. Cistulli, Dennis Haskins would like you to know that he very much supports your Twitter feed, such as it is.

And now the readership has been served properly, Mr. Cistulli. Take note. Please also take note that you left your monocle on my chaise lounge.

Those in the know know that Reds prospect Billy Hamilton is not content with merely pilfering bases and scampering home. Rather, it is his roguish aim to scrub from history the other, older Billy Hamilton, who toiled from 1888 to 1901 (i.e., Back When God Liked Us). Those ill intentions are ill enough, but now comes the clearest sign yet that he’s winning …

As you can plainly see, New Billy Hamilton has now placed himself athwart and astride the fellow travelers of Old Billy Hamilton — many of them Irish, all of them racist.

It is now New Billy Hamilton who is hoisting poisonous toddies with Ed Delahanty. It is now New Billy Hamilton who worries about the croup, hardening of the liver and vaguer body troubles. It is now New Billy Hamilton who motivates himself with a fear of old-country famine. It is New Billy Hamilton who has agreed to marry the Colonel’s daughter for the sake of appearances. It is New Billy Hamilton who, upon entering the confessional, says, “Get comfortable, Padre.”

Thenceforth, New Billy Hamilton will entertain comparisons to only New Billy Hamilton.