As an intelligent baseball fan, you have surely by now read or heard the famous and apocryphal story of Rickey Henderson renewing his acquaintance with John Olerud. If not, here’s the original tale, as told by ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian:

In spring training 1999, Rickey Henderson of the Mets was reunited with first baseman John Olerud, who had been his teammate with the Blue Jays six years earlier. As most people know, Olerud had an aneurysm in college, which required brain surgery. So to protect his head, he was allowed to wear a helmet in the field. As the story goes, Henderson was talking to Olerud one day, noticed the helmet and said “You know, when I played in Toronto, we had a guy who wore a helmet.”

“Rickey,” said Olerud, “that was me.”

Now, for your enjoyment, please partake of three adaptations of this timeless yarn.

1.

It had been weeks now, but John never got used to hospitals. The stinging scent of disinfectant, the hollow glow of the fluorescent lights, the squeak of intern’s sneakers in endless tiled hallways: all of it felt synthetic, unnatural, unwelcome. John reached room A232, took a single deep breath, and pushed through.

Read the rest of this entry »

Worst day of spring training, physicals #ihateneedles but the good news is, once today’s done, baseball will officially be started!#LGM

— Justin Turner (@redturn2) February 17, 2013

In other Mets news, the very excellent Metsblog has a couple of photos from the Mets team bowling night. But it doesn’t say who won– the team with David Wright, Ike Davis, and owner’s son Jeff Wilpon? Or the team with Collin McHugh, Rob Carson, and Josh Edgin? Any guesses?

The following action-news photographic images, airlifted from the front lines of media sociale, prove beyond all doubt that veteran tosser LaTroy Hawkins is a rooter of not only Kansas Jayhawks basketball, but also of the Nippled Mounds of American Ladies …

And …

Having read and re-read the Zagat Guide to the Good Life, I have long been aware that an appreciation of both Dr. Naismith’s game and lady paps signify a striving toward said Good Life.

So it is with LaTroy Hawkins, Sommelier of Titties.

Whoa, whoa, whoa …

What the fuck did you just say to Rich Gale? What in the living fuck did you just say to this 6-foot-7, 225-pound sum-buck?

Rich Gale will set those gold-rimmed Foster Grants aside — maybe hand them for safekeeping to Pete LaCock, who will mutter, “Shit, you shouldn’t have said that,” — give a considered stroke of his mustache with thumb and pointer finger and get the shit down to business. Don’t let the feathered body wave fool you: If Rich Gale’s smoky baritone doesn’t get through to you, then these got-damn soup bones will do the rest of the talking.

Yes indeed, I’d pump the brakes over there, tadpole, lest you want Rich Gale to use these meaty shilelaghs to beat some wits into you. Within the last fifteen minutes, Rich Gale has factually pinched off a crap bigger than you. Say something like that again, and Rich Gale’s going to get around to tenderizing some meat.

You started in on him, and he told you that tiny boats should stay near the shore. But you kept at it. And now he’s giving you that smoldering, 12-gauge glare that says it looks like it might be time to take out the trash. Maybe what’s coming — and what’s coming for you is a mouth full of bloody Chiclets — will give you pause the next time you take a notion to nip at the heels of Rich God Almighty Damn Gale. Shoulda left your mouth at home, you dumb dumbass dummy.

Yeah, this is gonna hurt you a whole helluva lot more than it hurts Streets of Fire Rich Gale.

In an ongoing effort to scientifically clinch the correlation between longitude and awesome, I present to you — without comment, but with hearty pleasure — the following gems mined from Tumblr, where they were tagged thusly: “japanese baseball.”

From user 1863-project:

From user thefuzzden:

Read the rest of this entry »

North Carolina State sophomore and left-hander Carlos Rodon, who struck out 135 batters last year in 114.2 innings, is pitching this very moment against Appalachian State. His slider is excellent, and has allowed him to record five strikeouts against the first 13 batters he’s faced of the game. It has also been hit very far out of Doak Field.

Here’s a slider for a swing and miss to Appalachian State DH Dillon Dobson:

Read the rest of this entry »

Unless you are living under a rock, you have heard that another rock (probably bigger than the one under which you are living) crashed into the Earth somewhere in a place the scientific community calls “Russia.” An image is below:

No disrespect to CNN, but the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has actually done their due diligence and (quite easily) uncovered the source of said meteor. ENHANCE!

ENHANCE!

ENHANCE!

I knew it. Just search for “meteor” in Baseball-Reference.

What can’t this phenom do?!

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the woman we now know as Jane Austen was in fact a time-traveling criminal. After watching the movie Clueless in 1995, Ms. “Austen” created a temporal paradox by traveling back to the late eighteenth century, ingratiating herself in a middle-class home, and pre-inventing the romantic comedy. The historical Sandiego may have gotten away with her literary fraud, too, if she hadn’t made a critical error in the early pages of Northanger Abbey (1817):

“…and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books…”

Ms. Austen, soon after the book was published, was assassinated via “typhus” by TimeCop Jean-Claude Van Damme. But for reasons that are whispered by time paradox conspiracy theory buffs and JCVD fans, Austen’s novels were allowed to remain in the timeline. This led to various American experts debunking the pre-invention of baseball by Austen and salvaging the more reasonable theory that one single man invented a game involving rudimentary objects and basic rules, thousands of years into mankind’s existence.

Read the rest of this entry »

Because I refuse to meditate upon his personal life for even a moment longer than is necessary, I’m unsure as to how the very profligate Dayn Perry not only (a) made his way to a site called Twit Amore — which site encourages visitors to “Discover who they love on Twitter” — but also (b) decided to engage said website in the service of that Discovery.

As the image above indicates, however, Perry did both of those things — and the results, we will say, are really of benefit to no one. If Perry has ever loved the author, he has done so only with the aid of a preposition — which is to say, he has loved on and astride and towards the author, but never just the author himself, in the accusative form of the noun.