I have no predictions, but I do have the ability to use Google’s Image Search.

The following are ten depictions of baseball superimposed on the 9000-series of the BlackBerry phone line, otherwise known as the Bold.

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While everyone else here NotGraphs is hopping on the Bold Prediction Bandwagon, I’m going to push the envelope by proffering to readers Ten Old Predictions, which is bold in its own right, I think.

Also, in case you didn’t notice, old rhymes with bold, ya see.

1. Carl Crawford will win Comeback Player of the Year.
2. Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, Mark Buehrle, and Emilio Bonifacio will lead their team to a division title.
3. The Houston Astros will fail to win 60 games.
4. Matt Wieters will be the best offensive catcher in the league.
5. Spending spree in Los Angeles will be followed up by a disappointing season.
6. Ryan Braun will beat his PED charges.
7. New place, new faces won’t be enough to raise attendance in Miami.
8. Yuniesky Betancourt will fall into significant playing time with a Major League club.
9. I will eat a burrito for lunch.
10. FanGraphs will acquire an excellent baseball website to add to its team.

Here is the deal, internet. 99% of the time, your fickle, cheezburger-ridden attention span is a thorn in my side, sometimes causing you to have forgotten something I’ve written while you’re still in the process of reading it. But not today! These are the golden times, the week before the season, where I as a Responsible Internet Journalist Figure can say anything I want about anything, and you will praise me for bold vision and keen insight. This, dear reader, is prediction season.

But you don’t want predictions. You want bold predictions, so bold that if my predictions were a barbecue sauce, they would melt through the meat, through the bone, through your fingers and the plate and the floor and the earth’s very crust itself with its spicy, spicy hubris. And I am nothing if not your faceless, linguistic slave. So partake – delicately, one or perhaps a fraction at a time – these bold predictions for the 2013 season.

(Other NotGraphs Bold Predictions: Jeremy / Bradley)

1. On Tuesday, May 21, the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Aaron Hill will face reliever Rex Brothers of the Colorado Rockies in the eighth inning. On the fifth pitch of that at bat, Hill will be thrown out on a grounder to third base. You will have forgotten this prediction by then. Read the rest of this entry »

Other NotGraphs Bold Predictions:
Jeremy Blachman’s 10 Bold Predictions for 2013

1. On April 15th, Giancarlo Stanton will hit a line drive deep off the green walls of the Marlin’s godawful-green home park. Instead of reaching third on a gimme triple, he will stop at second base. With both feet on the cushy white bag, he will face the cameras. In full zoom, the cameras will catch him mouthing, “Oh! Life has a wretched banality and the clock’s rhythm is more steady than the heart’s. Even if I was on third base, ain’t no one but me could drive me home anyway.”

2. On April 5th, Pirates outfielder Andrew McCutchen will smash a line drive to left that pulverizes a dove mid-flight, about 15 feet above third base. Vin Scully will ejaculate: “HOLY BIRD-F**KS!!!” The phrase will later be engraved on both his Hall of Fame busts.

3. Ben Zobrist will do everything and then do it all again because he did everything the first time without making any outs. National writers will again suspect the Rays are trying to trade him for Howie Kendrick and that the Rays wish he would stop moving around the field, playing all those positions and so forth.

4. The Houston Astros will win the AL West after actual, cosmic asteroids utterly destroy American’s western seaboard. And after the Rangers underachieve expectations.
Read the rest of this entry »

From Yahoo! Sports:

[T]he Lehigh Valley IronPigs of the International League, the Philadelphia Phillies’ Triple-A club, have announced video games in their male urinals that are powered by pee…. Pee-gamers get a score each time they play and a code they can later punch into a website (wash your hands first, dudes) to track their progress. The top scorers even get displayed on the jumbotron during the game.

Link.

If I played, I think I’d probably use a pseudonym. (High scores on the Jumbotron? Really?) And, just to make this fun, ideas for pee-game pseudonyms in the comments?

Have you considered going to a Marlins game this year? Of course you haven’t. You are a person of taste and discernment. It’s why you frequent all the best websites and also NotGraphs. You know that attending Marlins games only serves to prop up the failing tyrannical regime of Jeffrey Loria, the very antithesis of the benevolent despot we generally prefer to the chaotic meanderings and whims of a government by and for the people. For while the tyranny of the majority is terrible, truly the tyranny of the art dealer turned sports mogul is even worse.

So no, you will not be attending any Marlins games this year. And neither, frankly, will anyone else worth his or her salt. For the Marlins are actually having to resort to a two-for-one Groupon ticket offering to get people to show up on Opening Day. Opening Day is amateur hour, when every Tom, Dick, and Harry who likes to claim they’re a baseball fan but who constantly complains that the games are too long and boring commute to the park to get drunk with like-minded rabble, and then slosh homeward for the rest of the season. The Marlins can’t even fill their ballpark with those dillweeds.

As far as I can tell, the Marlins didn’t even come up with a marketing slogan for 2013 (unless “Single game tickets on sale now!” counts. Sean Flynn (the Marlins’ vice president for marketing) promised we would have one over a month ago. Not that I want to encourage anyone to attend Marlins games going forward, but I do want Flynn to be able to keep his job (especially since he’s probably losing his pension). So he should totally feel free to use any of these to entice people to come out to the ballpark: Read the rest of this entry »

Mercifully presented without comment, the Meme-ing of Yuniesky Betancourt …

Virgil Trucks died on Saturday at 95, relinquishing his crowns as both the oldest living former Tiger and the oldest living former Yankee (he finished his career in the Bronx in 1958). So who has filled his shoes? Well, it seems the new oldest Yankee is a guy by the picturesque name of Rugger Ardizoia. I had never heard of him, so I looked him up.

Read the rest of this entry »

A very special gift from my buddy, Dylan.

Some time ago, probably about a year ago, I proposed to my fellow NotGraphs contributors that we do a NotGraphs Franchise Player Draft. It’s something in which there was at least mild interest, and I’d still like to see it done, despite my laziness in following up on my original inquiry.

And though I haven’t followed up on that inquiry, I’d say that the idea of a NotGraphs Franchise Player is something that I ponder almost daily — either directly or by way of considering (1) what makes NotGraphs NotGraphs, or (2) why, precisely, I am drawn to certain baseball players more than others.

Addressing those questions would be central to the NotGraphs Franchise Player Draft. Each participant in the draft would select one baseball player — living or dead, considering that death is such a strong theme in these immortal electronic pages — that he believes most embodies l’Esprit NotGraphs. Among the things that will be considered, I’m sure, are a player’s personal aesthetic (e.g. hair and facial hair); his extracurricular habits; his on-field antics; possibly his NERD Score; whether/in what ways he is photogenic; myths surrounding him; his sabremetric standing and/or statistical oddities.

So, what sort of player makes for NotGraphs Franchise Player™ material?

Read the rest of this entry »

Fun to read the real ones over at RotoGraphs.

1. Josh Hamilton will defy what seem to be everyone’s lowered expectations in Los Angeles by having an MVP season… and winning the Cy Young Award as well, after the Angels convert him to pitching and slot him into the rotation. Poor Jered Weaver. He didn’t think a bad spring would lead to losing his spot to an outfielder!

2. The Yankees win the division by going EVEN OLDER, with an April trade for left-handed reliever Darren Oliver, a May signing of 1B Eddie Murray, and the return of Bobby Richardson to second base after Robinson Cano opts to undergo season-ending breast augmentation surgery. New/old manager Yogi Berra leads them to their 28th World Series crown.

3. Mike Trout will be this year’s Mike Trout, going back in time to re-create his magical rookie season and give the Angels one more year of pre-arbitration eligibility.

4. Jeremy Hefner: National League Cy Young Award winner, and heir to the Playboy fortune.

5. Chris Davis, following his 2012 victory as a relief pitcher, will save more games this season than Wade Davis. Wade Davis will strike out more batters than the number of times Chris Davis strikes out. Ike Davis will hit more home runs than Wade Davis and Chris Davis combined. Rajai Davis will play more games than Doug Davis.

6. Josh Rutledge will be a top-50 shortstop.

7. Tim Lincecum will end the season with a higher ERA than he starts the season with. He will also end the year with more career strikeouts, more career walks, and fewer career wins, thanks to ongoing litigation about a handful of victories in 2011.

8. Jose Tabata outearns Travis Snider. In salary. Travis Snider, on the other hand, hits 38 home runs and comes in 4th in the NL MVP vote.

9. Chris Archer earns the most value of any Rays starter not named Price, Hellickson, Moore, Cobb, Niemann, Colome, Hernandez, Odorizzi, and Torres.

10. Manny Ramirez, finding success in Taiwan, returns to the major leagues as a starting outfielder for the Cubs. He hits 20 home runs in just over two months, and ends up with a $22 million contract to return next year as the regular DH for the Yankees.