A List of Fan Stereotypes Provided by Google Correlate, Sorted by City

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You and I are

bound by self-same objectives,
one can assume.

Our flight: From MDW to PHX by way of OKC.
“Can I raise this?”
Yes you may.
An armrest between two broad-shoulders
is more a barrier than a rest
anyway,
and since this is the only
time our arms will ever touch,
why not let them press together, two hams
resting flank against flank for one
hour and forty-five minutes.

And in two days, at an A’s / White Sox game,
I will describe your gas
to interested friends.

This is our only interaction
and unless I am
in OKC or you are
in MDW
and again we somehow twain for another
hour and forty-five minutes,
or maybe side-by-
flank at an A’s / White Sox game,

this will be our last.
Fare thee well.

Image credit.

So, okay: Joey Votto hit a baseball out of the entire stadium the other day. That happens sometimes.

But then Joey Votto felt uncomfortable about all the cheering and stuff the crowd was doing because of how far and hard he just hit a baseball. Maybe he was concerned that Yu Darvish would feel bad if the crowd hooted and hollered too much. Maybe he became embarrassed the way a man does when he plays amongst boys.

Whatever it was, Joey Votto felt the need to signal the crowd to be silent.

And the crowd obeyed.

Some nights I don’t feel like writing. I sit in the dark listening to the furnace and staring at the pale white of the open Word document, and I wonder if I’m ever going to write again. I always think of Jim Bouton in Ball Four, examining his own arm as if it’s a foreign object, trying to count the pitches left in it. How many words do I have left in me?

I’m guessing Ring Lardner probably felt much the same way.

Lardner died seventy-nine and a half years ago, and published his most famous novel ninety-nine years ago. His work rarely saw a second printing in his lifetime. He was close friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, met Hemingway but didn’t get along, drunkenly danced on a lawn to try to get Joseph Conrad’s attention. Mencken admired him, Woolf praised him. He’s mostly forgotten now, just like Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser and most of pre-war American writers, men and women who lived in too quiet a time.

Fitzgerald bemoaned this fact in his eulogy, “Ring”, in which he writes:

“During those [sports-writing] years, when most men of promise achieve an adult education, if only in the school of war, Ring moved in the company of a few dozen illiterates playing a boy’s game. … A writer can spin on about his adventures after thirty, after forty, after fifty, but the criteria by which these adventures are weighed and valued are irrevocably settled at the age of twenty-five. However deeply Ring might cut into it, his cake had exactly the diameter of Frank Chance’s diamond.”

Perhaps this is what caused the disquiet I felt as I read Lardner’s You Know Me Al on a flight to Arizona to meet my younger, more intelligent and far more focused colleagues. I read the book in two hours, after promising to put it down at the end of every chapter. It’s a comedy, in the sense that Don Quixote is a comedy: one in which we are meant to laugh at the main character, but find the target of the satire too universal, too personal to take any great pleasure out of it.

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What can I say, really? Like all of my fantasies, I died in the end. I mean, I guess I didn’t actually die, but I almost electrocuted myself trying to restart my wireless router, which did, I suppose, actually die mid-draft. We should all be so lucky. I’d tell you who I ended up with, but what’s the point? It doesn’t count. Not that real baseball counts either. It’s a game. I’ll never understand how some people can get so worked up over a game when there are people starving in Africa, in Asia, and right here, in my living room. Three cats and a dog, all starving. Who has the energy to think about feeding them when there are people starving in Africa, Asia, and so many other places around the world?

I used to think it would be nice to visit some of those places, but then I realized I’d probably just end up being one of the starving ones. Chris Sale seems like he’s probably starving. So skinny. Oh, and he’s on my team. I outbid everyone else for him. Finally won something, two hours into the auction. It must be a fantasy if I’m winning something. Wow. Thinking about starving made me bid way too high for Mike Trout. Sophomore slump is coming, I’m sure. But his name is a food and I was hungry, so I went to 50 for him. Why not throw as much as I can on a couple of superstars, right? You never know when a bomb’s gonna go off and the draft is going to suddenly come to an end. And then it matters whether I stopped at 48 for Trout? No, if you want someone, you draft them.

I feel so bad for Mike Trout. Reaching the pinnacle of his career — of his life — at such a young age. There is nowhere to go but down. I don’t even know how he gets out of bed in the morning. Nowhere to go but down, Mike. Speaking of nowhere to go, Kyle Lohse. I feel like Kyle Lohse and I have a lot in common. Nobody wants us, not even the Astros. I bid a dollar for him at the end of the auction and got him. We’ll show them, Kyle. We’ll show all of my self-important leaguemates, with their jobs and their families and their breakfasts and lunches and dinners. We don’t need any of that. We have each other.

We also have Bartolo Colon, because you can’t think about starving people around the world without thinking about the guy who ate all of their food. I also went to $3 on A-Rod, but, hey, I can’t really bring myself to draft a guy who’s in even worse shape than I am.

Good luck in your drafts too!

Play this music:

Watch this GIF:

NOTE: If’n you look upon those barely-beclothed dancing women of the above-embeded musical video, I must here remind you these fair ladies are — most likely — your mother’s age, if not older. In fact, one may even be your very mother. Unless you are the rare elder statesman of NotGraphs.

Such is the majesty and mystery of time.

Max Scherzer, bathed in the uncreated light.

How has the author spent his Sunday? Generally speaking, not in any way that would credit the species.

Yet, just like a broken clock, that same author is both (a) standing quite still in your grandmother’s anteroom and (b) occasionally right.

In this particular case, a brief moment of inspiration has produced the following — i.e. three premises towards what would likely be an important syllogism were it complete. But it is not complete. And perhaps — like all things that are beautiful but imperfect — never will be.

In any case, here are those same three premises, sans conclusion.

Premise No. 1
To philosophize is to learn how to die.

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If you follow college basketball (or even if you don’t), you may have taken part in the American tradition of filling out an NCAA Tournament bracket. There will come a time, if it hasn’t already happened, when your bracket will become busted, and you will lose interest in said tournament.

When that time comes, take solace in the following project I have worked very hard to create. It is a bracket of mustaches, for which to pick the best mustache in baseball. The present author has taken the time to (arbitrarily, as time was a concern) whittle down the candidates to the two finalists, below. Choose wisely, pick your winner, and click the image to reveal the answer.

Last weekend, a bunch of FanGraphs/RotoGraphs/NotGraphs writers descended on Arizona for our annual Spring Training Thing. The traditional Big Pizza Bash at Cibo happened on Saturday night, and Rob Neyer (maybe you’ve heard of him) was among the special guests. At one point during the evening, a stack of baseball cards was making the rounds. When it got to my table, the word was “Neyer brought these, he says take some.” Sweet. The cards were very new, and I had heard of many of the players. I took three, and later that night at the hotel I read the “Scouting Reports” that Bowman had on the back.

Needless to say, they were amazing. They used the right words and everything. I am not sure why anyone reads Baseball America when insight like this is on the back of cards. So I thought I should share some of the stuff I learned. I think it is an appropriate thing to do, given that Rob himself is no stranger to the “here’s what I learned from some baseball cards” technique. Not sure he has ever taken it to the level of scouting, though. Look out Hulet, Sussman, and Newman!

At first, I was just going to take three random cards. Then I noticed there were multiple players named “Austin.” That is a great contemporary baseball first name, isn’t it? It’s the “Dakota” of prospect names. So I had to take two Austins.

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The following tweet is entirely and in-no-way altered from the original (click to embiggen):