For no apparent reason, Werner Herzog, icon of depressive existentialist cinema, recently sat down and discussed America’s pastime with Hall of Fame shortstop Ozzie Smith. In particular, they discussed baseball strategy, fundamentals, and the grueling experience of being a baseball fan, season after season.

In case you missed the conversation, here’s a choice Herzogian nugget:

“Ozzie always says [playing baseball is] full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much erotic for the fan. I see it more full of obscenity. It makes a person vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical in the stands or the living rooms. I would see fornication with delusion and asphyxiation and choking and fighting to believe in a losing team, I would see hope growing and then just rotting away.

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Health can be confusing! Sometimes you feel healthy when you’re actually not, and other times you don’t feel healthy and your body actually is but your brain is betraying you by saying it isn’t. Even though your brain is part of your body, which makes it even more confusing. And that’s not even including the pineal gland, which houses our soul and regulates our sleep patterns. I mean, yikes, right? That’s why I, Dr. Mitch Williams, M.D., am here to answer your questions about healthiness.

Q: I’m a college pitcher, and after my last start my arm was feeling sore. What should I do? Do I just wait, or is there a way to speed up the healing process?

A: Pain is jut your body telling you that it’s disappointed in you. The key to overcoming pain is to repeat the motion that caused the pain, and doing it harder, and more suddenly than you did before. This stretches out the muscle cells and allows life-giving aether to enter the nuclei. This makes them stretchier, which in turn lets you throw harder and more suddenly than you could before. It’s like a cycle of success!

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From Baseball Think Factory, 3/17/13:

Now Is the Time to Lock Up Dustin Pedroia

Dustin Pedroia is a 29-year-old second basemen who is signed for the next two years and with a reasonable team option for 2015. Normally, I would be against inking such a player to an extension, but I think I would make an exception for Pedroia. Here’s why:

—First and foremost, Pedroia is the face of the team and a really excellent player. In his first 6 years as a full-time player he’s put up 31.1 fWAR. He’s beloved by the fans, well-liked by his peers, and seemingly has an exemplary work ethic.

Exemplary work ethic. Well-liked. Beloved. So let’s take away his freedom.

So you thought you could go first-to-third on yet another Yuniesky Betancourt Super Error ©? So you thought maybe the world had tilted its freckled hand in your favor? So you thought that limp toss had some divine timing? You think it was an accident?

Guess again.

‘CAUSE YOU JUST GOT YUNI’D.

What can I compare Mike Petriello to? He is finer than a summer’s a day, a dew-crested tulip, or a big ol’ ziplock bag of melted chocolate. He is even finer than these things because no chocolate, flower, or Earthly rotation has enGIF’d MLB footage for me at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday morning.

It’s a matter of record that competitive fist-pumping was an event at the inaugural Olympic games held in 776 BCE, and was a fixture of said games for over 400 years. The choice not to revive the event for the modern competition has been criticized by voices as diverse as Anglo-American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and also singer-songwriter Sade, probably.

During the fifth inning, though, of their WBC victory on Sunday night over Japan, Puerto Rican batterymates Jose De La Torre and Yadier Molina made an important submission to the annals of the fist pump, executing this elaborate but also spirited maneuver following the strikeout of Japanese third baseman Nobuhiro Matsuda.

There is no ballplayer named Ptolemy Beans Doogan-Beans.

The urchin will sell no more newspapers.

The gentleman, otherwise fulfilled in his life and work, will soon be known to all as “patient zero.”

The archbishop now doubts his own certainties.

The wife looks up from the dishes and knows at once she cherishes nothing.

The man sits at the formica table and stares. He is waiting for the gloaming to advance across the yard.

What else is he to do?

She attributes the awful thing the boy said to the caprices of youth. He will say it to her again in 20 years.

The man rises for work each morning in the same way that the tides are yoked to the moon.

At this one moment, all across what was Gaul no one is making love. Not even her.

The wine has turned.

At the market, he thought for a moment he saw his dead father. He knew then he would not mail the letter.

He maintains the affair because it is a different drudgery.

She decides to tell her grandfather that she’s heard all his stories before.

Look at your own face: Are you not a Walker Evans subject?

At the tavern, it is late, and all the glasses are empty.

For there is no ballplayer named Ptolemy Beans Doogan-Beans.

Alive or dead, there is no Ptolemy Beans Doogan-Beans.

Never having visited the state of Arizona for Spring Training, I was initially unsure of what to/what not to wear. Actually, that’s not true. I had 99% of my clothing decided, with one large omission; which hat to wear. As I do not have what one would describe as a rooting interest in any team that plays their Spring Training games in Arizona, I was left in a bit of a pickle. I had the option of wearing a Minnesota Twins hat, but that seemed a little gauche — as the Twins don’t play a game there. I might as well wear a hat stating “I’d rather be in Florida,” which is a hat hopefully nobody owns. My other options were hats bearing either the logos of basketball teams, or golf equipment companies, neither of which seemed appropriate either. So I settled — though “settled” seems perhaps like a word that invokes displeasure in the ultimate outcome — on a hat bearing the logo of the Saint Paul Saints (seen on the right), my local representative of the Northern League of the American Association of Independent Professional Baseball. Though they don’t do Spring Training, wearing their signifier seemed less assuming, a little curious perhaps, but not aggressive. Look at me. I’m just a baseball fan enjoying baseball wearing a baseball hat.

This decision took about three days to complete, and I was happy with it. Imagine my surprise then — no, seriously, imagine it — when I arrived this morning at my hotel in Arizona to find fellow Patrick Dubuque, mostly of NotGraphs fame, wearing a very similar hat (left). Let me assure you that this, while delightfully whimsical, was not planned nor intended.

Details are sketchy as to why Dubuque, who hails from the Seattle area, would wear a hat of an independent team from the middle-west. I have been informed by the subject himself, however, that his decision proved to be less irksome than mine, as he apparently owns only one hat.

The world is still trembling, one imagines, at the scientific discovery the present author made on these very pages on June 6, 2011. In said article, the illustration in which I reproduce here because you are assumedly too lazy to click a link, it was established that the offensive performance of a baseball player was correlated with the length of his last name.

The Chinese Baseball Club of China has taken this inefficiency to heart and elevated it to heretofore unheard of letter-to-name ratios. For a recent but specifically unspecific WBC contest, they wielded the following starting lineup:

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Sorry, Bobo Polaroids or whatever your name is, but Brian Harper is going to have to take this call …

It might be regarding the waterfront development project, or it might be regarding one of the countless opportunities for high-level arbitrage of which Brian Harper chronically avails himself. Just know that Brian Harper needs to talk business right the crap now. You can snap your little Donruss picture or whatever the hell this is all about later, but right now Brian Harper is seeing to the business of taking a business telephone call regarding the dollars.

“What do you think I should do?” Brian Harper is asking of his broker or minority partners. It’s a rhetorical query, of course. For Brian Harper knows exactly what the shit he’s going to do, and that’s because when the subject is U.S. American business, Banknotes Harper is the final word on the last word. “That’s what you think I should do?” says Banknotes. “Fuck you. Do the opposite.”

Banknotes Harper knows his way around a racket much like he knows his way around the sex closet at the American Airlines Admirals Club at … well, pick your hub airport of choice and Banknotes Harper knows his way around the sex closet at the American Airlines Admirals Club at that particular hub airport.

Baseball, you see, is but a revenue stream for Brian Harper. Buck Banknotes takes the money he makes from baseball and plows the shit right back into kick-ass interest-bearing vehicles that nobody even knows about yet. Maybe this call is about that. “Pay down the principal?” Brian Harper Buck Banknotes is wont to say. “I’m the principal, and I’m calling you to my office so as to beat your cheeks with a wooden paddle. Dollars.”

When not parking his Duesenberg in his heated garage, Lord God Cabbage Brian Harper is parking ducats in interest-bearing offshore accounts that no one even knows about yet — this is ground-level shit — and realizing boundless capital gains before the next call comes in. And the calls are always coming in. “Margin call?” Coin Skins Mazumah Brian Harper often says. “Call me back on my cutting-edge portable horn when your margins are sufficient to waste my time trying to talk treasure to the hairy treasure chest.”

Brian Harper would tell you it’s just going to be a moment, but it’s not going to be a moment. “Time is money?” Bread Property Doubloons Brian Harper says to you, even though you didn’t say “Time is money” to him.

Then he says something else about a pending stop-limit order, at which point you decide to go take Tim Laudner’s picture instead.

This week has somehow turned into Found Week for this writer, but I pass on another gem. Today is Kirby Puckett’s birthday. He would have been 54. Some — perhaps rightly so — contend his Hall of Fame legitimacy. Other — more rightly so — scowl at the off-the-field acts for which he was accused.

Nevertheless, this clip involves David Letterman, and a player that still carries a lot of clout in my neck of the woods.

Let it be known that from this day forward, all my fantasy teams will be labeled the Creepy Pockets.