PHOENIX, Ariz. — R.A. Dickey, who started Team USA’s opener in the 2013 World Baseball Classic, set a few things straight when asked about the team and its chances. “It’s not about the names. It’s about the makeup,” said Dickey, emphasizing that any gap in the Americans’ star power will be amply filled by mascara and rouge. Asked about his teammate’s comments, David Wright added: “Listen, don’t get me wrong, we’re all going to leave it all out there and hopefully come home with a trophy. But let’s be real — the main reason I’m here is to look completely fabulous in front of an international audience.”

As Mike Axisa pointed out yesterday, Johan Santana is not very happy with his situation right now. He’s coming back from injury, he wants to throw, and in fact is throwing in the bullpen against the wishes of Mets management, who haven’t allowed him to pitch in a Grapefruit League game yet.

But the real scoop is being, ah, scooped by the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team, and that scoop is about Johan Santana’s Gatorade Towel, which the star pitcher recently jammed into a fence link and forgot about while he crossed his arms in selfishness.

Johan Santana’s Towel looks on as Johan Santana pouts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our fearful leader, Carson Cistulli, should be packing for his trip to Spring Training, but it appears that he’s putting the finishing touches on his latest work of substandard genius.

(h/t to the impeccably named Womb-Tang for the picture, and Greg for bringing it to my attention.)

1. Travis d’Artagnan, C, New York (NL). d’Artagnan was captain of the Toronto Musketeers, a semipro team led by Louis Merloni and killed when a ball hit him in the throat at the Siege of (Kevin) Maastricht in 1673.

2. Gary Sanchez, C, New York (AL). Far too distracted making Will Ferrell movies.

3. Francisco Lindor Chocolate Truffle by Lindt, SS, Cleveland. Lindor used to be 175 pounds, until he started to eat all twenty varieties of hard chocolate shell with smooth chocolate filling. Now he is 425 pounds, and has the second-lowest range factor in professional baseball, ahead of only some guy on the Yankees.

4. Mike Old, 3B, Texas. Not to be confused with Mike Olt, Mike Old turned 106 last October.

5. Kaleb Coward, 3B, Los Angeles (AL). Afraid of the ball.

This picture, which I cannot source because I cannot find where it came from, and google image search cannot find it for me, speaks to me on many different levels:

Read the rest of this entry »

Former MLB shortstop and current manager of the Águilas Cibaeñas of the Dominican Winter League, Felix Fermin, is going to eat your entrails in a second, but right now he is putting on this baseball cap.

Felix Fermeeeeeeeeeeeeen!!!!!!

Felix Fermin has two big strong hands, which are capable of incredible dexterity; you are seeing this dexterity in action presently as he puts this cap directly onto his head without crushing said cap. In a second, though, just as soon as Felix Fermin is comfortable with how this cap rests on his head, he’s going to use those hands to pull your outer flesh apart in order to gain access to your delicious entrails. Yes, Felix Fermin is convinced that your entrails are delicious and he is happy to see you have arrived, fresh and jiggling and alive.

Read the rest of this entry »

I grew up an only child in a quiet neighborhood filled with evergreens and retired people. With few children my own age nearby, I devoted much of my time and energy into devising means of entertaining myself. There were swamps to explore and forts to build during those rocket summers, swings to be swung. But also, armed with an endless supply of thrift store equipment, I hurled myself at every sport imaginable. I played the part of athlete, broadcaster, general manager, statistician, and commissioner all at once, for both sides.

Not every sport was equally viable for one player. Basketball worked well enough, though football was a near disaster. (On a given play, I would hike the ball to myself, drop back, throw the ball into the air, run under it, make the catch, and then proceed to tackle myself.) I talked my parents into letting me dig one golf hole in the middle of our yard, and then set up a course by arranging eight tees around it in each compass direction. My parents even bought and set up a tetherball pole in the driveway in what I can only imagine was a cruel and well-executed joke.

But my favorite sport of all, as now, was baseball. Of course, my Graig Nettles-signed wood bat was still too heavy as a little kid, so I turned to the svelte yellow cylinder of the wifflebat. I spread out four Frisbees, which I assume my parents gave me to play with on days with exceptionally strong headwinds, and stood at the plate, bat in my right hand and ball in the left.

Read the rest of this entry »

Do not blame Greg Luzinski for being a killing machine: For he is but a hostage to his factory settings. The pits of his eyes are pellucid only at the moment of the kill. Stare into them — moments before he makes a deadly cudgel out of one of your de-socketed limbs — and you see nothing more than the clicks, clangs, grinds and clatters of an industrial sense of mission. It follows, then, that Greg Luzinski is a killing machine.

As you might imagine, he is amoral in the extreme. The sense of compunction he feels at the clinically detached slaying of, say, a grandmother who has finally come to believe that, insofar as Publisher’s Clearinghouse is concerned, the fix is in; or the child who witnesses the indiscretion of a diplomat; or the shareholder who is too promiscuous with grievances toward the board fails to register on even the most finely tuned instruments of detection. It follows, then, that Greg Luzinski is a killing machine.

Depending on circumstances and externalities, Greg Luzinski’s Boolean programming commands him to kill with a muzzle-loading firearm or the cutlass he wears on his hip or the nearest load-bearing beam. Failing those, he will use his barrel-hinge knuckles to choke the insurrectionist until his isthmus of a throat turns to blood and dust.

Do not blame Greg Luzinski for the warehoused pallets of the over-murdered. You’d just as soon blame the tempest for the ship’s wreckage. Greg Luzinski’s one and only locus presses him onward, and so he annihilates by rote.

The only reason Greg Luzinski isn’t taking back the streets at this moment is that he never surrendered those streets in the first place. Another reason is that he isn’t taking back the streets is that those who mind his switches haven’t yet received written orders — signed in triplicate — instructing them to command Greg Luzinski to take back the streets. But if they do, he will. And don’t you know the storm drains shall be choked with a thickset gumbo of human organs.

Greg Luzinski, you see, is a killing machine.

Buzzfeed offers its picks for The Ultimate Fictional Baseball Team. A little too much Major League for my taste — Jake Taylor, Pedro Cerrano, Willie Mays Hayes — but can’t really quibble with most of it.

My pick for the best fictional team is the 2013 Astros.

Your picks in the comments.

Despite the fact that most of his daily nutrition is derived from spreadsheets and decimal points, noted and famous sabermetrician Rob Neyer is also partial, it seems, to Rice Krispies Treats — photographic evidence of which fact has been captured via an internet Twitter message by Dave Cameron and rendered here, for the Enjoyment of the Public, into a fine oil painting by the present author.