I have deemed it too long since the last installment of NotGraphs’ Men Surrounded By Things series, so I present the Cubs’ first base prospect Rock Shoulders surrounded by wrestler/actor The Rock’s shoulder. Both subjects are delightful mixes of muscularity and artfulness.
This has been Men Surrounded By Things.
I bid good weekends to you all.
English rock-and-or-roll supergroup Bad Company, who combined with Foreigner to encourage sex in hallways and multi-purpose arenas across Christendom, once queried: “Are you ready for love?” The aria is a tale — a necessary tale — of the everyman who is rendered urgent, turgid and veiny for immediate and driving coitus.
As it turns out, “Ready for Love” was inspired by right-hander Claude Raymond, who pitched to middling effect in the major leagues from 1959-1971. Bear nubile witness:
As implied by his 1966 and 1967 baseball cards, Mr. Raymond walked around for two full years in a state of partial and suggestive undress. This is because he was ready for love.
Chroniclers of Raymond’s day took to calling him “The Un-Bezippered Corsican Rogue.” While such a sobriquet misstated Raymond’s origins, the prevailing incrimination — that of a pecker lurking in wait — could not plausibly be denied.
Just two years after Raymond retired from baseball, he served as a session bassist for Bad Company’s self-titled debut album. It was during those boozy marathon studio conclaves that Raymond’s story was told and subsequently put to vinyl.
While modern society has forced Raymond to leash his organ, he remains ready for the possibilities — love among them.
Celebrate yourself and sing yourself, O baseball automatons. Bathe in your empty praise, your victories. Conform through your universal applause.
For as you and your ilk seek to perfect the game with your numbers and deeds, to “win”, you are in reality sucking the marrow from its bones and withering its husk like some sort of desiccated meat-plant, some hideous affront to nature. This is your doing, you titans; baseball’s carnelian plant-blood drips from your hands.
For what is perfection, in truth, but a misunderstanding of the ends of art? Perfect art is not art. It is the child labor of a creosote-encrusted factory. It is a paper-backed, ten-cent Horatio Alger novel. It is paint-by-numbers. It is a man doing pushups, and it is other people counting those pushups, and then the man no longer doing pushups. That is what winning is.
When one stands in awe of a gothic cathedral, a punishing and uncompromising bestial groan of man, one is not struck by any sense of perfection. Such a state of culmination, of relaxation, is paramount to death itself. What is alive and vibrant is dynamic: it is not a love of knowledge, but a love of change. The power of the gothic nature is its disquietude, its insatiability, its everlasting thirst. Art is never satisfied.
Morning, guys. Hey, did you hear? There are bagels in the conference room. Seriously, go grab one quick.
In the time it took the author to capture and render into GIF form the footage here of Cincinnati prospect Tony Cingrani’s 11th strikeout tonight (against Detroit minor-leaguer John Lindsey, in this case), the left-hander also recorded his 12th and 13th strikeouts — a total he’s compiled in just 5.0 innings and 15 batters.
Click this hyperlined text for a box score of the game in question.
Watching Jose Bautista do what he’s done since arriving in Toronto has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my baseball-watching life. And Bats did it again on Wednesday night, moments after being fooled by a first-pitch breaking ball from Indians closer Chris Perez.
Trust me: Jose Bautista is worth the price of admission. He will get you out of your seat. He’s done it before, and he will do it again. And, as you can see from the reactions of the paying audience, above, the act never, ever gets old.
All praise be upon my friend the @BlueJayHunter for the GIF. He’s one of the hardest-working bloggers in blog business, and a Canadian gentleman, to boot.
Josh Reddick, who hit his first home run of the season just minutes ago (box), has drawn some attention this spring for his rather convincing impression of a feral human man — in particular, with regard to the hair and beard part of his body.
“What will he look like when’s older, though?” is a question the reader has definitely asked himself, for the purposes of this post.
With a view to answering that exact question, the editors of the present site either did or did not travel into the future, collect images of Josh Reddick, and return to 2013. They either did or did not then organize five of those same images into the form a of a slideshow.
Hi there.
Did you know that you are pleasureable to Mike Schmidt? You are. He really finds you very silly, in all the best ways. The very sight of you brings him joy.
Oooo-hooo-hooo-hoo-hoo! 😉
To Mike Schmidt, you are a rainbow capybara with dolphin friends, singing kind songs in a summer rain. When you talk to Mike Schmidt, he feels your voice pour over him like a refreshing waterfall in a world without war or violent crime — a world that smells like clean laundry, where you smell like organic cilantro, where that cilantro is tickling the corners of his nose, too, forever.
Yes, Mike Schmidt just likes to look at you, to see you smile; he loves to see you flourish. He hopes that you are doing well, and that you will continue to amuse him for as long as you both shall live, which Mike Schmidt wishes would be forever and ever, because he just cannot get enough of you.
Mike Schmidt thanks you for being you.
Eager to hear from Yu Darvish in the wake of his dalliance with one of the greatest feats in sports, I naturally turned to his official blog, Thoughts of Yu. I was rewarded with this entry, just posted this morning (and helpfully translated by Google):
Has there really not been a NotGraphs post dedicated to Cole Hamels and his mustache?
It’s almost Bobby Valentine-esque.
Crashburn Alley has a great piece about it too.
