What is worse than allowing a game-winning RBI single to Ben Zobrist? Allowing a game-winning RBI single to Ben Zobrist resulting in a complete emotional meltdown.

If rocks were capable of engaging in sexy lovemaking with each other, that would be strange. That’s one fact. A second fact is this, though: if rocks really could make love, their yawps of craggy pleasure would be indistinguishable from the normal speaking voice of St. Louis Cardinals radio broadcaster Mike Shannon.

Such a voice is well-suited to utter certain words. Words like cud, for example. And arse-ropes. And Beowulf.

A word that has no business either in or around Mike Shannon’s mouth, however, is chartreuse — a word so French that, after giving voice to it, one finds himself tempted either to smoke a cigarette or denounce the Zeitgeist or both simultaneously.

And yet chartreuse is precisely the word Mike Shannon found himself compelled to speak aloud during the first inning of this evening’s Pirates-Cardinals game.

To wit:
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It’s official — @robdelaney will sing the national anthem for the @dodgers this Friday: atmlb.com/13YtWkE

— Cut4 (@Cut4) April 23, 2013

The purpose of this post is to remind the reader that — inside his handsome leatherbound agenda and on this particular date — that he has made plans at ca. 10pm ET to watch American comedian Rob Delaney sing the National Anthem at Dodgers Stadium.

Note, please, that this post is concerned with none of the other entries in that same agenda — not the one on Saturday night, for example, to “Five-finger-discount someone else’s dreams” and not the one for next Thursday, either, to “Wear parachute pants like it’s my destiny.”

I’ve been pretty heavy-handed with this theme recently, and this post wasn’t necessarily planned. However, as Dave Cameron pointed out, the baseball GIF game has changed, and therefor this specific one needs to be addressed.

Otto Respighi wrote Pines of Rome as the second installment of his Roman trilogy. The final movement, Pines of the Appian Way (edited here a little, for time), is meant to depict Italian soldiers marching up the historic Via Appia through the break of morning.

Imagine, if you will, that Yu Darvish’s pitches are not unlike the Italian soldiers, and the fabled road is not unlike the hitters’ swing plane. The pitches, like the soldiers, march through it valiantly — with grandeur. And in either case, the end is spectacular.

Watch:
(Author’s note: The present author has gained maximum enjoyment by waiting until the GIF is fully loaded, then starting the tune right as the pitches are leaving Darvish’s hand.)

Listen:
(Author’s note: This is best heard through a good pair of speakers/headphones, and, in any case, as loud as physically tolerable.)

pines

It’s not a cake! It’s a Blue Jays donut! And not just any donut! The official donut of the Toronto Blue Jays!

Available at your local Tim Hortons, it is most refreshing when paired with this quote from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn:

“If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a change to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard–and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man’s doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night, so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself.”

This has been your Friday cake and quote.

Shout out to Dayn Perry. Always remember: Dayn Perry is everything, and Dayn Perry is everywhere. And thanks to @BBaxTwitts for the donuts.

Within these very dog-eared pages, David G. Temple, freelance sexecutioner, noted that baseball as a social phenomenon lends itself to culminating hubba hubba.

Among the instances of such was this:

The sexual enthusiast will be pleased to know that the obliging Mr. Met, whose dirty protuberance is at all times veiny, boing-boing and purpled, consented to the madame’s wishes.

On the shores of Far Rockaway, amid the medical-waste flotsam, love was made …

You must change your life.

If you don’t follow Carson Cistulli on Twitter:
1. Good call.
2. You may not have seen that the current author has single-handedly legitimized NotGraphs.

As it happens, I have video evidence of actual Major League Baseball player Rajai Davis reading a post that your’s truly made for the very site you are viewing at this moment. No more will NotGraphs be known as a holding cell for mediocrity and Internet grab-ass. We are done simply being an oasis for underpaid semi-professionals and rudderless ne’er-do-wells. No more will Jeff Sullivan refer to us as “motherless mama’s boys.” We are NotGraphs. We have purpose. We are the world of the World Wide Web.

Thank yous go to the MLB Fan Cave for apparently making this happen, Mr. Davis for making my day, and most importantly to me for making NotGraphs a thing people cared about for even a minute.

God bless you all, and God bless David G Temple.

Back at the end of the 2011 season, Mike Fast at Baseball Prospectus posted a study that suggested José Molina might be the best at framing pitches. Last night at Tropicana Field, as Molina caught Alex Cobb, his talents were in full effect.

Witness the following two called-strike-threes. While there’s considerable glove movement on Molina’s part in both cases, as Mike Fast’s article points out, it’s much more important for a catcher to keep the rest of his body — especially his head — stable as he receives the pitch. A catcher is going to have to move his glove to receive most pitches, and some of that movement can be disguised when the catcher closes his glove around the ball. Outside of his glove hand, Molina is pretty steady in receiving both of these pitches.

That pitch, according to Brooks Baseball’s PitchF/X, might have actually been a strike, but Travis Hafner certainly didn’t think so.

From Brooks Baseball.

This pitch to Francisco Cervelli, however, passes neither the eyeball test nor the PitchF/X test:

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DENVER — Following a successful appendectomy on Monday, a biopsy confirmed the contents of outfielder Jason Heyward’s appendix, leaving Braves fans with renewed enthusiasm over the budding superstar’s future.

“Tell you what, I knew he hadn’t been himself this year,” said Atlanta manager Fredi Gonzalez on Tuesday. “I’ll be darned if all the stuff that was holding him back wasn’t stuck in that one little organ. Organ? It’s an organ, right? Hey, I’m no doctor. Anyway, now that we’ve got that taken care of, hopefully he can get back here quick and help us win some baseball games.”

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If Dave Cameron has unearthed today what he believes to be the Mona Lisa of GIFs, what follows is perhaps more like Max Beckmann’s triptych Departure — if Max Beckmann’s triptych Departure were divided into four, and not three, parts, that is, and also if it were less a “complex Modernist concerto of horror and hope” and more a “collection of Yu Darvish’s four slow curveballs from Wednesday night.”

Here’s Darvish’s first slow curve, to Josh Hamilton in the fourth inning:

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