The following is a work of fiction, duh.

In 2007, the American Association of Psychologists purchased ads on scorecards at various baseball stadiums to promote Psychology Awareness Week. The special scorecards included a column for players’ personality types next to the column for fielding position. Fans loved it, and so teams kept printing cards with the extra column. Presently, there’s a debate in the blogosphere concerning whether such columns should be filled in with the Goldsmith or the Myers-Briggs types, or via the Enneagram of Personality. I prefer the Enneagram myself: because the motivations of each type are clearly sketched out, it’s easy to discern which player is which type.

But then I began asking myself tougher questions: Is a Type 2 (Helper) likely to take more pitches in an At-Bat than a Type 7 (Enthusiast)? Is said Helper more likely to take more pitches when he is in an extreme relaxed state (when he will act more like a Type 4 Individualist than normal) or when he is in an extreme stressed state (when he will act more like a Type 8 Challenger)? Before I moved in with the Team and began collecting significant qualitative data to correlate with its daily on-field performance, these questions were impossible to answer.

So that’s just the scorecards — they gave me the idea for what kinds of questions to ask when the time came, if the time ever came, which it did.

More important is this past winter, when I live-blogged/tweeted a community event the Team put on at the local Holidome. There were autograph lines and Q&A’s and baseball-related carnival games (I topped 70 MPH in the Fast Pitch for the first time ever and then celebrated by eating one of every available sausage variety, which wasn’t all of the ones from the full stadium menu, but was still pretty impressive). There was a huge cake in the shape of the Team’s logo. All the players donned baker’s hats and signed their names on the cake using pastry bags full of frosting. Underprivileged youths gave thumbs up from under small chef’s caps of their own.

I worked up the nerve to approach the Third Baseman [3B], who had signed his name first and then slinked off to a corner behind the cake. He had a rep for brooding, being bookish, reading political history and sociology. So I figured we could chat—I like those things, too. I had actually hoped that I might find him wandering down a corridor, stewing.

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I wandered the forgotten, half-stocked shelves of the back corner of the low-end department store like a ghost, weaving through a graveyard of display model car seats and pressboard cribs. On the walls hung plastic wrapped in plastic, pink and light blue devices, the last bastion of comic sans font. I waded through reams of onesies with messages like “First Round Draft Pick” and “Daddy’s Little Angel”, with disdain my machete. We were still in book, I thought to myself. The nursery was painted, the ultrasounds studied with burgeoning horror, our diaper philosophy established. All was proceeding.

I had long since lost the reason for being there. My wife unseen called out questions from the southeast, but I was far away, back in my own childhood. Growing up in 1980s suburbia, where crime waves consisted of vandalism, my parents would allow me to explore alone the wide, beige-tiled aisles of the local general store, and I would stare at all that colorful plastic and the potential that was vacuum sealed within. I coveted it all: wind-up pocket toys, board games, sports equipment. With my little senses I drank in the untapped fun.

I’ve failed, in my own little liberal arts degree way, to live up to the economic status of my hardworking parents. I’ve long grown accustomed to my own poverty, and since my wife volunteered herself into our collective cause, she’s accepted her own lead crown. But looking at all this stuff – and there is no better word for it – adorning the shelves, beaming with its own uselessness, I felt regret. I probably won’t be able to waste money on dumb things for my daughter the way my parents did for me, thanks to life choices squandered fifteen years hence.

It was under this cloud that I sulked aimlessly, until I stumbled across this:

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ERRATA

In a recent article about Jason Heyward undergoing an appendectomy, we noted that a player named Matt Halladay had previously undergone an appendectomy and missed little time afterwards. We were obviously referring instead to Roy Holliday of the Pittsadelphia Marmondbacks, also founder of the “Holliday In” chain of fast-casual restaurants. We were also mistaken about the identity of the player who had surgery yesterday. It was Dirk Hayhurst, not Jason Heyward, and he had surgery on an appendage (an armish-looking leg, we believe) rather than his appendix. The operation took place in Detroit, not Denver, and was announced just before 1 AM Greenwich Mean Time, not Eastern time, as we originally reported. The procedure took place not in a hospital, but in a house-pital, a house that has been converted into a surgical center. We reported that the typical recovery from such a procedure is 2-3 weeks, when in fact it is 20-30 seconds, and Hayhurst is currently resting comfortably in a Halladay Inn Express. He is expected to make a full recovery and rejoin the Buffalo Bills well before the third period.

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In general, I feel okay in the clubhouse. Obviously, I’m the low man on the pole, and when I get the brush off, it’s fine. Nobody knows who I am. I understand. And when I feel a little awkward standing there fiddling with notes among half-dressed young men, I just have to look around and look at how awkward half the rest of the room feels and I’m more comfortable again. At least I’m not lugging heavy television equipment around or tugging at a tie.

All of that is not to say that I didn’t feel my heart in my shoes on Monday night in the Padres clubhouse:

Monday night in the Padres’ Clubhouse

In my defense, dude’s mustache is a full beard now, and he wasn’t sitting at his own locker. But, yeah. Still. I know. I know.

In which Pete Rose translates towering works of poetry.

In today’s episode, Pete Rose will translate T.S. Eliot’s towering modernist opus “The Waste Land” from the original English into Pete Rose American.

Mr. Eliot’s original:

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Raul Ibanez.
He gives and gives, yet asks for
Nothing in return.

This has been a NotGraphs Haiku.

And this was entirely an excuse to post the above GIF, for which all praise goes to @lonestarball. And Raul Ibanez.

The New York Times with a long look at Curt Schilling’s failed video game company and the millions of dollars of Rhode Island taxpayer money lost in the venture.

Also, Gov. Lincoln Chafee is going to have a hard time getting invited to the Fenway Park luxury boxes:

“I just remember his own teammates didn’t like him,” Mr. Chafee said in a radio interview the day after the vote. “They thought he was a bit of a salesman. I remember one of his teammates said he painted his sock, the bloody sock, he painted it.” (That story turned out to be inaccurate.) Mr. Chafee added, “I don’t know if I trust Curt Schilling.”

This article does not make me want to start a video game company or live in Rhode Island.

Obviously this is of the greatest selections of films regarding baseball:

Let us bullet some of the highlights of this trailer:

• Dog does not choke on ball.
• “Let’s playyyhghhghg baawwwwwwww!!!”
• “Dadgum dog-nappers erh at it aggen!!!”
• What villainous power could top the evil bounty of a raccoon’s mind?
• GURLS SURE IS BAD AT BASEBALL!!!
• Stinger: Air Bud reveals he is in fact possessed by Legion and can speak in the tongues of many spirits at whim. He only reveals this, apparently, upon reaching first base.

One might suppose, looking at the graphic here of Tampa Bay’s defensive alignment from their game earlier on Sunday against Oakland, that Sun Sports’ producers have made an error of some sort.

In fact, that isn’t the case. Instead, what we have here is an entirely accurate representation of the Rays’ most extreme and creative shift to date — one which requires not one, but two, Kelly Johnsons.

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Today I encountered yet another visual affront to my native American heritage. Behold the official Cleveland Indians Twitter page:

Yes. That’s right. THIS is their profile photo:

Hey, Indians, when you’re done relieving yourself all over my genetic history, why don’t you command your platoon of interns to find maybe a slightly higher quality photo for your Twitter account? Maybe then you could have more followers than, I dunno, the media-powerhouse Minnesota Twins (not a media powerhouse).

“But Bradley, you are only 1/64 Native American. Why do you care about the Indians insulting Indians?”

Okay, okay, which of your ancestors could you do without? Huh!? Maybe we should start snipping unimportant relatives from your family tree. OH, THAT’S RIGHT, THEN YOU’D NEVER BE BORN, HUH?! Just because I’ve got a gallon of hot German blood firing through my arteries and capillaries doesn’t mean the four ounces of Native American blood is pressed up against the wall, being asked for papers.

Fix the logo, Indians.