The following tweet — concerning primarily Miami left-hander Brad Hand’s involvement in the theater arts — is entirely and in-no-way altered from the original (click to embiggen):
This may not work. That’s fine, y’all know I’m lucky if I bat at the mendoza line here. But I’ve got no snark, no jokes, no memes today. All I have for you is something I’ve never seen before in baseball. And you may not be able to see it, even though I made this GIF so that you might:
El Venado Herido — or, in English, The Wounded Deer — is an instant masterpiece by Joseph. The image is of Joseph’s head placed on top of a stag, which is pierced with arrows. The arrows no doubt refer to his own pain and suffering due to having been demoted twice within the span of a month — this, despite his conspicuously mature offensive approach. At the bottom of the painting, Joseph has written “carma,” — one meaning of which is something like “destiny” or “fate.” In this painting, as in most of Joseph’s self-portraits, he presents himself as incapable of changing his own destiny.
BALTIMORE– Brian Roberts strained a flexor tendoligastring yesterday while riding a stationary bike, when the bike suddenly became not-stationary and started moving. Roberts, unprepared for the bike’s motion, fell off. This injury marks the fourteenth consecutive rehab assignment that has caused Roberts more injury than he was trying to heal in the first place, and cements his status as extremely cursed and very broken.
“I don’t know how my arm fell off at the elbow,” Roberts said last week in front of a crowd of reporters, before a piece of the ceiling fell and hit him on the knee, shattering it into hundreds of tiny knee-parts and also causing him to contract Fallen Ceiling Fever, an infectious disease that will keep him sidelined for the next 9-12 generations.
“I don’t know how my arm fell off at the elbow,” Roberts repeated in front of a different crowd of reporters, evidence of the post-post-post-concussion syndrome he’s been suffering from ever since he hit his head on his high chair at age 2. Roberts, who retains as much speed and agility as a player could possibly have after losing both legs, and then losing each of the prosthetic replacements upwards of a dozen times, was most recently injured while explaining his latest injury to a reporter. While talking, Roberts’ tongue somehow got caught in a pitching machine, an injury which required fourteen stitches and is likely to keep him out of action until the polar ice caps finish melting.
Roberts insists he will make it back to regular status one day, even if the Orioles are no longer a professional baseball team, and second base has been replaced with a robot drone in the post-apocalyptic version of baseball. While dreaming of this future, Roberts unfortunately sprained an eye, and strained his head. He is expected to begin a rehab assignment next week in Alpha Centauri.
It should not surprise the reader to learn that the present author — who is covered both in gold chains and Drakkar Noir — has written, recorded, and is currently mixing/editing a sexy R&B single addressed predominantly to Yankees prospect Corban Joseph’s plate discipline. While Joseph himself was demoted to Triple-A earlier this week, he recorded seven major-league plate appearances — and swung, during those same plate appearances, at either just zero or one pitches outside the strike zone (depending on the source).
What follows is not the aforementioned song in its entirety — because that will be released in such a way as to make the author Goddamn Wealthy — but rather, in the tradition of Barry White and that one guy from Boyz II Men, a transcript of the song’s brief, but powerful, spoken-word interlude.
I just can’t get my mind off of you,
Corban Joseph’s PITCHf/x swing chart
from the Texas Leaguers website.
I bookmarked you on my web browser of choice.
I even emailed a link of you to my own self,
so I could access you more easily
via my brand-name smart phone later on.
“Cistulli,” I said. “How do you like my new Hiroshima Carp fashion t-shirt?”
“Bah,” sniffed Cistulli. “I am a proud and relentless Occidental. I care not for those at the poo end of the spice-trade routes. They are beneath me. Literally. For look at this elderly Japanese man ‘neath my boot-heel.”
I noticed that there was indeed a elderly Japanese man struggling and purpling over underneath Cistulli’s awful stilettos.
“But Cistulli,” I said. “The Japanese play a unique and compelling brand of baseball. Surely you would agree that, considering our game’s global reach, talents from the Pacific Rim will continue to enrich the U.S. major leagues.”
“For God and country,” he whispered as he increased the pressure on the windpipe of the elderly Japanese man to the point of death and then beyond that point. “Now, that’s better.”
“Cistulli,” I said. “Look at the Carp’s logo. Is it not pleasing whimsy? Is it not prepossessing in its use of fractals?”
“To piping-hot hell with the lot of them,” sniffed Cistulli. “Foreordination favors those who look like brawny and alabaster me!”
Then he ravished me.
The baseball landscape is littered with harmonic carcasses of side projects gone bad. Baseball players — perhaps out of boredom or ill-advised thought — have made numerous attempts at expressing themselves through music.
“…and welcome back to the, uh, next half of an inning here at the stadium this, uh, time of day, where both teams are trying their best to score some runs. Stepping up to the plate, there’s a number on his jersey, and, uh, hold on a second here… oh, wait, he’s not there anymore. Checking his number, and he just did something, and so now we move on to the next player, who’s definitely been up already in this game. He steps in, having quite a season so far, and the pitch is, yep, just as I expected. Here comes the next one, and it’s hit to the… yeah, he’s on a base now, definitely on a base. Before the game, he said he was going to try to do everything he could to help his team win, and he’s absolutely doing that. Just like he’s done his entire career. You know, he’s been talking a lot about this team’s chances, and told me before the game that when all is said and done, he thinks this team is going to have been one of the teams on which he’s played. Strong words from a proven member of the team’s roster. And now he’s on base– and we all know that when he’s on base, anything can happen, especially things involving baserunners. All of this brings us to today’s trivia question, sponsored by the friendly folks at one of our favorite sponsors. Who did… three times? I think I know the answer, and my producer is telling me… yes, I’ve got it. Maybe you do too. Noodle on that for a little while and we’ll get back to it in the top of the inning, if there are any innings left to go. And the guy standing at the plate takes that one, and does what he’s supposed to do next. Bringing the other guy to the plate, and he has had quite a series, both at the plate and in the field. He’s living up to everything we expected him to be, and shows no signs of doing anything but what he’s able to do. A real treat to watch this portion of his career. And… someone’s doing something, so that means we’ll take a quick break. Back next inning with a guy wearing a microphone, who will tell you all about what it’s like to be on that field, and take part in the exciting action. One team’s winning, or at least they will be by the time the game is over. We’ll be right back.”
Yesterday, my friend and fellow NotGraphs content-vomiter David Temple wrote about his utter and complete failure to finish a work of children’s fiction, The Kid Who Only Hit Homers. Finish reading it, I mean. It goes without saying that all of us at NotGraphs are frustrated failed novelists of some stripe or another, with at least one unfinished semi-autobiographical manuscript floating around on our hard drives, but Temple’s aborted attempt to read 130 pages of shockingly simplistic prose will go down as one of the more embarrassing literary admissions to grace these digital pages (the most embarrassing of which is still, by quite a large margin, the cover of Cistulli’s book).
But maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on David. With his weak will, he’ll never make it as a Green Lantern, but at least he was attempting to read a book that wasn’t about angsty sparkly vampires who ruin the game of baseball, an increasingly rare effort in what is passing for our culture in 2013. He could have, instead, simply waited around until this Fall, when he could have watched the television equivalent on ABC:
Let us dissect:
The following GIF depicts the Gwinnett Braves not understanding baseball. It comes to you from indispensable friend-to-NotGraphs Well-Beered Englishman.
The following tune comes to you from the Harlem Globetrotters, by ways of YouTube, by ways of a website that rips YouTube audio and turns it into MP3s that you download. To me, the Globetrotter’s theme has always been especially evocative of the embarrassment they dole out to their opponents, of the unpreparedness or haplessness of said opponents.
This has been “A GIF and a Tune”. It is a Tuesday.
