A hundred and fifty years ago, Walt Whitman thrust himself into the literary scene, challenging us to distill the vitality within us, the truly American. Since then, we as a people (and particularly our high school English teachers) have sought the Great American novel. Moby Dick? Too ponderous. Gatsby? Too shiny. Grapes of Wrath? Too many tortoises.

But it turns out that our quest is in vain, simply because it’s already completed. We have the text that encapsulates our youth, our dynamism, our hope. We have Matt Christopher’s The Kid Who Only Hit Homers.

In Sylvester Coddmyer III, the titular hero, we have a mixture of Ragged Dick and Nicholas Nickleby, a boy with humility and heart, who tackles his difficulties with pluck and moxie. Unlike the modern brooding hero, Sylvester is a boy of action rather than words. He’s a self-made kid, one who gets out of bed each morning pulling handfuls of bootstrap. He doesn’t make excuses; he only hits home runs.

But by no means is Sylvester a flat character. He’s an everyman; to describe him too precisely would rob the young reader an opportunity to find common ground with the character, just as every teenage girl in 2009 imagined herself as Bella. No, Sylvester has weaknesses, and ones we can all understand. He likes pie too much, for example. Christopher gives a subtle nod to The Natural by having Christopher overeat pies and miss a game. We’ve all been there!

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Recently, I invited some of my favorite baseball writers onto my award-eligible podcast to discuss some of their favorite baseball books. Fellow NotGraphs writer/Internet rabble-rouser Mike Bates chimed in with The Kid Who Could Only Hit Homers by Matt Christopher (note: my memory fails me. Bates chose a different Christopher novel, only mentioning this book in passing). It’s a children’s book — in that it’s written for children, not by them. Patrick Dubuque, another NotGraphs writer/digital sad person offered an idea: perhaps the both of us should read said book and give our take on it on these electronic pages. As I’m always desperate for article ideas, I agreed. My thoughts are below.

The Kid Who Could Only Hit Homers revolves around the titular character Sylvester Coddmyer III, a boy who stinks at baseball. We know he stinks at baseball, because the author spends upwards of two and half whole pages explaining this. He’s all bummed about it, and decides to quit the team. The next day, he’s visited by a creepy old man, George Baruth, some sort of specter of Babe Ruth, who starts training with the kid. The next day — THE NEXT DAY — this kid is belting hits all over the field, and is patrolling the outfield with the grace of Willie Mays. A few warmup games are played, and then it’s time for the season.

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On the one hand, Josh Hamilton’s enthusiasm for swinging — documented in some depth recently by FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron — has very likely hurt his ability to produce at a high level offensively. On the other, it allows one to make amusing constellations from the pitches at which Hamilton has swung.

Yesterday, we considered just such a constellation — in that case, of what appears to be an ugly fedora — from all of Josh Hamilton’s swings against Chicago White Sox pitchers this past Saturday.

Here, now, we see another entry to what may or may not become an ongoing series — in this case, informed by data from Hamilton’s May 8th game against Bud Norris, Jose Veras, and the Houston Astros (box). The constellation here bears more than a passing resemblance to the alien spacecraft from Disney’s 1986 film Flight of the Navigator, just tilted on its side a little. The ship, voiced by Paul Reubens, identifies itself as a Trimaxian Drone Ship from the planet Phaelon — which ship the Navigator in question (played by a young Joey Cramer) nicknames “Max.”

Credit to Texas Leaguers for the strikezone plot.

Y’all take it from here.

Carson recently directed Hopeless Joe to the Baseball Hall of Fame’s scouting reports site, where you can waste an afternoon reading the original scouting reports on all of your favorite scrubs and stars, mostly from the late 1960s through the late 1990s. Did you know that scouts recognized that Kevin McReynolds was past his peak in 1994? Now you do.

Inspired by this site, Hopeless Joe decided to dig back into his own archives for some scouting reports of his own. And, there, buried in a drawer, between the half-empty bottle of Listerine that he takes a swig from when he just needs to feel some kind of feeling, and the stack of rejection slips from agents who were not so enamored with his short story collection, “Hopeless Joe’s Hopeless Tales of Hopeless Children in Hopeless Situations,” he came across the report he filed this spring on B.J. Upton, just before the Braves kicked him out of Champion Stadium for sitting in the center field camera’s shot line and holding up signs telling television viewers that one-third of all baseball spectators will one day get some form of cancer, and they should really turn the game off and go see a doctor.

In any case, Hopeless Joe’s Scouting Report: B.J. Upton.

On the one hand, Josh Hamilton’s enthusiasm for swinging — documented in some depth recently by FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron — has very likely hurt his ability to produce at a high level offensively. On the other, it allows one to make amusing constellations from the pitches at which Hamilton has swung.

Above is just such a constellation — in this case, of what appears to be an ugly fedora — from all of Josh Hamilton’s swings against Chicago White Sox pitchers this past Saturday (box). According to PITCHf/x, Hamilton swung at 33.3% of all pitches outside the zone and 52.6% of total pitches during the course of the game — which figures, to be fair, are almost not considerably above league average.

Credit to Brooks Baseball for strikezone plots.

Andrelton Simmons has admitted in a NotGraphs semi-exclusive that he has just hit puberty.

As we all know from experience, that journey can lead to all sorts of interesting places.

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I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I tried to repeat this accident of web searching with something a little more ambitious. Alas, searching for Heath Bars just prior to searching for news about Heath Bell did not get me anything worth posting. Nor did searching for Samuel Beckett works of theater before searching for news about Josh Beckett.

…and if you have your own baseball-related Great Moments in Google Ads, take a screen capture and feel free to send them along for a future post.

I am proud to release my latest film. It is entitled Ty Cobb: The Movie and it stars Ty Cobb and Paul Krichell.

What the reader might not know — but is certainly going to find out following the completion of this unnecessary em-dashed aside — is that, among the categories to which NotGraphs authors can assign their posts, there’s one called Charlie Blackmon Info.

“Why is there a category called Charlie Blackmon Info?” a reader might ask — nor does the author have any intention of discouraging the reader’s natural curiosity. Still, asking that question, one might as well also ask, “How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?” Or: “How, after managing to get a moonbeam into your hand, do you make sex to it?”

Some questions, in other words, are unable to be answered — or, at the very least, unable to be answered without the aid of a harrowing diagram.

In any case, the purpose of this particular edition of Charlie Blackmon Info is to alert the entire world that (a) in his third plate appearance of the season, recently promoted Colorado outfield Charlie Blackmon homered and that (b) the author has commemorated Blackmon’s home run in American GIF form, with the caveat that (c) the video quality of the GIF isn’t particularly great, because (d) the author’s modem is working poorly, even though (e) the author’s wife has repeatedly reminded him to call for repair, while (f) the author has secretly prayed in his heart for the problem to resolve itself.

All of which is to say: