As the half-smile suggests, Young Dayn Perry regards his attitude as one of the “devil-may-care” variety. He’s wrong in this regard, however: the devil doesn’t care — not about him, and not about his attitude.

Young Dayn Perry has recently received an invitation — from varsity linebacker Darrell Perkins, specifically — to wipe the goddamn smirk off his face before Perkins does it for him. Young Dayn Perry has every intention of accepting.

Darrell Perkins’ invitation is the first Young Dayn Perry has received, to anything, since freshman year.

Owing to the example set by his parents, Young Dayn Perry absolutely knows what love is. The subject with which he’s less familiar is girls’ privates.

Young Dayn Perry wants nothing more than to put his hands up on Katie Graham’s hips and then, when he dips, to have her dip, as well, such that they’re both dipping together at the same time.

Young Dayn Perry has recorded no fewer than 37 mix tapes for Katie Graham since September, he’ll reveal while signing her yearbook.

“Never change,” Young Dayn Perry will add. For totally different reasons, she won’t.

Young Dayn Perry hasn’t so much watched 1992 drama School Ties as memorized every line and written a sequel that follows Brendan Fraser’s character David Greene into college and then onto his professional life as a successful dermatologist in Newton, Mass.

“You can take the man out of Mississippi,” Young Dayn Perry’s father has intoned on more than one occasion, “but you can’t take the Mississippi out of the man.” Young Dayn Perry is haunted by this and other truths.

The New York Times reported on Friday that Nate Silver is leaving The New York Times to join the ESPN/Disney/ABC empire. He is expected to contribute to “Olbermann,” the new late-night ESPN2 talk show to be hosted by Chris Berman Keith Olbermann. But surely there will be more.

** Nate Silver Presents “30.172 for 30.465,” a more mathematically-accurate film series celebrating numerical moments in the history of sports, like the amazing technology that measures home run distances, or estimating how many pounds C.C. Sabathia weighs.

** ABC’s “Bet on Your Baby,” now featuring accurate spreads.

** Statman and Robin, a new animated superhero series voiced by Nate Silver and Robin Roberts. Statman will apprehend statistical criminals, like whoever was responsible for the Windows 8 advertisement featuring the nonsense ERA vs. Lefties stat.

** Disney’s Statistically Accurate Movie Remakes: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, plus or minus Two Dwarfs; Three Pigs, Each 20% Littler than the Average Pig; One Hundred and Seventeen Era-Adjusted Dalmations; An Estimated 19,834 Leagues Under The Sea, Depending On The Tide; and 46% Chance of Snow Dogs.

** Kids in the National Spelling Bee will now be properly ranked. (Gosh, that’s been an oversight for years. How am I supposed to make my fantasy spelling league picks without having a sensible ranking system in place?)

** “The Statistical Wizards of Waverly Place,” coming to The Disney Channel.

** ESPN replaces March Madness with a National Burrito Tournament.

The term "pimping a homerun" does not do Dan Vogelbach justice here http://t.co/VmD7wg3XkL (courtesy of a @minorleagueball commenter)

— Andrew Gill (@AndrewDGill) July 21, 2013

Watch that GIF, and listen to this:

Or, if you find Vogelbach’s saunter somewhat edged, his bat flip somewhat angry, if you thinks there’s a zephyr of suffering that carries the ball to left field, play this adaptation instead:

Is he Daniel Vogelbach? Is he Vogelbux? Is he Vogelbored? Vogelbroken? Vogelballin?

Today, maybe we decide.

It is manifestly the case that people who are shackled by responsibilities and whose lives are little more than a series of burdensome obligations, one upon the other — it’s manifestly the case that these sorts of people take pains, whenever possible, to inform other, different people whose lives aren’t conspicuously awful that “sometimes it’s necessary to do things in life that you don’t want to.”

Besides ending their sentences with prepositions all the time — itself an unattractive quality — these people commit another grievous error, as well, in supposing that their actions are somehow of any consequence in the world.

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Dayn Perry and Carson Cistulli — NotGraphs heartthrobs, both — have done me and the entire city of Milwaukee a favor by agreeing to “read” their “work” tomorrow, Saturday the 20th of July, at Woodland Pattern Book Center (known as the poetry bookstore of the Midwest, just as Perry and Cistulli are known as the poets of the online baseball community).

A 6pm start helps to maximize the leisure time both preceding and following the reading, without which neither of these men would be fit to give their public what it wants, i.e. a hearty and thorough loin-ravaging.

Perry’s chapbook, Drinking With Boileryard Clarke, will be available for purchase for $10. Half of each purchase will be donated to Woodland Pattern, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization; the other half will go toward enabling Mr. Perry.

If you’re within traveling distance of Milwaukee, please join us for what promises to be an event.

If you are Eno Sarris and are planning to attend, be sure to wear a protective dong covering.

Questions, regrets, and excitements can be directed to @RobertJBaumann on Twitter.

For some dumb reason I’m writing another post about COOL scores, a metric that has the exact opposite intentions as NERD. A metric that holds almost no merit, and would hold no merit  had I not figured out how to calculate z-scores in Excel. And yet, this vacuous metric so resonated with a certain Carson Cistulli that he bought me two beers and offered me the chance to write more dumb things for this dumb website. Dumb dumb dumb.

By way of introducing myself I’ll include a relevant and thoroughly disgusting self-portrait that I snapped in the Verona Public Library, just now.

My jungle de bouche is a bit unkempt, but I believe in leaving room for improvement, especially in terms of kemptness. I’ve previously appeared in the commenting section at NotGraphs, albeit rarely, as user Johnny Hummusbeard; I successfully suggested Iago’s Balls in the Nickname Seeks Player series. I own a Pontiac.

On to COOL scores for pitchers! COOL, or the Coefficient Of On-field Lustre, is a useless number shittily designed to approximate how enjoyable a baseball game might be to someone with no interest in baseball. Do you prefer calling your bff’s “chica” and texting solely with emojis? You might be the target audience for COOL. Are you an orthodox nun? COOL’s for you, babe. Are you an undead wight emerging from the depths of a Hopi burial mound? Feast on some COOL. You’re an avocado? Nice, let’s make guaCOOLmole. Etc.

COOL for pitchers (or pCOOL) is another step toward developing a COOL game score. This way you and I can say, “Hey, come view this spectacle!” and actually deliver said spectacle. Remember that pCOOL has no bearing on a pitcher’s actual skill. In fact, some factors that benefit a pitcher’s pCOOL score are harmful to a pitcher’s career. This makes pitchers with high COOL scores something fleeting and disastrous, yet transfixing, like, say, Alexander the Great’s invasion of India. There are more notes on COOL for pitchers, but I’ll cover those below. Let’s just dive in, like kids in a horror movie skinny dipping, and see how gruesome it gets.

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A man, wearing nothing but an unadorned white baseball jersey and a gray mesh baseball cap, careens his Winnebago down a desolate highway in the Arizona desert. In the passenger seat, another man—either passed out or passed beyond—also wears an unmarked baseball jersey, his head on the dashboard. Two bodies, even more likely dead, slide across the RV floor among loose free-weights and other exercise equipment until the vehicle veers into a ditch. The hyperventilating driver, Turk Bass, climbs out, swaps his blank jersey for a vintage Rickey Henderson Oakland A’s jersey that is still on a hanger dangling off the side view mirror (his pants are long since gone), then re-enters the van to retrieve a video camera. He records a cryptic, handheld farewell to his son. “I just want you to know that no matter how it may look, I only had you in my heart.” He turns to face the oncoming sirens.

*

Flashback to the eve of Turk’s birthday, three weeks earlier. At dusk, Turk exercises on a mini-stairmaster in front of a plaque commemorating his contributions to some Nobel Prize worthy research. At breakfast the next morning, his henpecking wife Selma hands him a plate of eggs topped by veggie bacon spelling “50.” Afterwards, Turk drops off Junior—whose arm is in a sling—at a physical rehab clinic before heading to the local high school where he works as an ineffectual chemistry teacher and an assistant coach for the varsity baseball team.

Later that day, one of Turk’s more disrespectful students—also the hotshot shortstop on the varisty team—witnesses him moonlighting at a car wash for additional income. The encounter becomes even more belittling when the student laughingly photographs his teacher wiping down the tires.

A now humiliated Turk returns home where Selma has organized a surprise birthday party for him. Among the guests is Turk’s gregarious brother-in-law, Rog, an investigative lawyer and spokesperson for the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball. Several guests at the party have gathered around the television to watch Rog’s segment on an ESPN broadcast, wherein he defends the validity of the recent suspension of several star players. Rog explains that, should the suspensions be appealed by the MLB Players’ Association, he’ll have two pieces of “knock out” evidence: detailed financial records of the company that supposedly provided steroids to the players in question, and testimony from a recently retired player, who has confided to Rog that he facilitated connections and helped funnel steroids to dozens of players—and also has a major gambling problem.

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RotoGraphs editor and co-proprietor of BeerGraphs Eno Sarris has organized an event for later today (Thursday, July 18) at Chicagoland bar Fizz — which event will feature baseball writers of some consequence and also Dayn Perry.

During a recording of FanGraphs Audio this morning, that same Dayn Perry inquired about the timing of the event, and, after being informed that it was scheduled to begin at 4pm CT, launched into a frothy-mouthed tirade about the early-ish hour — suggesting both that it (a) wasn’t becoming of civilized man and also (b) might force him to rearrange his schedule a little bit.

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Loyal reader Larry Holt sent me this screen grab:

Thanks to the LA Times for being on the case. Clearly a little bit of facial hair goes a long way when it comes to Home Run Derbies. Next year, look for each of the competitors to simply sport one long hair coming out of some part of his face, with the rest of it clean-shaven.

They’ve all told you the same thing — those who raised you, siblings, lovers, the god you worship, the earthly squires of the god you worship, teachers, physicians, strangers on public transit, neighbors, pets. It’s the stinking, larded pageant of those you have known, and they agree on nothing save for this: that your best is not good enough.

It is not often that you call upon the best you’ve got in the service of completing a task or making what struck you in the conception stages as a pleasant gesture, but even in those scarce moments when you do offer up the best you’ve got, it’s not enough.

Mariano Rivera knows this. He’s aware of all that you’ve befouled. Consider it a mission of conscience for him, this letting you know that he knows you’re diminished by the effort …

You see that he, for a fugitive instant, looks askance while he hails your miserable attempt. He’s aware that this is alms-giving of somewhat embarrassing extremes. To be sure, there is condescension lost in his practiced applause, which strikes you as not unlike the hand-claps of a dutiful grandmother who beats the Gold Medal flour from her hands as she makes the weary lemon cake by rote. The apron hides a will and a cancer …

Mariano Rivera’s prosopon mask of exuberance is to obvious excess, to glut. What you’re doing at this moment warrants so, so much less. But Mariano Rivera feigns joy so as to train you to keep at this toil. He knows you’ll never get there, but have another go at it just the same, would you, you hesitating buckaroo? For he knows hope is not so much an expectation as it is a way of whittling at the days like a sassafras branch until they come to embalm you. Mariano Rivera knows this, but he’s too gentlemanly to say as much.

Your best will never be good enough, but it’s better than it ever has been, so long as Mariano Rivera is watching.