Lovers of base and ball, we have a crisis. A crisis of terrific and overwhelming proportions, necessitating the author’s very purplest prose. I speak to you today of the Triple, that loveliest and most thrilling of base hits. Whereas once that graceful animal seemed to flit its way through every box score, today, sadly, it is rarely and fleetingly encountered. I will not mince words: if immediate, drastic, and comprehensive action is not taken, there is a very real possibility that this creature will go the way of the passenger pigeon, the Tasmanian wolf, and the barehanded catcher. Regard! And feel the awful urgency of this lamentable state of affairs:

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Last week, CBS reported that tensions in the Angels’ clubhouse last season grew so high that Torii Hunter and Albert Pujols nearly ended up in a fight. Leading to this informative news illustration.

“Hunter Fights Pujols”

Readers are invited to improve on this.

It is a sad day for baseball fans, dear NotGraphs readers. Let us all light our little candles in our little paper cups, crack a forty, and pour one out for our fallen compatriot. I have little words to offer at this point, so this hastily-compiled montage will have to do for now. Hug someone you love tonight.

Barring any inconsistencies among his travel documents — an entirely real contingency, that — the author is relocating for about a year to Paris beginning in the middle of September. In preparation for said move — and in a gesture of supreme self-interest — he has resolved to publish in this space a brief, daily French exercise concerning base-and-ball.

What follows is such an exercise — featuring, in this case, a passage from Canoe regarding the New York Yankees’ recent sweep of Toronto.

For each paragraph, the author has produced a (likely flawed) translation. At the bottom, there’s commentary regarding certain words or phrases of note (and which are marked by an asterisk) either because (a) those words and phrases are particularly difficult, but the author has grasped their meaning or (b) they are particularly difficult and the author has abandoned all attempts to make sense of them.

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Must have missed this bit of news from the Brewers’ trip to Texas a couple weeks back…

While I missed that, the always spying Investigative Reporting Investigation Team did not. Found this in the IRIT’s photo archive from August 13:

Mexico, post-Axfordian appetite.

You can’t even eat [an entire country] without someone’s Google Glasses capturing you these days!

Derek Jeter is very excited to rejoin the Yankees lineup today.

This has been Baseball Players Twerking.

ST. PETERSBURG — Matt Moore felt fine Sunday, a day after the 24-year-old left-hander threw a simulated game. “I feel good, just normal soreness,” Moore said. “You know, okay. Adequate. Better than bad. Not quite great.” “So you’d say you’re feeling acceptable?” asked this reporter. “Yeah, satisfactory. Decent. Tolerable. Bearable.” “And how have you been spending your time on the disabled list?” “Studying for the SAT.”

This is the newsiest news since one fan “attended” a recent “game.” Why did the quotation marks around “good” bother me enough to write a post about them? I don’t know! But they did!

Put your 3D glasses on your face because Evan Longoria hit a homer directly through your television set on Saturday night:

Imagine: If you, lucky you, had been poised near yonder catwalk camera with, say, a ten-foot pole and net, mayhaps you could have snared a souvenir of your own — a home run souvenir.

For 30 years now, writer and public-broadcasting personality Rick Steves has published Europe Through the Back Door, a series of annual guidebooks designed for travelers interested in moving beyond Europe’s most obvious (and expensive) tourist activities and experiencing the continent more like a native might.

One senses from the animated GIFs below — of Jose Fernandez striking out batters to end the fourth, fifth, and sixth innings of his Saturday start, all on curveballs looking — that, were the young Cuban émigré to write a guidebook designed to acquaint readers more intimately with the proper use of a championship breaking ball, that he would likely advocate more of a front-door approach.

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Yasiel Puig has made a name for himself in baseball for a variety of reasons. In the GIF pit of the Internet, and certainly on these electronic pages, one certain trait of his has been highlighted — his bat flips. Puig, however, is not one to rest on his laurels. He gets the Hell of his laurels and ventures into the burgeoning  world of BALL flips.

Observe: