Among the (certainly) many traits which the animated GIF embedded here — of NC Dinos’ designated hitter Ho-Joon Lee first releasing his bat with a great flourish and then, as extended coverage reveals, flying out to right field — among the many traits it shares with a West Coast party, certainly one of those is that neither appears likely to stop at any point in the near future.

For further similarities, please consult the author’s scholarly paper on the matter in the forthcoming edition of Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte.

Credit to concerned internet citizen Josh Augustine for bringing this to the editoriat’s attention.

My fancies were tickled when I tuned into the A’s-Indians game just in time to watch Carlos Santana — a player whom I very much like to watch — bat against Daniel Straily, another player I like to watch.

Fancies were tickled further when Straily’s moustachios flashed upon the screen — moustachios not unlike a young, hip dad might have sported in the ’70s or ’80s.

Read the rest of this entry »

What does this camp look like? An artist’s rendering*:

(*Much like you can do with Dayn Perry’s loins, click to enlarge)

The Toronto Blue Jays have let me down before. Many times. Regularly, in fact. But they haven’t let me down like this. Worst of all: they let down Mark DeRosa.

The season’s over. The eulogy has begun.

Even DeRosa believed.

“I told Casey Janssen after, this is what I signed up for, a 2-1 game against Boston with our closer on the mound and the heart of their order coming up in the ninth inning. We’ve let a lot of people down, let ourselves down, but this team is more than capable of rolling off some wins. … I just want us to compete over these last six weeks.”

It’s mid-August, and in Toronto, we’re thinking about April. Again.

I have no idea what the Blue Jays should do about Josh Johnson and Adam Lind, heading into 2014, but I know I want them to bring back Mark DeRosa.

Image credit: Otto Greule Jr./Getty Images

You might ask yourself, dear reader, you might ask yourself, “what were the Twins doing in 1991?” Especially, you might be asking yourself this because that is, in fact, the title of this article. After you’re done asking that, “Probably playing baseball,” is one answer that you could give, if you weren’t particularly clever. “Winning the World Series,” is another for the more literal-minded of you. Yes, these are both things that the Twins were doing in 1991. But among other things they were also doing, such as eating, sleeping, grooming their mustaches and mullets, watching Cheers, enjoying the musics of Color Me Badd and C+C Music Factory, and wondering if a viable third party candidate might emerge in next year’s presidential election, were the following:

Being hot.

Coming on strong.

Having Kelly at the wheel.

Not going wrong.

Lookin’ straight ahead on the right track.

Not turning back.

Having Puck, Chuck, Jack, Mack, Chili, Willie, Bush, Tap, Harper, Gladden, Al, and Gags. Hrbek, Willis, Gene, and Pags. Aguilera, Erickson, Teddy, and Bedrosian. Guthrie, West, and the rest.

Having the best.

Commencing to get off and running.

Observe:

Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight (Friday), FanGraphs hosts a gathering at The Mead Hall in Cambridge, MA. With a view to helping readers identify the FanGraphs personnel in attendance, the present author has provided succinct descriptions of each below.

David Appelman, Founder
Wears necklace of human heads, each of which (i.e. each of which head) is wearing another, smaller necklace of human heads. Is generally not without a glistening lamb shank in one hand and still-beating human heart (perhaps yours?) in other. Has third hand, too — although best not to inquire about it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Regard:

The Rays 2013 pregame clubhouse entertainment now includes at least:

• A DJ.
• A magician.
• A meringue band.
• A flock of penguins.
• A cockatoo.
• Bushels of plantains hanging from the lockers.
• A 20-foot python.

I may be forgetting one or two.

I have lived two lives:
pre- and post-Yasiel Puig.
Post-Puig is better.

This has been a poorly written NotGraphs Haiku.

Because I can’t watch that GIF too many times. Thanks, @GDixon410.

Today I present to you something that isn’t sabermetrics. It isn’t even really anything. But I do have a great name for it: PSEUDOMETRICS. Pseudometrics* is the red-headed stepchild of sabermetrics, if said stepchild were a pile of moldy socks woven from backhair.  Pseudometrics, like sabermetrics, answers questions about baseball. Where it differs is in the kinds of questions it asks. Whereas [real statistic] might try to answer [real question], pseudometrics attempts to answer questions like, “Which baseball player is most like a grape?” and “What would happen if we made Kyle Farnsworth the next Dalai Lama?” In other words, pseudometrics asks the unanswerable and then answers it, gauchely. In doing so, it employs methods that are less than precise. It’s like bombing a field of rocks in Utah and then looking for fossils in the crater. You might find a dinosaur, but probably you’ll also be at the bottom of a crater with no way up and no friends and no hope and planes flying overhead dropping bombs.

One might say pseudometrics is “useless,” but I’ve already thoroughly abused this website with a truly useless statistic. Instead I prefer to think of it as “ineffable,” in the same way the word propels the plotline of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. That is, in a possibly meaningful, possibly irrelevant way. It’s an umbrella under which unquantifiable inquiries are crudely quantified and dispensed to readers (you) who starve for numbers that tell you what’s really going on. Except these numbers don’t. But they feel like they do, and that’s what counts. Even us stolid empiricists require a little good feelin’ every now and then.

To celebrate the introduction of Pseudometrics and its overflowing banks of ineffability, I want to begin by considering who the most and least ineffable ballplayers are. Sound dumb? Grape!

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Coro of azcentral sports recently reported on Diamondbacks outfielder Adam Eaton’s eight-month-long struggle with hives. Eaton himself surmises that the excessive sweating caused by the hives is the main reason of his weight loss over the last month.

Eaton is hoping to reestablish his ba-donka-donk.

Coro’s news blip is chock-full of colorful quotes from Eaton that amused me greatly and that, ultimately, I could not ignore. Consider this one:

I was taking [allergy pills] twice a day and it didn’t care. It just came through. Real bad itchy. Just terrible. Sweating all the time.

I guess I haven’t done an exhaustive search for similar language, but this, to me, stands out as an unusual incidence of an athlete anthropomorphizing his ailment. The hives, here, are aware of the attack being made on them, and in spite of that, they continue their sojourn throughout Eaton’s body, stimulating his itch and sweat glands in the process.

Also, there is the phrase “real bad itchy,” which, well, alternately makes me laugh and conjures imagines of a murderous clown hulk. (Note: said phrase also has utility as a euphemism when revealing to one’s significant other that one has a mysteriously acquired groin irritation.)

Read the rest of this entry »