Managing editor Dave Cameron’s forthcoming appearance on FanGraphs Audio this week features — as many of Dave Cameron’s recent appearances have featured — features an enthusiastic guest appearance by that same managing editor’s very young dog.

It’s not unreasonable — is perhaps the most reasonable thing in the world — to suggest that, in the weeks since the canine’s arrival chez Cameron, the devoted (if few) listeners of FanGraphs Audio have become like uncles and aunts (although mostly uncles, probably) to the newest member of the Cameron family. The author has it on good authority, in fact, that listeners of that podcast like nothing better than when the baseballing content of this or that episode is forestalled by five or ten minutes by some idle chatter concerning the puppy’s sleeping habits or culinary preferences.

But what aunts and uncles require of their nephews and nieces isn’t a mere weekly audio dispatch, but rather real-live photographic proof — and moving images, if at all possible. It’s with that in mind that the author has acquired the poor-quality video embedded above of Cameron’s dog Liberty first jumping around a small plastic pool, and then falling over kinda, and then performing some other sorts of enthusiastic maneuvers, and then running in no particular direction, and then lying down without anything like warning.

The early 1970’s were a pivotal and epochal epoch — the most pivotal and epochal, perhaps — in the great Mustache Wars that have convulsed civilization since its very inception. If we were, for the sake of building a narrative, to point to a single event that forever turned the tide of those wars, it would surely be the 1972 World Series. Famously dubbed “Hairs vs. Squares,” this contest pitted the full-foliaged Oakland A’s of Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, and Rollie Fingers against Sparky Anderson’s baby-smooth Reds. The outcome — Oakland by a hair — validated mouthbrows everywhere and tipped off a long slide into obsolescence for shaved-lip purists.* It must have been a tough pill to swallow for old Sparky, who was so tenacious a defender of the clean-cut face that it cost him his firstborn son for a year and a half.

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Last Friday, MLB.com highlighted Dan Haren as the thirteenth pitcher to beat all 30 MLB teams, joining Al Leiter, Randy Johnson, Barry Zito, A.J. Burnett, Kevin Brown, Terry Mulholland, Curt Schilling, Woody Williams, Jamie Moyer, Javier Vazquez, Vicente Padilla and Derek Lowe, on a fairly meaningless list of people who pitched for a while in both leagues, since the addition of the Rays and Diamondbacks in 1998.

Winning the award for most insightful comment on the article:

Yes, I suppose that is true. Thanks, commenter.

As reported on yesterday by MLB.com’s Bill Chastain, Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Matt Moore is working his way back from elbow soreness. After his Sunday bullpen session, the left-hander was in good spirits, giving this insightful quote:

Today it was really just a great conditioning day for my shoulder, my lat, all the baseball-specific muscles.

It is clear that Matt Moore, science nerd, has science knowledge about science things that most of us did not even know existed, scientifically, in the first place — chiefly, baseball-specific muscles.

My interest piqued, I spent some time researching the fake internets of my mind and compiled the following list of baseball-specific muscles. This list is by no means comprehensive; feel free to add your own findings in the comments.

• sitim restinguere, or “the muscle of champions” – The only way to build this muscle is to have large coolers of iced beverages dumped over them.
• shoulder – Reclassified by Matt Moore as a baseball-specific muscle in 2013.
• lat – the baseball-specific equivalent of the latissimus dorsi.
• deridens diu pilam, or “the laughable long balls” – named in honor of the biceps of Gabe Kapler, the size of these “bad boys” is not necessarily linked to the frequency or distance of home runs.
• lignum proiciente, or “the bat-flipping muscle” – While all who play baseball professionally theoretically possess this muscle, we find that it is underdeveloped in some while being the predominant baseball-specific muscle in others.
• determinatur sordibus, or “the hustle muscle” – Delightfully rhymy, this muscle is generally only found in shorter and lither ballplayers and is often inversely proportional to other baseball-specific muscles; said to keep developing into old age, so it is often quite large in coaches and managers. Fun fact: Adam Dunn had an emergency determinatadectomy while in high school.
• carsons cistulli/dayns perry – The ability to capture the spirit of the game is centered in the groin, of course. While the dayns perry constantly pushes the loins outward, so as to unfurl the baseball-literadong from its editorial swaddling, the carsons cistulli is always working to restrain said while emanating its own joie de vivre. Ideally, these muscles are equally developed; sadly, they rarely are.
• lapso melius, or “slide-right” – These are the muscles used when a runner is trying to break up a double play; without them the top leg would remain along the ground and limply absorb the bag.

OAKLAND — The sports world and entertainment world collided Monday, when the celebrity couple of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie officially claimed infielder Adam Rosales. Jolie, who has a history of adopting children from impoverished nations, reports that she finalized the paperwork this morning.

“It’s always been a priority of mine to save children from dire positions, and those instincts kicked in when I heard about Adam’s situation,” Jolie said in an official statement. “It’s clear that Oakland and Texas, Adam’s two guardians, are not fit to provide him with the support and care that he needs. He needed to be removed from that toxic environment. It’s no different then when I adopted my other children, except that Adam is a 30-year old man. And a millionaire.”

Rosales, who has been the subject of a heated custody battle between the Athletics and Rangers told reporters that he’s just happy to finally have a home.

“I’ve been shuttling back and forth between homes so much recently, I’m not even sure where my stuff is. I think I have nine apartments in my name right now. And I lost track of my car like a week ago. It’s going to be weird to not play baseball anymore, but it sure beats living out of airports.”

Athletics GM Billy Beane, who, in a slight twist of fate, was portrayed by Pitt in the film Moneyball, could not be reached for comment. Rangers GM Jon Daniels did voice his displeasure.

“I really wanted Adam to be a Ranger,” said Daniels. “I mean, not enough to keep him on the roster for longer than, like, a couple days, but the desire was there. Mostly, I just wanted to fuck with Billy, though.”

Piggybacking on Albert Pujols’s decision to sue former host of “American Bandstand” Jack Clark for declaring on the radio that he “knows for a fact” that Pujols used steroids, the Angels star has decided to sue NotGraphs as well, for this post by Carson from last October, which stated:

[I]t’s entirely within the realm of possibility that Pujols played a not insignificant portion of the 2012 MLB season sans an effing knee.

Indeed, the NotGraphs post showed an enhanced photo of Pujols’s lower body, where you could see that his knee was entirely missing. Said Pujols:

I’ve said time and time again that I have two knees. I’ve been tested hundreds of times throughout my career and never once has a test come back showing that I have only one. It was irresponsible and reckless for Carson Cistulli to have falsely accused me of missing a knee. My faith in Jesus Christ, and my respect for this game are too important to me. I would never be able to look my kids in the eye if I only had one knee. Because they are short and I need to kneel and people with one knee can’t really kneel.

I am currently in the process of taking legal action against NotGraphs. I am going to send a message that you cannot act in a reckless manner, like they have, and get away with it. My hope is mostly that they stop posting about people’s mustaches. Only Jesus Christ can judge the quality of people’s mustaches.

NotGraphs is vigorously defending the action.

Should 5.2 WAR across 3013 PA net you a bobblehead? That depends. Do you have a set of vision adjusters like these?

Then, yeah, you probably deserve a bobblehead.

While examining the animated GIF embedded here of Elvis Andrus first homering and then, second, lazily tossing aside his bat, one is confronted by three facts, as follow:

1. Firstly, that it is not uncommon for base-and-ball traditionalists to suggest that it is incumbent upon each player, when he has homered, to “act like he’s been there before”; but also that

2. Noted pre-Socratic philosopher and pretty sad mec Heraclitus famously announced that “one can never step into the same river twice”; and finally that

3. Prior to his home run this evening, Elvis Andrus had recorded precisely zero of those (i.e. home runs) this season.

Confronted by these facts, is what one is.
_____

Credit to concerned citizen of the internet Ben Hudson for bringing this to the author’s attention.

As you are no doubt aware, or if you weren’t, now you are, because you are reading this fine article, Delmon Young has been designated for assignment by the Philadelphia Phillies. In honor of this great loss, the Royal We debut a new feature here on NotGraphs, in which We insert Delmon Young’s name into a shitty representation of the Western Canon, thus diminishing those works even further into the flammable morass of Lake Erie that is reality-TV-based popular culture.

In today’s episode, Delmon Young is the object of affection for one Edward Cullen, from New Moon, the second book in the Twilight Saga: Read the rest of this entry »

The above is an animation of Spiderman dancing. This has been a bit of an Internet meme, as many people have noticed that, at least in this particular animation, Spiderman will dance properly to almost any song played. The fine people over at the RadioLab radio program have pointed this out, and offer a scientific explanation. I advise reading the article, but essentially, our brain has a bias for things that are in sync, so we tend to focus on the times Spiderman’s dancing lines up with the music and block out the times it doesn’t. This is why it seems that Spiderman always has mad skilz.

I tasked myself with attempting to apply this logic to the music baseball players use whilst walking to the plate to bat. The following is Spiderman dancing to the at-bat music of the top ten batters in baseball, according to FanGraphs WAR.

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