Shrug.

I’ve always gotten Fielder and Kinsler confused anyway. Seven letters in their last names. Both getting paid millions of dollars to play baseball. Okay, one of them can’t grow facial hair and the other one has a neck tattoo, but can anyone really keep the two of them straight? Physically, I mean. If you described each one to a police sketch artist, they’d end up looking like twins. Also, statistically. They both hit like thirty doubles a year. And that’s just the start of their similarities. (And the end.) Their Bill James Similarity Score must be like 950. (Or 50.)

So it’s just two more interchangeable parts being swapped for each other. The fans won’t even notice a difference on the field, and it doesn’t do anything to help fix up the Obamacare website. I don’t have time to worry about Ian Fielder and Prince Kinsler. I’ve been trying to buy health insurance for almost two months.

Prince Fielder doesn’t call the wrong number. You answer the wrong phone.

Jeff Passan of Yahoo has submitted a science hypothesis to the teeming masses by way of media sociale, as follows:

You could substitute Alex Rodriguez's name for Lance Armstrong and pretty much everything would be the same.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 20, 2013

Perhaps? Perhaps. Ultimately, this isn’t the point. For, whatever the virtues of Passan’s suggestion, chief among them is how readily it (i.e. that suggestion) lends itself to the nearly effortless production of weblog content.

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A story that broke today was, like so many stories during the early off-season, about a young songstress from New Zealand and George Brett. As it happens, the title of the very popular Lorde song Royals was inspired by a picture of none other than the Hall-of-Famer for Kansas City. This is, indeed, crack reporting. What isn’t crack reporting is creating a list of songs that were certainly NOT inspired by George Brett. That is what I have done. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the Hall of Fame’s class of 2013 has been revealed, and I can’t pretend to be thrilled about it. No, I’m not talking about the Baseball Hall of Fame; it’s November, and baseball is dead to me. I’m talking of course about the National Toy Hall of Fame, which, for the woefully ignorant among you, is based in the Strong Museum of Play (that’s its name) in Rochester, New York. Faced with a solid pool of nominees, the voters once again displayed a truly breathtaking lack of boldness, imagination, and critical thinking, electing only two mediocre candidates — Chess and Rubber Duck — and thus ushering the Hall further down the road to complete irrelevancy.

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I found these amusing. Maybe you will too.

It was more difficult to find funny reviews of baseballs. I don’t know why.

“You can call me ‘a source close to the family and familiar with the negotiations.'”

The life of a reporter covering Major League Baseball remains a difficult one. Not only has the job of a beat reporter expanded to require several blog posts and newspaper articles in a single day, but today’s scribes must also be ready 24 hours a day to break news. In the desperate race to break stories, they are forced to rely on new, and occasionally unreliable sources.

So it was yesterday that Texas sportswriter Jamie Kelly broke the news that David Murphy was going to sign with the Cleveland Indians, because Murphy’s daughter told everyone at day care she was moving to Cleveland (presumably prompting an tsunami of sympathetic responses and comforting pats on the back).  The news was relayed to Kelly, who told her Twitter followers:

David Murphy informed his daughter’s daycare that he is signing with the Indians. This is, again, per my source close to the situation.

— Jamie Kelly (@JamieSportsTalk) November 20, 2013

As it turns out, Kelly was absolutely spot on. But this sets a dangerous precedent where ballplayers’ children become not just adorable moppets who get to play on the field with their dads on Sunday, but legitimate sources for breaking news. Already, we’ve seen the following rumors crop up:

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Mere hours after being formally recognized for his performance at the Arizona Fall League, Chicago Cubs prospect Kris Bryant is demonstrating his skill alongside a different kind of plate — namely, the expensive and decorative sort commonly found at middle-class American wedding receptions.

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The following tweet is entirely and in-no-way altered from the original (click to embiggen):

Mike Pelfrey walks into a bar.
The bartender says:
“Why the long face?”

This has been Inserting Mike Pelfrey’s Name into Old Jokes.

(h/t to CJ Fogler)