Archive for November, 2013

Sour Grapes Taste Good

First came the vote for the American League Rookie of the year.

ALROY

Fine. Maybe they just didn’t feel comfortable voting on a guy they didn’t see before voting. It’s pretty hard to call up a stat sheet, maybe call a friend covering the Rays, and hey Cody Allen did have a great season. Position players are over-rated.

Then came the vote for American League Manager of the year.

ALMOY

Well, now that’s a little peculiar. Could it be?

Hey now.

Reminds me of the time I offered to get the table beers while losing at poker. Winner got my twenty bucks and a warm skunked Heineken I found downstairs. Or the time I convinced the scorer — she liked me — to change Carson Cistulli’s hit to an error because Cistulli played more often than I did on our JV squad. Or the time I bid all of my free agent budget on Travis d’Arnaud just because I knew Mike Podhorzer needed a catcher in our TOUT league. (He won anyway.) Or the time I traded Adam Wainwright because he struck out Carlos Beltran like that. Or the time I kicked my nineteen-month old son’s ball over the fence because he scored a goal on me.

Sour grapes taste good.


Report: MLB and FanGraphs to Announce Creation of Mike Trout Award

mike-trout-mvp1

NEW YORK — Major League Baseball and FanGraphs, in an effort to have people shut up about Miguel Cabrera, Mike Trout, and the American League MVP Award for one goddamned second, have teamed up to announce the creation of a new award, the Mike Trout Award, a source from the commissioner’s office told NotGraphs on condition of anonymity. An official announcement is expected Friday afternoon.

The Mike Trout Award will be given annually to Mike Trout, for being the best player in baseball, and to a player in the National League who represents the essence of Mike Trout by leading the National League in Wins Above Replacement, as calculated by FanGraphs. It’s hoped that the Trout Award will mercifully end the debate between the Baseball Writers Association of America, fans, and sabermetricians everywhere — mostly on the Internet — over who are definitively baseball’s most valuable players every year. Because after two years, it’s fucking exhausting.

The Trout Award was to have been created for the 2014 season and beyond, but after Trout versus Cabrera Part II in the American League, MLB, and especially Commissioner Bud Selig, who acted “with a sense of urgency,” according to our source, pushed up the award’s timeline.

“Seriously, no one at MLB really cares who wins the MVP awards,” our source said via email. “We just mostly want not to receive angry phone calls and emails and even one weird — and pretty graphic — fax, which we suspect was sent by Mr. Brian Kenny. In any case, we believe the Trout Award is the perfect solution to stop the insanity.”

The winners of the Trout Award — Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen — will be presented their awards on Monday in a ceremony at MLB headquarters in New York City.


Actional GIF: Tampa Prospect Grayson Garvin’s Breaking Ball

The author needn’t really mention that left-handed Tampa Bay prospect Grayson Garvin was born and raised in Georgia. Indeed, history dictates that there are only two sorts of people in this world who could reasonably have that name: those who were either (a) born in Georgia or (b) born in Georgia but then subsequently killed while serving in the European Theatre of World War II. That left-handed Tampa Bay prospect Grayson Garvin is alive and not dead reveals which sort of Grayson Garvin he is.

Indeed, it isn’t Grayson’s biography which the author cares to address here, at all. Rather, why we’ve all gathered at this internet post is for the purposes of inspecting Garvin’s breaking ball — in this case, as it appeared during the young Georgian’s Arizona Fall League start of November 9th.

Here’s the first example of it — in this case, to Kansas City outfield prospect Lane Adams:

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Baseball Withdrawl Antidote: A Young Vin Scully

We love Vin Scully for many things — one of which is his general grandpaness. But did you know Vin Scully used to be a young person? THE DEVIL I SAY! It’s true, at least according the below clip of some sort of TV show in which a young Scully acts. Is it acting if a baseball announcer plays a baseball announcer? If it is, Scully has acted quite a bit, according to his IMDB page — the go-to source for all your Vin Scully acting credit needs. The clip is from a show called Alcoa Premiere, which played scripted TV dramas that dealt with some heavy stuff. Famous movie composer John Williams also scored the show, for what it’s worth. Enjoy seeing a dark-haired Scully from a simpler time when we didn’t have to deal with all this technology and inter-racial marriages.

(h/t to the Scully-fan Twitter account @vinscullytweet)


Enough is Enough on Risky Awards Photoshoots

It’s high time someone spoke up about a potentially dangerous trend in Major League Baseball. The league has been pushing its luck for years in assembling awards candidates at season’s end. Driven (I can only assume) by some kind of twisted sensationalism, it has been arranging players not only in closer and closer proximity for photoshoots, but forcing them into more and more active and realistic positions, and thereby greatly increasing the chance of accidental injury. Don’t get me wrong: we all love looking at these pictures. But someone, at some point, is going to get hurt. And we cannot allow that to happen.

These shoots have been going on for as long as we can remember, but the basic safety controls have been gradually eroded for years now. While players were traditionally photographed in casual, head-on poses:

im_awards_mvpheadshot

…these poses were abandoned in favor of “action shots” like the following — though each player was still confined to a separate small room, with fairly thick walls.

verlandershieldsweaver090711

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Even Today, Big Pun Still Considered Most Valuable Player

Nearly actual reportage conducted by this internet weblog has revealed that, despite his frequent claims to the contrary — distilled to their essence, most notably, in the 1998 hit single embedded here — late Bronx-born rapper Big Pun remains the most valuable player to basically anyone with some combination of (a) ears and (b) a heart.

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Hopeless Joe’s MVP Picks

Ah, the MVP awards. Where we make virtually every player feel bad just so we can honor two guys for their luck-enhanced statistics. Haven’t we figured out by now that it’s all just statistical noise? Roll the dice and Jacoby Ellsbury can hit 32 home runs, or R.A. Dickey can be unhittable for six months, or Nick Punto can be above-replacement-level. One in a million seasons, I could probably get a hit or two, walk once or twice, and end up with a million-dollar contract instead of this minimum wage job shoveling coal into the boilers here at the local mental health facility. And yet we continue to award the random nature of results instead of what’s really important: the rational understanding that life is meaningless, sports are diversions to help us forget we’re all going to die, and the real most valuable player is the one who best distracts us from dwelling on the truth.

Which makes this year’s most valuable players Alex Rodriguez and Mariano Rivera, because I still have hundreds of articles to read about each of them, and that will prevent me from thinking too hard about the exceptions in the fine print of my life insurance policy.


Head of Cistulli with Rob-Ford’s-Head-Topped Pizza-Eyes Lazily Placed on Body of Eddie Gaedel as Tampa Burns

CistulliPizzaEyesandBurning

Please direct all complaints concerning lazy photoshopping to cistulli at notgraphs dot com.


Humorous/Insightful Baseball Term/Stat/Acronym Needed

batoota

It came to my attention this morning that Internet web site and the O.G. Google, Yahoo!, is selling off some of its domains. As I buy and sell domains like my portfolio depended on it (it does), this grabbed my interest. As a professional domain broker, I’ve come to quickly analyze the potential worth of domains. While some are certainly more valuable than others (if you think I’m spilling the beans on this, you have brain damage), one confused me: Batoota.com. I did some very quick and even dirtier Googling of the Internet to find out just what Batoota meant. It seems to hold little meaning in actual language, used mostly as a name in countries where brown people live. But this spoke to me. Batoota. Batooooooota. It has a ring to it.

So I turn to you, fair NotGraphs readers. Let’s come up with some sort of stat or acronym or something that makes this domain useful. Let’s create another term that confuses people and sets the statistical movement back a few years. Most importantly, let’s make me some money.


Head of Rob Ford Lazily Placed on Body of Eddie Gaedel

I recently Photoshopped the head of Toronto mayor Rob Ford — who’s better known in proper circles as “Melvin Nosotros Good Times” — onto the body of famed baseball halfling Eddie Gaedel. I surveyed my work and thought it stupid.

But then David G. Temple, the handsome Muay Thai expert with wind-swept hair and a far-off look in his eye, posted some Photoshoppage of a pizza on top of Tropicana Field. Upon viewing Mr. Temple’s contributions, I thought, “My dumb work has been sanctioned.”

Here, then, is Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s head sloppily placed on Eddie Gaedel’s body:

Melvin Nosotros Good Times

At this point, the reader will note that, unlike Mr. Temple and his post, I can scarcely be bothered to construct a false meta-narrative around my lousy photo. For I am Dayn Perry, practitioner of lassitude.

In the interest of redemption, though, I leave you with one of the sky-scraping tweets of our century — one that carries with it the whiff of our baseball …

#Hero #NeverForget