A curious reader might ask, “Hey, Answerman, do you have answers to my baseball-related questions?”

To which the Answerman might reply, “No. Why do you ask?”

Q: Tom Glavine’s wife, Christine, recently Tweeted a photo of her husband on the phone just as he was receiving news of his Hall of Fame election. Most players would be ecstatic, but Glavine looked stoic. Tell me, have any other players looked so unemotional upon receiving news of their HOF elections?

A: Actually, there have been several. Christy Mathewson was probably the first. Upon receiving news of his election with the inaugural HOF class of 1936, he had been dead for nearly 11 years.

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   Gee Brain, what do you want to do tonight?

   The same thing we do every night, Pinky: TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD! Read the rest of this entry »

This has been the Tao of Gomes.

This has been One Childish Possibility for Greg Maddux’s HOF Cap.

Important Update: Twitter-user to the stars Ryan Dunsmore has graced us with an artist’s rendering of Maddux’s plaque donning such attire. Observe:

Get to know new Tampa Bay Ray Brad Boxberger.

He likes running water.

No running water in hotel… Great job @HolidayInn

— Brad Boxberger (@Brad_Boxberger) August 6, 2013

He hates slavery.

Congrats to @Brad_Boxberger on his 1st game with 4 strikeouts in 2 innings! On Team @NFS, he's pledged to #endslavery with every SO in 2013.

— Ethan Batstone (@ebatstone) May 6, 2013

He likes chocolate and bananas.

Breakfast of champions #chocolat #chocolatebanana pic.twitter.com/gexC5UgOZx

— Brad Boxberger (@Brad_Boxberger) May 6, 2013

He hates censorship.

Tell Congress: Don’t censor the web! http://t.co/7e8qBMUd

— Brad Boxberger (@Brad_Boxberger) January 18, 2012

He shops at Kroger.

Nicest grocery store in America http://t.co/2NdgD7rw

— Brad Boxberger (@Brad_Boxberger) October 24, 2012

And, hey, Coca-Cola, give this man an endorsement deal!

I think @CocaCola would taste even better in the arctic cold weather while talking to a polar bear.

— Brad Boxberger (@Brad_Boxberger) February 6, 2012

Happy New Year! Am I late on that? I don’t care! It’s still January and I still accidentally write 2013 on everything I have to date, ladies included. With time continuing to degrade our bodies year-by-year, I think it’s high time we think about the important stuff again. Stuff like: what can I measure for no reason? Specifically, what useless, trivial, unimportant but highly distracting thing can I measure? Answer: Shit tons. You can measure anything! Except for the impact God is having on the men in your Bible study.

Last summer I created a measure called COOL meant to parody NERD. I prefer COOL to NERD because it makes me laugh harder. I also love myself the most. I once again have the itch to do some measuring. I could maybe satisfy this itch by delving into something meaningful–something illuminating that adds to our sabermetric body of knowledge. But I know, duh, that nothing is meaningful, really, and I’d be wasting my time thinking so. Instead, the closest I can find to meaningful activity is one that will make me laugh, hopefully others, too, if only because I laugh harder when others are laughing. So I must measure something meaningless, or at the very least, something that resembles something meaningful but disintegrates at even the slightest scrutiny. A la COOL.

I generated some ideas for metrics by first thinking of a word in my brain (Brodmann area 47/46, perhaps), any word, and then coming up with what that word might measure were it a metric. You will find these proto-metrics, these seeds of weeds, below. And below them you will have the opportunity to exercise the privilege of voting. I will delicately craft a perfectly destitute metric out of the highest vote-getter.
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Advice for young self-made writers of dubious talent and forgettable, sometimes-pleasing web-humor: relax! Producing quality material, especially in such a strangely self-limiting genre, may seem intimidating at first, especially while Masahiro Tanaka is busy killing baseball for weeks at a time. It may appear as though every decent idea you squeeze out of your limited perspective and unimportant personal history might be your last. But don’t worry: if you’re truly destined to be a semi-anonymous content-creator, the Fates will apportion you tiny little pellets of inspiration at random intervals. How else to explain, after a 2.5-year writing career, my recent discovery of this:

Such ancestral bonds might go unappreciated by a Mississippi Matt Smith or a Zach Reynolds. But my sole genealogical heritage belongs to a man who killed cute animals for a living and created a town solely for the purpose of selling their skin. Armond Dubuque doesn’t much of a leaderboard to climb, is what I’m saying.

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I will not at this time recount for you the series of considerations and life decisions that led me to conduct a Google search for the terms “Engelbert Humperdinck + baseball,” but know that from this peculiar tree, velvety fruit has been harvested.

Please regard, with tensed hips and phallus, the following passage from Milton H. Jamail’s book, Venezuelan Bust, Baseball Boom …

And here he is, that Enyelbert Soto.

What I’m saying is that there exists a player of this, our baseball named after this, our Engelbert Humperdinck.

What I’m really saying is: Boil me in oil, for Engelbert Humperdinck played baseball.

As there is no baseball of note to be played today, nor will there be any played tomorrow or the next day or the next, we must fill our baseball-craving minds with whatever baseball-related slurry is kicking around up top. An example of these things, a very specific David-G-Temple-related example, are as follows:

• Base stealing
• Prominent base stealers
• Cocaine
• Spreadsheets/Charts related to baseball
• Writing creatively about baseball
• Switching chairs, in a sad effort to hopefully enable writing creatively about baseball
• Pete Rose
• Transportation to Spring Training in Arizona
• My being too fat to fit in the clothes I wore to Spring Training in Arizona last year
• A self-imposed diet to enable me to fit in the clothes I wore to Spring Training in Arizona last year
• County Stadium in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• The baseball-related podcast I have to re-edit due to computer issues
• A baseball-related short story I promised to someone
• How I haven’t written something creative about baseball in a while
• Making a list about baseball-related things about which I’ve though, today

In addition to the very English and talented Craig Robinson, the editoriat of NotGraphs is pleased also to announce the debut here of John Paschal, who writes additionally for The Hardball Times under the pseudonym Azure Texan. Here, Paschal attempts to render into prose the thrill of speaking over the phone with the actual, real Carson Cistulli — an experience of which literally even zero presidents have had the pleasure.

So, due to several dark-alley bribes and trench-coat meetings in the underground parking garage of the United Nations, you suddenly have a chance to write for NotGraphs, which is exactly like writing for FanGraphs except, you know, not. The first order of business, though, is to field an introductory phone call from His Eminence Carson Cistulli, probably because you are a shadowy figure on the Internet and so he wants to make sure you’re not a potted plant or a set of twins named Ripper and Shank.

Scheduled time of call: Noon Eastern. This is problematic because you don’t live in the East, you live in the NotEast, but he assures you via email that it will work out because these things almost always work out, phone-wise.

Still you are nervous, or, put differently, NotNotNervous.

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