I didn’t want to do two of these so close together, but then Delmon Young had to go and sign with the Baltimore Orioles this week, meaning it’s once again time for the royal We to insert Delmon Young’s name into a shitty representation of the Western Canon, thus diminishing these works even further into the flammable morass of Lake Erie that is realty-TV-based popular culture.

Today, Delmon Young plays the part he was born to play, as a terrible baseball player searching for someone, anyone to guide him, in Notgraphs-subsidized Internet GIF-maker and notable quitter David Temple’s favorite book, The Kid Who Only Hit Homers*:

*By the way, having re-read the first couple pages of this book for the purposes of this post, I just want to say that the ghost of Babe Ruth comes off as a total pedophile. No child should ever read this book again lest they be encouraged to accept “private coaching” from complete strangers after practice.

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According to research conducted by the author this morning in his pajama pants — and reproduced below entirely in the form of two tweets by Tribune-Review beat writer Rob Biertempfel — the Pittsburgh Pirates appear to be the major-league baseball club which most wholly embraces the tenets of absurdism and also, probably, the only club which embraces even one tenet of absurdism.

Paul Leo Molitor is so handsome that each year on the anniversary of his birth, a single tear rolls down the faces of the sculptures of the Petit Palais. It is somewhere between lore and truth when the taxi driver tells you that when Paul Molitor sneezes, what he expels becomes airborne semen, and it impregnates not only all ladies in the airports of the world, but also the men, the children and the full complement of Sharper Image products available in Terminal C.

Fully pregnant as I write this, I have spent years — minutes, even — searching for a daguerreotype of Paul Molitor at his most luminously handsome. And this is it; and it is this …

If this same photo were of a lesser man, then it would be what it is: sepia-toned and worn to ribbons. Yet because the image is of Paul Molitor, it is shimmering in its perfect preservation. It has been used as a bookmark for Erica Jong novels. It is poised forever at the ready in Odin’s spank bank.

Gaze upon his essence if you dare. Note the chin as perfectly cleaved as a stallion’s hoof. Become engulfed by the eyes. They are lozenges made up of every loving marriage. When the Pacific Ocean is in hospice, that is the blue it will imagine as it dies surrounded by other weeping oceans. Each whisker is an oak tree, each chest hair a curly sex act or some warfare.

Paul Molitor is about vanquish the Axis Powers. Paul Molitor is also about to make love to one while painting the other. No, the other other. I’m talking about the girl leaning on the balustrade and looking back with a cherishing as thick as gruel.

Omar Vizquel and his magic car take flight toward Opening Day
Past the downtrodden January, where the blankets of snow do lay
All the players have found their teams
The fans are ready, too, it seems
To grass and sun and won-pennant dreams
Omar will show us the way.

The car is the color of marigolds, an illicit reference to Spring
‘Tis the color of his gilded trophy gloves and AL Championship ring
He obeys his lease down to the letter
The less miles that it incurs, the better
His shirt — a silken Cosby sweater
Both shiny and wondrous things.

Fly away with Vizquel, this night, to a place where batted balls soar
He’ll buy you a beer and a nacho plate, he’ll even let you keep score
A place where the pastime is always forever
Where shortstop can be played by whoever
Where stabbing ground balls is an easy endeavor
You’ll swear you had been there before.

(h/t to Internet baseball wizard darenw)

As my colleague Mr. Reynolds observed earlier today, the Chicago Cubs have just unveiled a new club mascot for the first time in over a hundredyear, which is a term for “century” that I believed to be real until I Googled it ten seconds ago. I’m sure I am not alone in finding the Cubs’ choice to be a controversial one. Was anyone consulted on this? Were any alternatives considered? Now that “Clark” (or, as Mr. Reynolds more aptly christened him, “Coked-Out Bear Child”) has been unilaterally instated as the face of the franchise, it’s clearly too late to offer our own suggestions. How sad it is, then, that I had so many good ideas — visions of Cubs for which costumes already existed: ideas now fated to shrivel like desiccated fruit, as do all dreams deferred. You are welcome to vote on the following, if you enjoy exercises in futility.

Lion Cub

bostoncostume.com

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The Cubs recently announced they are bringing back a mascot to the franchise in the form of “Clark the Cub.” Clark, a name normally reserved for douchebags and Superman, is the first mascot the Cubs have had since Joa, a live bear that remained with the club for only three months. But before Joa the 1908 Cubs had this:

O terror!

And now the Cubs have this:

O terror! Terror abounds!

Here’s a fun game, if you’ve already finished the rest of the Internet. Try to find a baseball player where the number of Google results for a misspelled version of his name come closest to the number of results for his name spelled correctly.

For instance… Todd Zeile: 84,100 results. Todd Ziele: 6,240 results.

So that’s not so close.

Think you’ve figured out the trick here? Andruw Jones: 752,000 results. Andrew Jones… any guesses? Amazingly, only 417,000 results. A lot of people write about baseball on the Internet, compared to writing about ordinary people whose names are spelled appropriately.

Maybe the trick is to use obscure players. Marcus Semien: 32,000 results (31,000 of them link to FanGraphs). Marcus Semen: only 486 results, and most of them unsafe for work.

Jhonny Peralta: 923,000. Johnny Peralta: 58,200. Jake Peralta, Andy Samberg’s character on Brooklyn Nine-Nine: 31,400.

Wladimir Balentien: 121,000. Vladimir Balentien: 1,440. Vladimir Balentine: 42 results.

Can you find one where the misspelling exceeds the correct one? That’s your challenge, bored-at-work readers. That’s your challenge.

The information you didn’t request. (Click to embiggen.)

As a professional weblogger, it’s the constant task of the present author to ask, and then subsequently answer, the question “For what sort of information would a Worker of the World gladly suspend his labors and provide my particular weblog with a hot internet click?”

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“Shameless”, is a word that might be used to describe the mental state of the author as he begins constructing this post. “Wholly Unaccomplished in Life”, is an epitaph to which said author will likely be resigned by the end of this same post….

Election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame is a mark — albeit an imprecise one, to say the least — of greatness. While some of the players enshrined in the Hall could hardly have been greater than they actually were (like the newly elected Greg Maddux), I think I speak for at least seven billion people when I say that the perfect set of eyebrows can greatly improve the aura of even the greatest of the greats. Great. So.

Jackie Robinson with Branch Rickey and his perfect eyebrows.

Speaking again for those same seven billion people, I say that Branch Rickey’s eyebrows are perfect for affixing under almost any circumstance. Here they are, then, affixed in pixels to the newest inductees to the Hall of Fame.

Greg Maddux

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Brought to the attention of the author, once again, by means of intrepid weblog The Deadball Era, and then corroborated by a primary source (above) after a protracted internet search, is the unfortunate death of Ed Irvin or Ed Irwin or, strangely, “Bill” Irwin, who died in 1916 after being thrown through a saloon window in Philadelphia.

Text courtesy the February 9th, 1916, edition of Philly’s Evening Public Ledger.