TEMPE, Ariz. — As a three-time All-Star, and former .300 hitter and middle-of-the-order threat, Joe Veteran has no need to listen to critics, especially those ripping on his huge contract.

He would of course love to be able to silence them, but, in his heart, he knows they’re right.

Veteran, who is trying to bounce back from the two worst seasons of his career, said he thinks he’s likely to be even worse this year, the unavoidable march of time taking its toll on his bat speed and other underlying physical skills. And while he avoids reading stories about himself– mostly because he spent so much time as a child developing his baseball skills that he never learned to read– he is forced to admit that what he hears on sports talk radio is almost certainly accurate, and he will never reach his previous heights again.

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It’s usually about this time every year where I sit down and look at the forty man rosters of each club, and realize there are about a billion random middle relievers I don’t know anything about. I don’t think that’s because I don’t do my due diligence. Moreover, given the high turnover rate for relievers, I don’t feel like it’s my duty to memorize all these guys either. They’re all going to be gone in two years, and I’ll have to learn a whole new set of forgettable names. None of you know or care about them.

Don’t think so? Fine, we’ll prove it. Pop quiz, hotshot. Modern day middle reliever I hadn’t heard of or fictional character from an Edith Wharton novel? I’m tired of relaxed grading standards. You need to get at least 80 percent to pass. Read the rest of this entry »

Each day this week, the author is recounting notable home runs he’s conceded during his life as a nearly decent baseball pitcher at various levels.

Previous Installments: One / Two

Date: March, 1998
Level: High School (Preseason)
Place: Lake Bonny Park in Lakeland, FL (Link)

I am both (a) almost certainly plagiarizing the work of another, more talented author, but also at least (b) appealing to capital-T Truth, when I note at the outset of this brief post that, during the career of a young ballplayer, there are moments when he is compelled, against his will probably, to acknowledge that he’s unlikely ever to become an older ballplayer — or, at least not the sort of older ballplayer who’s compensated for his virtues afield. “This is not for you,” the facts of reality conspire to announce gravely. “Time to re-evaluate your options, probably.”

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It’s not for the present author to say whether the reader should or shouldn’t click upon, and therefore embiggen, the image embedded above. What such a reader would find upon so doing, however, is a lightly annotated version of tomorrow’s (Wednesday’s) MLB.TV schedule — which schedule reveals that, indeed, three spring-training games are available for consumption by the capital-P People.

Among the players expected to appear, for example: the very curious Trevor Bauer (for Cleveland) and very promising Joc Pederson (for the Los Angeles Nationals) and not actually that Italian Tony Cingrani (for Cincinnati).

There aren’t nearly enough stadium features named after players. And the ones that do exist are named after players who don’t even play anymore. Wouldn’t it be more fun for teams to commemorate current players? First in what will either be an ongoing series or not…

CITI FIELD, PROPOSED (click to embiggen)

The horrifyingly unregulated NotGraphs Genetics Lab has done it again, for the first time. You, the reader, asked (maybe) for someone as frightening as Clark the Crack Cub, as prolific as Jeff Sullivan, as tyrannical as Dayn Perry, and as handsome as Cistulli isn’t.

You pleaded: “Engineer us a leader, oh NGGL! May he strike terror in our hearts! May he give courage to our loins! May he sport the wisps of countless ghostly hairs! And can his name be a pun?! OMG CAN HIS NAME BE A PUN!?!?!”
We answered: “Quiet, rabble. It is done.”

HOMER UN

(And his genetic antecedents, Homer and Kim Jong Un):

Each day this week, the author is recounting notable home runs he’s conceded during his life as a nearly decent baseball pitcher at various levels. Read the first installment here.

Date: June, 1993
Level: Prep League (13-year-old Babe Ruth)
Place: Rollins Park in Concord, NH (Link)

Frequently it’s been the case in my adult life that people have mistaken me for longtime reliever and Dominican Republic native Octavio Dotel. “Excuse me, but are you Octavio Dotel?” people will often ask me, for example, on the streets of this or that American city. Or “Mr. Dotel,” they’ll say, catching up to me as I finish my afternoon jog, “could you please sign this baseball I happened to be carrying for some reason that I don’t even know?”

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Now that the Winter Olympics are behind us, and with them those boreal Danish cyborgs, those European blurs, those airborne American ice-o-nauts, those pawns of the alpine graviton, we can steer our Olympian spirit back to that lonely orphan of the Quadrennial Games, baseball. We the people, endowed with the Visa-commercial belief that we can achieve our dreams as long as we set our minds to it and also have parents who will drive us to the rink each morning at 4, can now seek ways to restore the American Pastime to this international event, the Pastime having been abruptly voted out some years ago when a bunch of Commie Pinkos got together with a bunch of wine-sipping art lovers to deny Americans their Gawd-given right to Americanize the rest of the world, and also to dominate it.

Granted, baseball got booted from the Summer Games, not the Winter, but since the Games of Ice ’N Snow are still fresh on our minds, and also since the Summer Games jilted Doubleday’s baby like a lottery winner divorces his wife, let’s work to return our game to Olympia’s embrace by making baseball part of the frozen fortnight, shall we? That’s right, fellow ’Murcans: Let’s make it a winter event!

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Each day this week, the author is recounting notable home runs he’s conceded during his life as a nearly decent baseball pitcher at various levels.

Date: May, 1990
Level: Little League
Place: Sanel Field in Concord, NH (Link)

Like a liar, is how I’ll begin this series of brief anecdotes — owing, I mean, to how this particular one (i.e. this anecdote) doesn’t concern an actual, but only a would-be, home run. Sue me, is what anyone offended by this is invited to do.

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Here are the results of the first round of this weekend’s Mock Mock Draft:

1.1 “Haha, I thought fantasy baseball was stupid as it is, but now you’re having a even faker practice draft for your fake draft?”

1.2 “Oooh, you got Trout? Too bad this isn’t a REAL DRAFT, sucker.”

1.3 “Maybe you should draft Garrett MOCK in your MOCK draft! Oh, he hasn’t played since 2010? EVEN BETTER.”

1.4 “Your fake team is even worse than your actual team. Which isn’t an actual team, of course.”

1.5 “I bet your spreadsheet isn’t even working right.”

1.6 “Maybe I’ll make you a mock dinner for you to eat after your draft, you terrible, neglectful husband.”

1.7 “You’re lucky this is a mock draft, because if it wasn’t, you would be in for a very long season.”

1.8 “Even Hopeless Joe had a better mock draft than you, and he left after three rounds to hang himself.”

1.9 “Ever hear of shortstops? Doesn’t seem like it.”

1.10 “Are you CRYING because someone took Byron Buxton before you? There’s no crying in mock drafting, crybaby. Save it for the actual auction, where crying is actually pretty common.”

1.11 “You’re not even pretending to respect the budget limitations you’re going to be faced with in the real draft. Oy.”

1.12 “Mock? More like a mockery. Who picks Justin Upton in the first round anymore?”

1.13 “There are more teams in your mock draft than number of years of education yo momma completed.”

1.14 “Uh… Mariano Rivera retired last season, moron.”

1.15 “Are holds actually a category in your league? That is so 1997.”

1.16 “I bet you don’t even know the strategic differences between drafting in the middle of the round in a snake draft versus one of the ends.”