Many of the voices in this author’s head considers NotGraphs to be the Skull and Bones of Internet Baseball Writing, mainly in that it’s secretive and pointless. But it’s our club, damn it, and we’ll be damned if we will have some millionaire baseball player steal our secret handshake and show it to some minor-leaguer on broadcast television. J’accuse!

Take solace, fair reader, in the fact that Mr. Cistulli and I will work non-stop next week when we meet in Arizona to devise a new secret handshake. Then, if you meet one of us in person and try to perform the old handshake, we can have you arrested for assault, which was our goal the whole time. Have fun in jail, dummy.

(h/t Mike Axisa)

Here at NotGraphs, we are no strangers to quantifying the absurdly subjective. And yet we never rest upon what we’ve already accomplished, no matter how extraordinary. Indeed, the cry of “Excelsior!” is an oft-uttered one around the NotGraphs offices, even as oft as “CISTULLI!!” and “Wait, we have offices?” So we have spent the winter sifting through vast reams of data, in an audacious effort to best isolate what it is that the baseball fan truly cares about. And here, with pleasure and some understandable anxiety, we present the result.

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The fundamentally awful work of one Carson J. Cistulli sent me to Ebay to find a series of hats that were infinitely better than the five he presented you with. I was going to make a joke about not sending a shabbily-dressed man-child to do a respectable person’s job, but then I got distracted by the following:

Vampire Baseball Cards: Team Cullen

So I set aside my snide remarks about Carson Cistulli’s vagrant-y appearance and smell and focused instead on this unholy, undead abomination.

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It’s a truth as old as time, if not somehow older: the most immediate way to apprise the world of one’s virtues as a human person is not by means of wealth or education or spiritual excellence, but rather by the purchase and then subsequent vesting of an excellent ballcap.

In the service of doing that exact thing, the author has recently inspected popular online retailer eBay with a view towards identifying those ballcaps which might most ably cultivate a sense of what Andre Breton referred to as “the marvelous” and what Kanye West referred to more recently, probably, as “a celebration.”

Anderson Lawmen New Era Hat (Link)
Style: Fitted (7 3/8)
Time Left: 19 days, 8 hours
Cost: US $29.99 (Buy It Now)

The Lawmen, according to Baseball Reference, were an Indiana-based independent-league team which belonged, first, to the Mid-America League and then, after that, the Heartland League. I have it on decent, if not good, authority that anyone who wears this hat is automatically deputized in whichever municipality he currently resides.

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Ty Cobb, or T-Nutts, is remembered by family as a warm and gentle man.

ATLANTA – Descendants of former Tigers outfield great Ty Cobb were furious on Wednesday after a picture of current Tigers outfielder Torii Hunter kissing an alligator went viral this week, revealing in the process that Hunter’s Instagram user name is tnutts48 — a name Cobb’s living family members say is the rightful property of their beloved relative.

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Jake Peavy explains his finger injury to the Boston Herald:

“Just getting ready to go fishing … promised my little boys I’d take them fishing. Went over to Bass Pro [Shops] and bought them some rod and reels and they were combined. Just tried to cut them, because they were wire-tied, using my knife,” Peavy said.

“With my right hand holding the rod, with my left holding the knife and when I broke the wire tab it (the knife) just stuck my knuckle pretty good.”

Peavy said he struck a vein and he bled pretty severely all over his shorts. He said he and his boys went to John Lackey’s house, where he discarded the bloody shorts for a new pair….

“It was a brand new knife and it was huge as well. It was new and big, so it was pretty sterile, but it was pretty sharp as well,” he said….

“No, we didn’t catch anything, but I might have got dad of the year votes on that one. I promised my 5-year-old we’d go fishing and that’s why I didn’t seek attention. My older two come with me (to the ballpark), but I leave him (the 5-year-old). We had about a hour before dark. I couldn’t tell my 5-year-old I couldn’t go fishing. It was his last day here,” he said.

As someone who has never been fishing, and is probably pretty unlikely to ever go fishing, I will attempt to translate this injury into something I can better relate to.

“Just getting ready to go to the library … promised my son I’d take him to the library to get some books. Went over to the children’s shelves and picked up a book, and it was stuck to another book. Just tried to pull them apart, and I got a paper cut,” not-Peavy said.

“With my right hand holding one book, with my left holding the other book, when I pulled the sticky pages from each other (one sheet) just sliced my delicate little finger pretty good.”

not-Peavy said he struck a capillary and he bled pretty invisibly all over the cuff of his polo shirt. He said he and his son went to John Lackey’s house, where he discarded one polo shirt for another one, in a slightly different shade of blue….

“It was a brand new book, and it was a picture book, so it was huge as well. It was new and big, and no one had taken it out of the library before, so it was pretty sterile, but it was pretty sharp as well,” he said….

“No, we didn’t end up reading anything, but I might have got Library Patron of the Year votes on that one. I promised my son we’d go back to the library and that’s why I didn’t seek attention. I could have used one of those tiny band-aids,” he said.

This is not ironic, sarcastic, or satirical.

This is not a deep look into the very soul of the author, not a roll call of all his psychological maladies.

This is not a metaphor, simile, nor allegory. Stop looking for a place to dig your finger nail. There are no layers to peel.

This is not commentary on the human condition, the frailness of life, the meaning of existence, nor the futility of the every day.

This is just a video of Carlos Correa hitting a double. And it’s fucking perfect.

(h/t Evan Drellich)

Sometimes, the headline alone does the — germane pun forthcoming — heavy lifting, and the need for further throat-clearing is obviated. This, right now, is one such instance …

This has been the pensive visage of LaMarr Hoyt — 1983 AL Cy Young winner — sloppily Photoshopped onto a screengrab of a question about weightlifting, which — i.e., the question about weightlifting — was originally posted to a Camaro message board.

This we know: All those TV shows about Bigfoot and UFOs – or, in extreme cases, Bigfoot-piloted UFOs, or, in extremer cases, Bigfoot-piloted UFOs in search of the Loch Ness Monster engaged in a subsurface mating ritual with Jimmy Hoffa, or, in extremest cases, Bigfoot-piloted UFOs in search of Ron Washington’s most effective bunt strategy – always end the same way, right? They end, in uniform fashion, with a provocatively ambiguous pronouncement that supports the mystery by hinting at the possibility that it just might be solved, probably in the next episode.

This we also know: During baseball’s off-season free agency period, there is now and always a “mystery team” that offends tradition by competing with the Yankees for the privilege of spending the equivalent of Kiribati’s gross domestic product on a 33-year-old right hander who might make 26 starts.

Now, standing in tandem here, are these twin pillars of the known unknown. That’s right, fellow sleuths: There is a mystery team, and by the end of this piece you might or might not know that the mystery team is still a mystery.

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Last week, the author began a five-part series recounting notable home runs he’s conceded during his life as a nearly decent baseball pitcher at various levels.

Previous Installments: One / Two / Three.

Date: April, 1998
Level: High School
Place: Nash Field at Milton Academy in Milton, MA (Link)

One advantage of having relocated my dumb body to Paris, France, this past fall is that it’s allowed me to become acquainted with a comestible known as mille-feuille (proncounced meal-FIE, roughly). While there are probably variations on the theme of same, mille-feuille is generally speaking a dessert composed of multiple, alternating layers of a leaf-thin puff pastry and then custard-type cream which, when consumed all together by an adult man, gives him a desire in his heart to impregnate the whole world at once.

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