Jesse Thorn, America’s Radio Sweetheart, is the host of the show Bullseye, which is distributed both by National Public Radio and through Thorn’s podcast conglomerate MaximumFun.org. I’ve been a fan of Thorn’s work for years, and his style and techniques can be heard a good deal in my host’s-spouse-approved podcast on The Hardball Times.

In a perfect world, you would subscribe to Bullseye and listen to all the great non-baseball content it has to offer. The world in which we live is far from perfect, however, so if you want to be a so-and-so about it you can listen specifically to the baseball-related content that was featured not too long ago. I have made that easy for you, using some HTML embedding wizardry. Just click play to hear Jesse Thorn talk to Keven Kerrane, the author of the recently re-released book on baseball scouting, Dollar Sign on the Muscle.

Yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Routine column covered a day in the life of Matt Harvey, where he admits to loving cheese:

Cheese is my favorite food of all time. I spend more on cheese at Whole Foods than all my other groceries combined. It’s a disgusting habit.

Which brings me to the first in a series. Matt Harvey’s Favorite Cheeses.

Let’s see… Matt Harvey… Tommy John surgery… Tommy… Tomme… TOMME. A low-in-fat cheese produced in the French Alps and Switzerland. Tasty-looking, and $29.99/lb. on the Murray’s Cheese website.

Stay tuned for more of Matt Harvey’s Favorite Cheeses.

The Flying Venable

Ready the sails
and fasten the cannons.
Stay the swabbing water.
A rasping of metal,
a yawning of lumber,
a rushing of sweet, warm winds —
the heavens don’t have enough space
for the mighty flying Venable.

H.M.S. Werth and her volleys be damned,
the suggestions of gravity and her laws be damned,
the thermodynamics and basic mathematics —
all of it be damned.
Send this vessel skyward,
make this Venable flying,
and they’ll remember that name.

Gollum’s riddle:

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

-Gollum, The Hobbit

Answer: Time

Illustration:

Gary Gaetti’s senior High School picture, 1975

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San Diego shortstop prospect Jace Peterson, the object of no little attention within these electronic pages, has today been promoted to the majors to replace the injured Chase Headley there.

This object of the current post, which has required minimal effort, has been to embed the video above of Peterson making a catch two years ago and which the author only found by chance earlier today while scouring Twitter for mentions mostly of his own name.

There are points on every man’s path where he must stop and proclaim, “I am here! I have reached this point on my personal path, if you will pardon the alliteration!”

And this, my fellow countrymen and you few random Canadians, is one such proclamation at one such point on one such path. In brief, today’s post – i.e., the post you are now reading, perhaps aloud to your most perspicacious pupils – is the twenty-fifth post that I, proser, have produced for the weblog known as NotGraphs.

Again, pardon the alliteration.

It is at such junctions, too, that a man must pause to reflect on his accomplishment, to gaze back upon his origins and all the capital-A Adversities he overcame, Adversities being an all-night strip club to which the aforementioned proser suffered an unfortunate dependence for a period of six foggy yet disturbing years.

What follows is what you have wanted, and awaited, for lo these many sentences: a personal and compelling account of my rise to this arbitrary numerical milestone.

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It’s perhaps fair, insofar as he died of pneumonia years before self-appointed “Gardener of Human Happiness” Joseph Stalin began his reign of terror over the USSR, it’s perhaps fair to say that it was Stalin who resembled very popular and successful ballplayer King Kelly. Even more appropriate is to use the remainder of this entirely brief post to make note of some compelling other truths about Kelly as stolen from his SABR biography.

Truths such as:

• Referring to his father’s death, Kelly wrote that he (i.e. his father) “passed over to the great silent majority,” i.e. a conspicuously praiseworthy euphemism.
• A teenaged and orphaned Kelly found employment at a real 19th century coal factory, where his job literally was to “carry a bucket of coal.”
• Upon being dropped to the floor from a stretcher during the illness that would kill him days later, Kelly apparently announced, “This is my last slide.”

Kelly image from August 11, 1907, edition of the San Francisco Call.

The Cubs fan in his natural setting.

Since the establishment of this weblog by Kool Keith and Oscar Wilde at a Golden Corral in 1971, it is has been the editorial objective — above all others — to provide such work as to assist the reader along his horrible, forlorn journey from day to night.

In the tradition of that singular effort, the author presents the following translation — largely for the benefit of Chicago Cubs fans, who continue to finds themselves on intimate terms with misery — of very dead French poet Charles Baudelaire’s Envirez-Vous, or Be Drunk.

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It was the author’s intention, originally, to utilize a combination of Brooks Baseball’s very useful PITCHf/x game-log information and also MLB.TV to the end of reproducing in these pages the most transcendent of Corey Kluber’s pitches from his complete-game, 11-strikeout performance on Thursday (box).

Notably, however, that same dumb author’s body is currently located about 15 miles from the Spanish border in the Pyrenees. Beautiful, is one word it would make sense to use. Lacking in the highest-speed of internet, is another collection of words that are relevant in such a case.

In the place of that hypothetical GIF is the more real one embedded here — namely, of the only actual footage available to the author in this instance. Disappointment, is the thing that’s very clearly abounding.

As the many-worlds theory tells us, the Michael Pineda Pine Tar Incident has already happened in alternate universes, but with slight variation. Presented below — in GIF form — is one such variation.

You nasty, Alternate Michael Pineda.