When last we left our friend, generally deplorable president of the Miami Marlins David Samson, he had been the very first contestant kicked off of this season of Survivor. Even though he missed out on 36 of the 39 days the eventual winners spent in the Philippines, his brief stay was eventful. Let’s recap his downfall:

1) David shows up wearing a sport coat, and is immediately acknowledged as the leader of the “brain” tribe.

2) David establishes his M.O. of speaking entirely in baseball metaphors.

3) David misreads a situation and targets one of his team’s strongest physical players for elimination, “thinking about Day 39” before the game is even 5 minutes old. That player winds up being given a significant advantage in the game.

4) David and the rest of his tribe fail spectacularly in the immunity challenge, meaning they will be forced to vote someone out.

5) David forges an alliance with Kass, who convinces him to focus instead on the incompetent J’Tia, but then Kass tells J’Tia they are gunning for her, allowing her to scramble together a counter-alliance.

6) David is voted out, blaming his tribe for being disorganized (when he was supposed to be their leader) and saying he had no regrets about the strategy that led to his immediate expulsion from the game he had trained so hard for.

On Wednesday, Survivor had it’s season finalé, which Samson did not win, obviously. Because he was the very first person eliminated. Indeed, he has had more time to think and reflect on where his game went wrong than anyone else who played the game this year, and whether by adopting a different approach and making different choices, he might have found even the smallest measure of success.

So during the half-hour reunion show, host Jeff Probst turned to the Marlins’ executive and asked him about his strategy: Read the rest of this entry »

Not getting the results you want at the plate? Tried all those fad swing tools without any progress? Had enough of your father’s disappointed looks?

Then register today for the Hunter Pence School of Just Kinda Flailing at It.

Here at the Hunter Pence School of Just Kinda Flailing at It, we understand the frustrations that can come with trying to hit for power with a traditional swing. Our founder, Hunter Pence, had that frustration, too. That’s why he developed this revolutionary new approach to hitting. It may look unorthodox, but the results are proven.

Just one 10-week course at the Hunter Pence School of Just Kinda Flailing at It will have you knocking balls over the wall while looking like an anthropomorphic bowl of Jell-O in no time. Results are guaranteed, or your money back.

Don’t settle for weak grounders to third. Don’t waste time trying to model your swing after Ted Williams’. Enroll at the Hunter Pence School of Just Kinda Flailing at It, and see your game transform. Teammates and opponents might say you hit like a windsock with a significant tear in it, but they’ll be saying it as they watch balls go over the fence.

Call now. Special financing is available in most states.

Rod Steiger would not care to hear about your semester abroad.

Periodically, the editors of NotGraphs compile a brief list of team names that remain unused at any level of baseball, accompanied by some suitable hometowns and likely mascots — with a view, that is, to aiding any clubs (either extant or prospective) in search of same. What follows is such a list.

Team Name: Fighting Post-Structuralists*
Possible Locations: Berkeley, CA; The Main Quad of Hampshire College
Mascot: A gender-less, race-less creature to which each member of the crowd will inevitably attach his or her own associations, anyway.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since you are a baseball fan, you probably have cheered for a home run before. You probably have been cheering for home runs for years. But you probably never have examined how you have cheered for all of those home runs. Maybe you never have asked yourself what the optimal way to cheer for a home run is; you never have fretted over cheering for home runs before a home run happens, nor have you felt dumb about the way you cheered for a home run after you did so.

Well, you should feel dumb. Because no matter what you have done to cheer after a home run, you have never done it correctly. You have been doing it all wrong for all these years.

Thankfully (and thanks especially to NotGraphs reader Eric Rood for his hot, GIF-able tip), former GOP presidential candidate and current senior US Senator of Arizona John McCain is here to show us the way — the only way — to properly cheer for a home run. He shall show us all.

First and foremost: tuck in your shirt. You don’t want to look like a slacker when cheering for a home run. The cheering of slackers doesn’t really count as cheering.

Next, if at all possible, try to stand in front of a guy in a Zac Brown Band t-shirt. This provides an awesome, patriotic backdrop for your cheering.

Then — here’s the really important stuff — do your best impression of an elated zombie by reaching out your arms, and keeping them stiff. Open your mouth in something that resembles a palsied yelp. Rotate 90-degrees away from your wife (so as to disassociate yourself with her pathetic clapping), and then back again — with stiff arms still outstretched, of course.

Read the rest of this entry »

Following up on yesterday’s post, I thought I’d look for the most unappealing pictures I could find on Twitter of the Rangers’ two-foot long, $26 hot dog. This was easy.

#Boomstick pic.twitter.com/lwDrn6Ih5u

— Cadillac Guillen (@OhShootItsChris) May 21, 2014

This happened…. #boomstick pic.twitter.com/13pA5GwkgK

— Pussy Willow Rose (@Manny0208) May 18, 2013

The "we don't negotiate with terrorists" brisket-loaded, nacho hot dog #AMERICA #boomstick finished @MattyLiite pic.twitter.com/dxuBwnyOn8

— Dustin Potter (@dustinpotter115) April 20, 2013

And the winner:

Baseball has a heavy tendency to fall into certain rhythms. A new game may start, but we have some pretty good guesses as to what’s going to happen. There will probably be some hits, some strikeouts, and maybe even a home run. There probably won’t be, however, a walk-off balk.

This oddity has merit in its own right. But it offers Ryan Raburn something more. Raburn is used to being a batter — a man in charge of both his and his team’s momentary destiny. He is used to being a spectator — watching things happen on the field that will affect the outcome of the game. This very moment, the moment the umpire points out the balk, is a moment rarely experienced by baseballers. He is the tiniest of moments past being the man responsible for his team’s fate and the tiniest of moments from watching his team secure a victory. Moments. Fractions of moments. The further you break it down, the further you whittle away the trace edges of these moments, they start to become one in the same — to the point where there exists a single plane in which Raburn is in charge of winning a game that is already won. He is the hero, the goat, and the happy teammate all at once.

Cheer, cringe, and cheer again, Ryan Raburn. You have achieved ultimate enlightenment.

Dayn Perry and the present author are recording an Answer Time edition of FanGraphs Audio late tomorrow (Thursday) morning — a thing (i.e. Answer Time) not unlike Question Time, but also the exact opposite.

The reader is invited to submit an answer for Perry — who hasn’t made his bed, but is already preparing to lie in it — in the comment section below.

The coldest winter I ever spent was the last five minutes of a basketball game. What does this mean, exactly? I’m not sure. My brain can be very weird. You should see it sometime. Seriously. It’s here on the desk beside me, next to my cup of chicory. It’s wearing a pair of Captain Morgan souvenir sunglasses – the brain, I mean, not the chicory – and one of the lenses is missing. This gives it a kind of “crazed” look, but I would say it’s really more “demented” than crazed, or that the sun is in one of its eyes.

But let me tell you, basketball games last forever, if by “games” you mean those last five minutes and if by “forever” you mean, like, forever. Why, just the other night, I watched the last five minutes of an NBA playoff game and in the meantime began to enjoy the musical stylings of Lawrence Welk. I also found Angela Lansbury to be a handsome woman. In addition, I began to fart without intending to do so.*

*If you still haven’t caught on to what I’m saying, please consider: I also began reading AARP publications, not for the articles but for the pictures.

Anyhoo, nobody seems concerned about the length of basketball games. Why? Because those last five minutes come with commercials through whose content we might learn that beer is best enjoyed “cold.” But baseball games? Jiminy Cricket, people have been moaning about their length for-EH-verrrrrrrr, as if baseball games were Ming Dynasties or Phish jams, or Phish Jams whose themes, coincidentally, are Ming Dynasties.

To that end – ha! – I hereby offer these proposals for accelerating the game:
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m quite sure I’m not alone in this: I see some square things as baseball diamonds. This concrete slab with small rocks at each corner on a bed of gravel is in the front yard of my mate’s house in London, England.

You know the score: clickbig.

Building on yesterday’s post about Hopeless Joe’s Shake Shack Adventure, this post was originally going to be about baseball’s longest hot dogs, perhaps a ranking of them. But it turns out that there is not much of a contest. It’s the 24-inch-long BOOMSTICK down in Texas — originally a tribute to Nelson Cruz, but it became so popular that they kept it even after Cruz was gone. (And the stadium’s concessionaire has brought it to other ballparks for trial runs.) It has even inspired a whole 24-inch-themed concession stand in the ballpark, where the Rangers have offered obscenely unhealthy items like the Murphadilla (after David Murphy), a 24-inch quesadilla, the Rossome Nacho (after Robbie Ross), a BOOMSTICK topped with nacho ingredients, and the Beltre Buster, a 2800-calorie, 1-pound hamburger.

This year, they introduced the Choomongous, a two-foot-long Korean barbecue sandwich.

Clearly, the Rangers believe that their stadium seats are well-constructed and will not collapse under the weight of their fans.

I propose a few new Rangers-player-themed concessions to add to the menu:

1. The ALEX RIOShootthat’sagiantpastramisandwich, a two-foot-long pastrami sandwich topped with mustard, sauerkraut, nachos, and sixteen crumbled up chocolate chip cookies.

2. The DAR-Fish Taco, a 24-inch fish taco, filled with an entire striped bass, two heads of cabbage (shredded), a field of radishes, and four pounds of vanilla soft-serve crema.

3. The Elvis (Andrus), a sandwich made of 24 bananas and thirteen pounds of peanut butter, served between two “records” made of chocolate Oreo cookies, and topped with a game-used home plate dipped in caramel.

4. The Prince Veal-der, a 24-inch veal parmesan hero, accompanied by a bucket of pasta and a wheelbarrow filled with extra tomato sauce for dipping.

5. The Colby Lewis, a gigantic grilled (colby) cheese sandwich, Scott Baker-ed in the oven until all melty.

6. The Mitch More, More, Moreland-and-sea, where two 24-ounce steaks serve as the “buns” for a lobster roll, made from two pounds of lobster meat, four fields worth of celery, and a Costco-sized jar of mayonnaise.

7. The Ron WashingTON-OF-FOOD, a garbage pail filled with whatever leftovers the stadium kitchens have on a given day, pulverized in a blender, and served with a straw (whipped cream topping optional).

Any others?