Too often, we use NotGraphs as a forum to satisfy our own whimsicality. We find things funny and silly and crack jokes and make everyone’s day a little brighter.

That’s stupid. Life is at once a long slag that is over too soon. Every one of us will get our hearts broken, will lose people we love, and feel like we’re a crushing disappointment to our families and friends. And if you don’t, you almost certainly should because you’re probably insufferable. We are, all of us, lucky if we make it to the end of this life with our wits relatively intact and we leave this world with as many holes in our bodies as we came in with.

It is in the spirit of reminding you that life is pain, Princess, and anyone who tells you any different is selling something, that I present to you the most existentially troubling and depressing statements about player injuries from the past week:

“I couldn’t feel my shoulder.” -Felix Doubront, Boston Red Sox starter, after being removed from a game against the Blue Jays yesterday with a dead arm.

It’s hard to feel anything these days, I know, given how numb we’ve all gotten to each other’s pain. How can you even know if your shoulder is there?

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NEW YORK — In a move to shake up the format and increase viewership of a failing show, MLB Network will re-brand their program “High Heat with Christopher Russo” to “Christopher Russo Argues with a House Plant.”

The NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team, in speaking with sources inside MLB Network, has learned that the new format being launched was just one of several possibilities for a new direction to the show. Sources say pilots were filmed for shows with names that included “Christopher Russo Watches Reruns of Top Chef,” “Christopher Russo Reminisces with Your Dad,” and “A Still Image of Christopher Russo but with Top 40 Music — Please Watch.”

“It was a two-bird-one-stone situation,” one executive said. “We needed to try and boost ratings, and we needed to find somebody that could tolerate being screeched at for a half hour.”

Russo, known for his cantankerous persona and a voice that could strip a sizable room of its paint, has had a revolving door of guests on the show including players, managers, and MLB Network personalities alike. Initial testing has concluded that the house plant has the best chance to stay long-term.

“It seems silly to do a remote with a plant,” a producer said. “But if we kept it in the same room, it would start wilting at a rapid pace.”

The roll out of the new format should happen near the beginning of June, as soon as the network finishes cutting new commercials and the studio goes through another round of soundproofing.

…Joey Watto also possessed a datapad, on which he would maintain copious records of opposing pitchers and defensive shifts employed against him. Watto only used said inventory as an occasional refresher, however, as he had a great memory for previous plate appearances and game situations. Also in Watto’s arsenal were several loaded lucks chunks, which he would use to remind himself that “luck” happened when opportunity met with a prepared mind and body. As a diversion, Watto owned a shisha, which would, for him, replicate the climate of hi native Canadaria. Another of Watto’s personal effects was his swagger stick; he used it to hit line drives and, occassionally, homeruns. Although he had left family behind on Canadaria, he never cut off contact with them, and always sent money home to them. Within a standard year, he had earned enough to pay off his debts. Despite his initial success, however, he was not satisfied, and was convinced that pitchers were trying harder to get him out than they were with batters of other species….

In case you missed it, here’s the first member of the MLB All-Star Wars Team, Smeth Sith!

…so I was hungry, you know. It’s hard to maintain this calorie-restricted diet my doctor has me on, telling me it’ll help me live forever, as if however long my life would otherwise be isn’t long enough. And it’s hard enough to avoid temptation when you aren’t starving yourself on three hundred calories a day, let alone when you are.

I was at the Mets game, so of course I was looking for a distraction, and I remembered reading something about Ryne Sandberg and Shake Shack, but I couldn’t quite remember what it was, since my short-term memory is shot from, uh, something that happened to me, I think, that I’m having a bit of trouble recalling….

Anyway, Shake Shack sounded good, since I am known to enjoy the occasional fast food indulgence. Well, I wouldn’t say “enjoy,” since what can any of us really enjoy given what’s been going on in the Ukraine, but I can at least usually tolerate and effectively digest a hamburger. And anything that brings me closer in spirit to a Hall of Famer like Ryne Sandberg can’t be a bad thing, so after waiting six and a half innings on line, I ordered a Shack Stack — that’s a cheeseburger and a mushroom burger, on top of each other, just like my brother and sister used to sleep right on top of me when we were kids and our parents could only afford half a bunk bed.

The burger comes, and it looked a little funky — I mean, there were mouse footprints inside, and it was kind of a greenish-purple, if that makes any sense on the color spectrum, and I took a few bites and

OH MY GOD MY INSIDES ARE COMING OUT OF ME

MY OBP (ON BOWL PERCENTAGE) WAS 1.000. FOR DAYS.

ALTHOUGH MY BABIP (BATTING AVERAGE ON BOWELS IN PLAY) WAS ONLY ABOUT .275.

(Fortunately I keep a mop in the bathroom.)

MY FIP (FECES-INDEPENDENT POOPING) WAS VERY VERY HIGH.

I don’t know what was pouring out, I really don’t.

AND I HAD FOUR BS (BLOWN-OUT SKIVVIES) IN JUST TWO HOURS.

I was about -300 Wipes Above Replacement before everything finally started to subside and I could get on with my depressing life of data entry and cat wrangling. Of course, I had to sneak out a locked Citi Field by climbing the outfield wall since no one had bothered to check the family restroom before locking everything up. And so at four in the morning, there I was, dangling over by the big Home Run Apple, trying to hail a taxi cab in the middle of Flushing (and having killed my eardrums with the sound of Flushing for hours and hours in a row), underwear balled up in my pocket, and the second half of my burger in a to-go bag.

And I was hungry.

So I figured I’d chance it and eat the rest.

My daughter is not impressed by you, Jack Daugherty.
She creases the cardboard in her clumsy hands
While you gaze upward at a future, long since past.
To her, we are all undrafted free agents.
She doesn’t understand how it feels to have a baseball card.
She doesn’t understand how it feels to be young.

A million photographs of you languish in plastic tubs,
In garages and attics, wedged between Weedles and basic lands
Protesting to an uncaring, amnesiac world
That you made it, when so many failed, when so many
Assumed you’d fail. You drew 10 walks in 1989.
You, a propaganda poster for the Protestant ethic, a piece of history.

But history is a tyranny of the old upon the young
Of implicit values, adages and limitations,
The insipid morality of sugarless breakfast cereals
Strained carrots, quiet lies, living for tomorrow.
There is no American Dream for the children
Who cry through their naptimes.

My daughter rejects your truths, Jack Daugherty.
She cannot read your name and would not care to.
The accomplishments summed on the back of the card
Are not even numbers, betray no intelligence
A feral, flimsy, and fleeting cuneiform
Good only for being eaten.

As my daughter gnaws apart your effigy,
Destroys one small fraction
Of your existence in this world
She coos to herself, softly.

After beginning the latter’s first-inning at-bat with very much an inside fastball, Corey Kluber proceeded to strike out Miguel Cabrera on three breaking pitches to the outer half of the plate — the last of which pitch is depicted in the animated GIF embedded here.

Also depicted within the aforementioned GIF is a series of speech acts performed by the Detroit hitter. While no audio is available of Cabrera’s message to Kluber, NotGraphs’ Forensic Speechreading Expert Panel of Experts confirms the following dialogue:

“Falafels are never fun… Fun.”

A cryptic message, one notes — but terribly rich and even more compelling.

Because he is afraid both of answers and the truth, the author has not endeavored to confirm that the word Ydhwxactx — very clearly tweeted by former major-league left-hander Jamie Moyer — actually belongs to any of the Oto-Manguean languages. It seems to, however, and that — as America’s celebrities teach us — is what’s most important.

Following his brother’s complaints about the media in Toronto making him out to be a bad guy, J.Q. Arencibia had this to say about his firing as an accountant at a leading firm:

I didn’t expect going in that my numbers were going to be analyzed like that. You know, I think it’s pretty ridiculous that I was singled out as the villain of the office when all I did was botch everyone’s tax return. I showed up, I did my job, or at least I tried to, and then people in the “human resources department” start looking at you like you’re some kind of monster for doing an extremely poor job at calculating things, and then they start telling other people, and my secretary stopped following me on Twitter, and I did end up speaking to my boss about all of this, but he just said it came along with the territory of being an accountant. I thought I was going to be part of the future of this firm and not be made a scapegoat just because all of the clients left after they got audited, and demanded their money back. By describing the work I did as “shoddy” and “bad,” I really considered legal action. They defamed me. I tried to file a suit against them, but I messed that up too. But, you know what, it’s all in the past. Now I’m doing what I love to do, at home, and even though no one’s paying me to file these tax returns on behalf of imaginary people and businesses, it’s a lot of fun, the atmosphere is great, and at least there’s no more poutine. And that’s all I have to say.

This happens tomorrow.

It's official! Local HERO CAT will be throwing out a first pitch on Tuesday, May 20th! @TheHeroCat

— Bakersfield Blaze (@BakoBlaze) May 15, 2014

You, you’re here with me, on the internet. So doubtless you’ve seen this:

I know, right?

But you may not realize this brings about the final age of baseball. Writers know the best stories have inevitable endings — those stories that can end only one way — Juliet, Romeo, they must die — Yossarian must never leave the island but by desertion — and Finnegan’s Wake must, um, riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs… James Joyce is a helluva drug.

I diverged. This brings baseball to its final, most golden age. The Cat-Baseball Era.
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David Ortiz: trendsetter, world changer, wizard.

First, he turned a no-hitter into a one-hitter.

Then, he turned an infamous error into an infamous hit.

Next, he turned a pop-up into a scorching line drive (in the box score!).

In the process, he turned a one-hitter into a two-hitter … and a two-hitter into just another shutout. Now, emboldened by his mystical success, Big Papi is transforming the very world we live in – the very world we thought we knew! – by altering our most cozy definitions and familiar designations, a Merlinesque achievement in a land where magic was believed extinct.

What follows is a list of what things were and, per Ortiz, what things are.

What follows, indeed, is The World According to Papi.

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