In the first inning of the 3,543rd regular season baseball game of the 2014 season, two of the three billion birds on earth settled onto the infield grass at Comerica Park.
“Everybody’s acting like this is normal,” muses the announcer as men in brightly colored clothes and high socks stand watching a man throw a ball at another man, while another man holds a stick and swats at it.
In a sequence of events designed to illustrate that life isn’t entirely a festival of awfulest sorrows, left-handed Texas prospect Alexander Claudio, celebrated in electronic print earlier today by the present author, made his major-league debut minutes ago — during the course of which he threw the above pitch, his signature and very slow changeup, captured here in even slower motion.
The Washington Nationals received a substantial setback today, as it was revealed that star hominid Jayson Werth has been diagnosed with the rare disorder quinquagintaquinquitis. The condition is popularly known as “Sammy Hagar’s disease” after the singer who immortalized it in 1984.
According to NotGraphs medical experts who have examined the above photograph, obtained from the Virginia Highway Patrol, Werth is likely in the “advanced stages” of the disease. The experts say that the outfielder may require the multi-stage treatment known as ATJ (for “All That Jive”), which could sideline him indefinitely.
(h/t to determined reader Nathan Hoff)
KANSAS CITY—You see it on the highlights, even if you don’t quite hear it: Player A, afflicted by a long-term power drought, at last hits a home run, yet upon returning to the dugout he is greeted with what experts call “the silent treatment.”
For the baseballing Royals of the city of Kansas City, the tradition has presented a challenge. As of this writing the Royals rank “dead-ass last,” as those same experts call it, in team home runs, but with a playoff berth in sight, the players are expecting a team-wide surge of adrenalin to quickly increase their power numbers and create an immediate need for well-crafted expressions of noiselessness.
The problem, players say, is one of silent-treatment inexperience.
“First, we’re just not trained in the silent treatment,” third baseman Mike Moustakas shouted above the sounds of a poetry slam on Tuesday. “Even in Spring Training, we don’t do a lot of drills. Sure, we do this one drill called ‘Stunned Silence,’ where Ned (manager Ned Yost) tells us he’s pregnant, but beyond that, we’re always joking and laughing and talking about the weather, which is typically warm and dry. We’ll say things like, ‘The weather is warm and dry, which is typical.’
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Yangervis and Odrisamer are:
(a) The two most popular styles of coffee table at IKEA.
(b) Two newly-discovered native tribes of Papua New Guinea.
(c) The top two Icelandic banks, as ranked by deposits.
(d) Two mountains in the Ural range.
(e) Two types of heirloom apples, neither with any significant market penetration as of yet.
(f) Acronyms for top-secret government programs.
(g) A comedy duo popular in northern Estonia.
(h) Two deadly infections spread by small rodents.
(i) The newest sitcoms on German television, both surprising hits thus far in the young season.
(j) Twin Caribbean resorts now deeply discounted on Hotels.com.
(k) Styles of dance from the 1780s.
(l) Two different types of flourless chocolate tortes, one with walnuts and one without.
(m) The botanical names of two colorful purple flowers.
(n) Unheralded colors of the rainbow.
(o) The top two wheelchair manufacturers in Finland, sorted by market share.
(p) Bees who share the spotlight in the new Pixar film, “Bees!”
(q) Seaweeds found off the New Zealand coast.
(r) Baby toe-curling reflexes that disappear by age three.
(s) The co-recipients of this year’s Fields Medal.
(t) Characters in Michael Chabon’s new graphic novel.
(u) Slang terms for “testicles” in the Haitian Creole language.
(v) Two Republican candidates for governor of Wyoming.
(w) Technical terms for the two different sizes of ash that are produced when a body is cremated.
(x) The latest new flavors of Lay’s Potato Chips.
(y) Rejected economic theories of Cold War Russia.
(z) None of the above.
One of the things we tend to love about baseball is when the game breaks, and a player ends up doing something they’re not supposed to be doing. Don Mattingly playing second base to finish off the Pine Tar Game, Randy Johnson manning left field on a double switch, Skip Schumaker firing fastballs that would make Tommy Milone jealous: these are the images of incongruity and improvisation that stick to us. We wait for the situations not because we want our heroes to fail, necessarily, but because throwing them out of their element makes them resemble us, just for a moment.
But why wait for the planets to align in real life, when we can simulate our dreams right now?
Thus I began this mad, stupid experiment. The premise is simple: using everyone’s favorite realistic baseball simulation, Out of the Park 2015, I created teams of baseball players by cloning a single player until they filled the active roster, and set them against each other in 162 games of gory combat. The results exceeded my wildest expectations.
The four teams in the CBL (Clone Baseball League) are:
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All, or nearly all, of the big philosophers you’ll hear about take pains to note that the correlation between one’s own actions and the events (good or bad) which befall that same one — that the correlation between the two is weak.
Indeed, Pirates right-hander and also contemporary philosopher Edinson Volquez took pains to illustrate that same thing tonight in the first inning against Detroit. With runners on first and third, and a run already in, Volquez conceded a ground ball up the middle that likely would have scored a second run while producing zero outs. What actually happened, though, was Volquez flailed wildly his right arm and somehow fielded the ball, eventually catching Ian Kinsler between third base and home. Out: recorded. The reality that our mistakes are sometimes rewarded, and vice versa: confirmed.
Ebola: No baseball player has yet been diagnosed with Ebola. There are no reported cases of Ebola at major or minor league ballparks. Checking your fantasy stats cannot give you Ebola, nor can participating in your fantasy baseball auction, assuming the auction is online. Ebola is not the cause of your favorite team’s poor season, or the reason why more moves weren’t made at the trading deadline. There is no correlation between OPS+ and Ebola, and the E in Ebola does not stand for Error. Alex Rodriguez is suspended from baseball, but not because he has Ebola.
Iraq: There is no major or minor league baseball affiliate in Iraq. Contrary to rumor, the Expos did not move there when they left Canada. IRAQ is not the same as WHIP. You have a very low chance of being hit by a missile while you watch a baseball game, whether in person or on TV. We are not at war with the American League, nor the National League. Our military activities in Iraq should not affect your fantasy team.
Gaza: Sam Fuld is Jewish.
Robin Williams: Robin Williams is not related to Ted Williams, Mitch Williams, Bernie Williams, Mike Williams, Gerald Williams, Billy Williams, Dick Williams, Jerome Williams, Jimy Williams, Matt Williams, Woody Williams, Scott Williamson, Robin Ventura, Robin Roberts, or Robin Yount.
At the end of last week, the author introduced not merely to the readers of this site, but also to citizens of the entire world, a new genre of artistic expression — namely, terrible photos of ballparks from the interstate.
To say that enthusiasm has abounded with regard to these poorly conceived images would be to repeat a lie that I told my parents just a few hours ago in response to their suggestion that my life is little more than a collection of poor decisions, one after the other, not unlike soldiers on the front lines marching to their certain, respective deaths.
Whatever the case, it does appear as though more than zero other people had already been participating in this practice of hastily photographing ballparks while in transit — even without recognizing the possible implications of that practice to art history. What follows is the work of one such reader, Ms. Rachel Monroe.
O.co Coliseum
O.co Coliseum is located in Oakland, California, and serves as home to the Oakland Athletics. Here’s a terrible photo of it from (what is presumably) the interstate the nearby BART station, BART itself often being referred to as “an interstate on rails”:
