I took images from a selection of spam emails and made baseball cards for them:

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The Jon Lester Trade: “First Yoenis Cespedes gets to leave Cuba, then he gets to leave Oakland. At this rate of quality-of-living advancement, he’ll be in Denmark by the end of the month, or at least Sweden. Some guys have all the luck. Although I mistyped his name as Ypenis before noticing and fixing it, so I guess he doesn’t have all the luck. But he has a lot of it.”

The Sam Fuld Trade: “Sam Fuld is awesome because he makes people like me think that if only we had a thousand times more talent than we do, we could be baseball players. I mean, most players seem like they’re a different species, but Sam Fuld just seems like an extra-awesome member of the same species. Though probably with fewer defects in his DNA.”

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FOX Sports Ohio has a fun article today, “Reds lethargic effort leaves Price perplexed.” I was initially confused about why David Price is thinking much about the Reds, since he isn’t even in the same league as they are, but then reading the article reminded me that Bryan Price is the manager of the Reds, so then it made more sense.

The article also made me wonder if there might have been a chemical agent released in the stadium causing mass mental confusion, since Price was “perplexed,” “two players forgot how many outs there were [and] [s]tarting pitcher Alfredo Simon didn’t cover first base on a ground ball to first baseman Brayan Pena.”

(In addition, mental issues are indicated by the fact that someone decided Brayan Pena was a first baseman, which is also confusing for someone with a .658 lifetime OPS.)

But my biggest takeaway from the article was this quote, near the end, from Todd Frazier:

“I guess you could say we were lethargic,” said third baseman Todd Frazier. “Maybe when (Chisenhall) hit that three-run homer it took the wind out of our sails a little bit, but I know we were battling. We were trying hard. Maybe it was not all there today.

“Games like this you’ve got to go back and the next day you’ve got to figure it out and work together as a hitting team. Together, as a team, our approach has to be better. Lethargic is probably a good word, but it’s just one of those games. We’ve got to come back and focus on getting back to that team game as hitters.”

Indeed, lethargic was a good enough word that they used it for the headline. Todd Frazier: Headline Writer. Nice work, Todd!

“Daddy?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” you answer, glancing up from FanGraphs.

“Daddy, what was 1990 like?”

You study her for a bit, searching her eyes for sarcasm. Is she old enough to have developed sarcasm by now? You’ve forgotten your Piaget, or at least the first chapter of Piaget your father-in-law gave you during your wife’s pregnancy. There was a timeline in there, a schedule for everything: vomiting, crawling, speaking, tying shoes, sarcasm, refusing to sit next to you in movie theaters. She seems sincere, looking up at you with those big brown eyes and that milk mustache. But she’s gotten good at being sincere, at looking earnest when she has to. You wish you knew how she did it, not because you want her to stop, but because you wish you could learn. You’ve raised her too well, and someday she’ll see what a fraud you are.

You sip your coffee, cold, and fold down the cover of your laptop. How could you explain? 1990 was Saturday morning soccer games on cold fall days, orange wedges and shin guards and swollen knees. It was walking home from the bus unsupervised, tiptoeing on curbs and avoiding cracks in the pavement. It was summer afternoons watching television shows you didn’t like because there were only ten channels, Dialing for Dollars, a nation’s temporary obsession with non-alcoholic beer, of Hypercolor shirts and Wayne’s World and Vanilla Ice, and unilateral American world power. It was the inability to look up answers to questions on the Internet, and a time when a list of pop culture references wasn’t a substitute for humor.

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I’ve heard of Jake Marisnick. But when I read Mike Podhorzer’s article this morning about speedsters available for the stretch run, I realized I had absolutely no idea what Jake Marisnick looks like. No picture in my head, at all. Maybe you don’t have a picture either. Hence, a brief quiz. Which one of these folks is Jake Marisnick?

(And, bonus: who are the rest of these guys?)

If you’re an interneting person, if you are “jacked in” — as they say — then there is a good chance you know that today is the day that commentors on the Web Site Reddit have decided to mob baseball stadiums across the nation, bearing signs that say, simply, I Enjoy Baseball:

I’m telling you this so that you will know it. So that when your spouse says, Hah, that’s a fine sign!, you can glance over your newspaper and mutter, Harumph! I know all about this — for behold: My mammoth knowledge!

Because: Why else would we watch baseball with a spouse in the room, if not to impress said spouse?

The authors of the little-known pamphlet Freakonomics noted that a person’s name can have a momentous effect on their socioeconomic and personal well being. As someone whose last name has often been rhymed with the act of regurgitation, I can attest to this unfortunate reality.  Though perhaps both the psychological trauma and hilarity of the ritualistic substitute teacher roll call is overrated, the sins of the parent can certainly be borne by the child, at least in terms of getting beat up in middle school.

One’s moniker can also bestow counter-intuitive outcomes. A well-known example of this is the brothers, Winner and Loser Lane, who grew up to become a repeat convict and a detective, respectively. Though we are dabbling in the softest, coziest of sciences, the conjecture is that both Lanes were treated, and therefore shaped, differently by their environment. Baseball, for its part, reinforces this lazy postulation: Win Remmerswaal fulfilled his destiny a mere three times, Bob Walk relinquished an uninteresting 3.27 per nine, and figures like Prince Fielder, Homer Bush and Josh Outman have provided equally false advertising.

So, too, seems to be the case for John Smiley, who in his tender youth, and at the height of his powers and optimism, appears already bracing for the approaching jest.

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Your Bo Porter did not shut down correctly. Would you like to run diagnostics on your Bo Porter?

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Press Bo Porter to run in safe mode.

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BO PORTER LOAD LETTER

Stack Bo Porter overflow.

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Bo Porter would like to access your location.

Jose Altuve is awesome.

That is all.

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — David Williams sits at the dilapidated service entrance to the Don Cesar Hotel of St. Pete Beach. The pastel pink walls and the sunny weather belie the pervasive anxiety in the air. Every few moments, Mr. Williams pulls his Samsung Galaxy S Blaze from his pockets and refreshes his RSS feeds.

“Any moment now,” he says. He smiles and returns the phone to his pocket. “Never been disappointed yet; won’t be disappointed today.”

Williams is one of the millions of Rays fans in the tri-county area waiting for trade deadline news that has already come. The Tampa Bay Rays traded ace pitcher David Price on Thursday afternoon, and though the returns of the trade has received muted praise, Rays fans are still hoping for a piece of the trade to be announced — they are waiting for news that is not coming.

“The [Matt] Garza trade, the [James] Shields trade — heck, even the Jason Bartlett trade — they all gave us some prospects to dream on,” says Jenny Havermayer a real estate agent in Tampa. “We know there’s a few more prospects in this trade. We just have to wait for them to announce it is all.”

Asked if she’d be disappointed if the Rays only received three players in the Price trade, Havermayer said, “No, I won’t be disappointed. Because they’re not getting three players. Ten prospects. Just wait. Ten. All shortstops and pitchers.”

The lunch rush is beginning and David Williams stands and stretches. He refreshes his feeds one more time as he ascends the steps to the kitchen. “I guess I’ll find out who else they got later, after I get off work.”

He smiles and stares across the crystalline Gulf of Mexico. He opens his mouth to say something, hesitates, then shakes his head and disappears into the open door. He is waiting for the player to be named never.

NotGraphs Newswire, alrights reserved.

Image Source.