Many baseball fans know about the controversy over the weekend regarding the flagging Yankee Stadium attendance, despite the playoffs being quite in town. The stadium did not fill up by first pitch; it did not fill up by the sixth inning; it did not fill up.

The NotGraphs Investigative Team is about to blow this whole mystery a new news hole. We recently received SPECIAL CLANDESTINE AERIAL IMAGERY of Yankee Stadium, and the truth may be too much for the average fan to wrap their mind grapes around:
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Amid the the wild conclusion of the 2012 MLB regular season, you — dear reader — will be forgiven for having not noticed an equally important race, that of the quite dead, large-headed presidents of these United States (those United States for foreign readers).

Yes, ol’ train-lassoing Teddy Roosevelt, who charged the San Juan hill, who earned the presidency via assissination, who got his mug carved into a mountain and who liberated the Cubans and Filipinos from the dangers of freedom finally got his due:

Well done done Teddy. Maybe someday you can win without the help of the Philly Frenetic.

The bitter tone of this piece was brought to you by John Sayles’ epic Spanish War novel A Moment in the Sun. Read it and then watch as your already unimpressive opinions of 1800s America sink to even more crushing lows.

SIDE NOTE: Yo, check it out. Listen to how Teddy sounded.

People talked differently, right? They also used bigger words — presumably because they had no intent of speaking to the lower class persons.

Here is a video of the Phantom Grand Slam, and here is the Phantom Grand Slam enGIF’d:

Base-rounding footage truncated for your loading pleasure.

If this is the first you are seeing of this grand salami, then I envy you. If that is not enough to sate you intellectual desires, watch the full clip (above linked) and that should both explain this oddity and remove a thin sheening of fun and mystery from the GIF.

After the jump, enjoy a fast-motion, more accurate rendering of the Phantom Grand Slam:
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Here it is, the two things you were looking for. You opened this page with two emptinesses in your soul, and I have their fillings prepared for you like a city worker who has the asphalt prepared for the divots in the road of a white neighborhood.

Here it is, the first item: The Rays rookies performing — at historic Fenway Park — in historic leotards and wigs — a choreographed dance set to the American classic “Call Me Maybe.” Here it is, as directed by James Shields

And here is the second thing:
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Ode to Terrible Cubs Fans

You will give me a look
when I say I am a Cubs fan
not a fan of Cubs fans
give me a look
think me spiraling away
in a high-horse spreadsheet
=sum(Jacques Jones, Milton Bradley, Cap Anson)
=stdev(this Google search:Steve Bartman)
The answer is not undefined
but curiously enough
spread out the collective goodwill
to the bleacher bums —
the Cubs fan heroes —
and get
#DIV/0.

Maybe the problem isn’t the Friendly Confines
but the duo Old Style and man combined.
If I don’t like the brick behind the ivy,
if I don’t toast the party,
if I don’t mind the wave,
I might be the Terrible Cubs Fan,
but I will enjoy it my own way
and when I catch a homer,
be quick to give it away.

Boucher warms up for his first inning.

“There’s no rules that say a pitcher can’t use a hockey stick,” said umpire Tony Randazzo before Friday’s game between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Tampa Bay Rays. “I don’t make the rules; I just sometimes enforce them.”

Two hours before Friday’s game, Andrew Friedman of the Rays signed Tampa Bay Lightning coach Guy Boucher to make his major league debut — as the league’s first hockey-stick pitcher. Boucher lasted three scoreless innings before being ejected in the fourth inning for throwing off his gloves and engaging in a five-minute one-on-one brawl with Blue Jays outfielder Colby Rasmus.

The event marks the first time in baseball history that not only an NHL coach has played in the majors, but also completed an inning using a hockey stick and wearing blue jeans.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Blue Jays manager John Farrell said after the game. “All you can do is tip your cap and say, ‘Well done,’ to both [Guy Boucher] and the Rays front office.”

It’s hard to impress the ol’ teammates. Just ask Tim Lincecum:

After Saturday’s game, Lincecum released this statement via his publicist:

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Which is to say, sometimes you throw a complete game shutout to make some money, sometimes you throw a bunch of sunflower seeds at yo’ mouf to impress, I dunno, is that Ryan Vogelsong?

Hat tip to A. King. No, that’s too obvious. Alexander K.

Let me begin with a belated apology: This is a belated review. I got my review copy late — after the season started — and I have since been under a deluge of research projects. There is a break in the clouds, so here is a much-deserved review of Baseball Mogul 2013:

Vitals:

Game: Baseball Mogul 13
Platform: PC
Developer: Sports Mogul
Modes: Franchise (Modern, Classic, Fictional, Expansion, and Custom)
Cool Features: Complete database of active and historical players, realistic aging, indexed encyclopedias, some advanced stats, and more.

Categories:

Realism: 9/10.
Graphics: 7/10.
Difficulty: 10/10.
Details: 9/10.
Playability: 10/10.
Intangibles: 50/50.

Total Score: 96/100 (A+)
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Ichiro Suzuki, for those who do not know, is in every Japanese commercial. In 2005, the Kokkai ratified into law a mandate requiring Japanese commercials to contain either Ichiro or Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 2006, a second law retroactively required commercials to include at least the image of Ichiro’s face in even the Schwarzenegger commercials, an addition that most commercial producers had already been doing for several years.

Anyhoot, some Japanese product called Yunker — which we can safely assume is an energy drink either made for cats or by cats because everything in Japan has to do at least partially with cats — made a pair of astounding new commercials featuring the face of Japan. They are here:

I ask: Are these commercials real? Now I put it to you to the max:
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Jackie Robinson has got a new movie — 42 — about him
coming out in 2013. Who else needs one?

After two exhausting rounds of voting — in which I had to write over 1000 words per post — we have finally reached the final vote, where we will determine the single more deserving baseball personality, the fella worth a quality Hollywood movie.

Here’s the poll. I encourage you not to vote for just the names you recognize, but the stories you think move-worth.

And follow the jump for the brief explanations of the players/personalities in case you missed them in the previous rounds.
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