With the 2013 MLB season coming to a close in the next couple of weeks, and since the remaining postseason games will feature match-ups in which I am more rooting against a team than rooting for any team, I figured now’s a good time to give my Year Rear End Review…

My mother started taking me to games at Milwaukee County Stadium when I was about six years old. We had a Brewers Game Gear Bag™ that we’d bring to every game. The staples:

• peanuts (salted, w/ shell)
• Twizzlers
• bottles of iced tea and/or water
• Milwaukee Brewers seat cushions
• my baseball glove
• AM/FM transistor headphones (for listening to Bob Uecker)
• binoculars

We brought binoculars because we normally had pretty bad seats: in the bleachers or at the far ends of the upper deck. Or at least, for many years, that’s why I thought we brought them. It wasn’t until I was ten years old or so– after we had been to a few games with much better seats to which my mother also brought the binoculars — that I realized she was brought them to look at Paul Molitor’s butt.

“There will never be another butt like Moli’s.” -Ma Baumann

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The Pirates are done. The Rays are done. The A’s are done. Baseball, officially, is stupid.

Jose Molina said it best without saying anything:

“Sonny gets sunnier day by day by day…” –Paul Simon

Billy Beane’s not a player,
he just walks a lot—
well, mostly it’s pacing through the muck
through the bleach smell
the rare scintilla from the dugout.
In the corridors, here, they store stuff
Billy don’t know what.
Billy don’t know how
but it’s essential.

Other places you go, some of the places
Billy played
it’s like this stuff doesn’t exist—
the cleaners and the men who wield them
wield mops, strings, cords.
Stuff you could kill yourself with.
That’s all hidden other places.
Here, it’s been flushed out
by nature:
rain and shit backing up the bay
spreading out the brown.

Then you’re down one-nothing.

But then there’s something Sonny
does—doesn’t hump the yacker up there
(the yellow hammer that bests Verlander)
a Vogt of lightning at the end of the night game—

the slight rhymes come to Billy now.
They’re essential, too, he knows.
Like the cleaners, the natural rhymes of quiet thought
are reminders how it all fits:
shifts, platoon splits, shits, bleach
repeat.

Eventually, it’ll all be clean.

As per usual, MLB.TV subscribers won’t have the access to network broadcasts for postseason games that they had for regular season games. What MLB.TV offers in place of said is “alternate angle companion coverage” to the more proprietary MLB Network and TBS broadcasts; of these angles, Postseason.TV subscribers can watch four simultaneously.

For those of you who don’t already have cable television subscriptions, Postseason.TV is a relatively cost-effective option for viewing hot postseason action — but it can also be frustrating. That is why NotGraphs, ever purveyors of fan-pleasures, has developed NotGraphs NotTechnologies™ to enhance your sensory enjoyment of the 2013 MLB Playoffs.

Simply by installing a few simple web browser plugins, you, dear NotGraphs readers, can turn an underwhelming Postseason.TV experience into an absurdist baseballing extravaganza! Behold your many options:

The Pedro Martinez HairCam™

Pedro has joined the TBS broadcast team for the 2013 postseason, but the Pedro Martinez HairCam™ is only available through NotGraphs NotTechnologies™.

Very jheri.

Obscure the Postseason.TV static camera angle of your choice with luxurious jheri curls by applying the Pedro Martinez HairCam™! Choose from several eras of Pedro coiffure!

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Sean Casey — no not that Sean Casey — published Carson Cistulli’s first (maybe) book-type thing, a slim chapbook called Assorted Fictions, which you can still buy for $2, postage paid.

Some years later, Mr. Casey made up for the blunder of publishing Cistulli by publishing a chapbook by the excellent Mark Leidner, called Romantic Comedies. Leidner used the romantic comedy meme again in his full-length collection, Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me, published by Factory Hollow Press in 2012. This excerpt, from the former title:

She’s like get a load of this and he’s like whoa.

She’s a lonely air traffic controller and his name is Eric Trafalgar and he’s completely out of control.

She’s a disorienting aroma and he’s a bee crashing into a mirror.

He’s a man running up a hill while morphing into a snowball and she’s a snowball rolling down a hill and morphing into a running woman.

Her very existence depends upon the capability of mimetic art, and he doesn’t even know what mimesis is.

He stabs her in the heart with an icicle, but when the icicle melts she resurrects.

Lovers’ Quarrel

In honor of Sean Casey, then, who makes my baseball and poetry worlds collide, and in the style of Mark Leidner, here are some Baseball-Based Romantic Comedies. Please mail me my millions, now, please.

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Whoever was responsible for the caption under Young Vin Scully’s photograph for Fordham University’s The Maroon seems to have forgotten a few words. The caption should read, Vincent Scully / The Bachelor of All Arts / The Radio Gentleman’s Gentleman.

Some people have said that Young Vin Scully is “in touch with Nature.” Instead, it should be said that Nature is in touch with him. For the Oceans of the World all model their waves after the form of Young Vin Scully’s coiffure; the Bees, their comb after the pattern on his self-woven necktie.

Having forgotten his overcoat at the hotel, Young Vin Scully ripped the awning off a bodega to lay across a large and oily puddle for a group of Fordham Prep students and their dates. To the young ladies, he doffed his cap; at the Fordham boys he cast a glance, which, for the rest of their lives, the boys would imagine whenever they failed to consider the well-being of others. As for the owner of the bodega, who had rushed outside in a huff, Young Vin Scully gently placed a hand on his shoulder and handed him a blank check. “For the repairs, and for your inconvenience,” was all that Young Vin Scully said.

Young Vin Scully doesn’t so much shave his face as he coaxes his whiskers to rest.

Young Vin Scully is capable of wonder and appreciation for many things on earth, even many things that are of lesser measure than himself — because almost all things will be of lesser measure than the man that Young Vin Scully knows he will become. Yet Young Vin Scully sees something in the future of which he is deeply skeptical: One day, they will try to name a street after Agéd Vin Scully. When that happens, when they try to name a street after Agéd Vin Scully, he will cock his unsmiling head in a way that evokes the determination of Young Vin Scully, and he will say, with both the force of the Oceans and the sweetness of the Bees’ Comb, “No, thank you, Mr. Mayor. In lieu of this action, please feed the hungry.”

Pence is plural for penny.

Halfpence is is plural of halfpenny.

Therefore, I am about to make a pointless joke that has been made a million times before, probably.

Also, remember the band Sixpence None the Richer? They existed.

Therefore,

Part of the NotGraphs Holiday Greeting Cards Series, coming this winter!

Almost every day during the last three baseball seasons, I have been doing something that no other baseball fan does: I have been checking the box scores of Miami Marlins games.

I have been checking said scores with bated breath, even, hoping to see one thing: a Giancarlo Stanton home run.

The headlines for the highlight videos of Stanton’s dongs are seldom without descriptors such as “mammoth”, “moon shot”, “upper decker”, or “long potato.” Well, last night, Stanton outdid himself at Citizens Bank Park, placing one into orbit around a delicious planetoid, thereby delighting a powerful entertainment god and gaining for himself a third and gaudy monicker.

Suckle your eye-lips on this teat-treat:

Rudeeeeeeeeeeee!

Absurdism is best served GIF!

It’s been a rough season for the Toronto Blue Jays organization, to say the least. They’ve been officially out of playoff contention for a few days already, and the disappointment and resignation for Jays fans must have started far earlier than that.

That they will finish the season with two [more] of their all-stars on the disabled list adds injuries to insult. That they will finish the season without a few other things…well, that’s just par for the course:

(Adapted from Mike Axisa, “Blue Jays shut down…”, 17 September 2013.)

It is like they do not exist!

Who do you think?! The Libyans!

Here is Joe Ferguson, throwing out Sal Bando:

This, from a Hardball Times article by Bruce Markusen back in January, which contextualized the play:

In Game One of the 1974 World Series, Ferguson cut in front of center fielder Jimmy Wynn to make a catch and then unleashed a 290-foot tracer to the catcher, erasing Sal Bando and taking a potential run off the board for the world champion A’s. It was also a smart play by Ferguson, given that Wynn was playing with a badly injured throwing shoulder and would have had little chance to throw out Bando.

When a friend of mine forwarded me a link to this video the other day, I felt like I wanted to write about it, but I’m still not sure why. It was a great play, to be sure, and I love watching frozen rope throws from the outfield. The fact that it happened in a World Series game that featured a classic 1970s rivalry adds to the coolness. But still, I’ve seen throws that are just as good or better, so why write about this one?

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