Today when I got on the bus
I said to myself,
“It is like I don’t exist.”
At the doctor’s office on a papered table
in my boxer briefs
I was like,
It is like I do not exist.
When I am at home
in an armchair
when my mouth is full of food
or dong
when I pull a well-worn dollar bill
from my Genuine Leather wallet
wherever there are books,
websites, weirdos, women,
or dullards — or ducks, really: ducks
make me feel this way —
whenever I watch a drug dealer
teem w/ existential angst
on TV
I want to be a drug dealer and
it is like I do not exist.

When Joey Votto
wants to break a bat but does not
when Joey Votto curses himself —
in high socks, no less! —
when I noticed the elastic of knee-high knickers
at Joey Votto’s knees
when I closed my eyes
and saw nothing but Joey Votto’s
hairline it is like
I do exist,
am alive, am a part of everything
that there is
to be a part of
which is only one thing:
this world of shit
w/o which nothing would exist.

Would that Joey Votto will want to break a bat
at those moments
when I wonder
if there is life on other planets
for I am not large,

cannot get past
this earth.

I first saw this photo at Deadspin. Maybe you did, too.

Young Troy Tulowitzki wants candy. He wants a skateboard with orange not purple wheels and he wants, oh, a huge dragon decal on the underside of the skateboard and then he wants a soda. He promises to brush his teeth very a lot. Soda.

The expression “business up front; party in the back” means very little to Young Troy Tulowitzki — not because he is too young to know what that means, but because he is in the business of partying. He parties with the Ninja Turtles of his mind. Sometimes he calls them “Inja Turtles” and he doesn’t know why but he laughs every time he says it. He likes Splinter the best; even though Splinter isn’t a turtle he is an inja [heehehe] and he is their father. Cowabunga, dudes!

Young Troy Tulowitzki also likes classmates’ birthday parties because ice cream cake.

Young Troy Tulowitzki has figured out that if he puts one hand on his forehead when his mom hairsprays his spikes then his forehead won’t be shiny and sticky from the hairspray and then Galinda Jefferson won’t laugh at him at recess. Galinda Jefferson is not his girlfriend, shut up! She isn’t! Shut up!

Yes, Young Troy Tulowitzki picked out this tie. It doubles as an Inja Turtle mask.

What does Young Troy Tulowitzki want to be when he grows up? A ninja guy at night, and a baseball guy during the day. Or if he has to play baseball really late one night, he will be a day ninja that day. His best friend will be Vanilla Ice.

Young Troy Tulowitzki, for all his worldly fashion, possesses the kind of happiness that one possesses when one is insulated from all manner of worry. The insulation that is, for Young Tulo, provided by the proverbial coiffures of youth and darlingness, will give way to the insulation of focused greatness for Adolescent and Adult Troy Tulowitzki.

Back at the end of the 2011 season, Mike Fast at Baseball Prospectus posted a study that suggested José Molina might be the best at framing pitches. Last night at Tropicana Field, as Molina caught Alex Cobb, his talents were in full effect.

Witness the following two called-strike-threes. While there’s considerable glove movement on Molina’s part in both cases, as Mike Fast’s article points out, it’s much more important for a catcher to keep the rest of his body — especially his head — stable as he receives the pitch. A catcher is going to have to move his glove to receive most pitches, and some of that movement can be disguised when the catcher closes his glove around the ball. Outside of his glove hand, Molina is pretty steady in receiving both of these pitches.

That pitch, according to Brooks Baseball’s PitchF/X, might have actually been a strike, but Travis Hafner certainly didn’t think so.

From Brooks Baseball.

This pitch to Francisco Cervelli, however, passes neither the eyeball test nor the PitchF/X test:

Read the rest of this entry »

More than any sport, perhaps, baseball is a game of constant, brief exhilarations for its fans. The delivery of each pitch is preceded by a moment of anticipation and followed quickly upon by a flash of excitement or disappointment — the crack of a line drive, the thud of an infield pop-up, the swing of a bat followed by the snap of the catcher’s mitt around the ball followed by the pumping of the umpire’s hand/arm…

The “whiff” is the perfect example of baseball’s many tiny catharses, equally balanced with the pitcher’s mastery (of stuff or command or both) and the batter’s ineptitude. The fact that said balance could shift completely with the very next pitch might add to the exciting complexity of the game as a whole, but, in isolation, few occurrences in baseball match the whiff’s combination of the triumphant and the ephemeral. No single whiff — nor even a seasonal body of whiffs — indicates the effectiveness the associated hitter or pitcher, but it adds to our net enjoyment while watching a game, and to our understanding of they kind of player the hitter or pitcher is.

In honor of this minuscule yet orgasmic aspect of the game, please enjoy these so-called Leaderboards of Windiness.

The Windiest Hitters
Presently sorted by total number of Whiffs (qualified hitters only).

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The following is a work of fiction, duh.

In 2007, the American Association of Psychologists purchased ads on scorecards at various baseball stadiums to promote Psychology Awareness Week. The special scorecards included a column for players’ personality types next to the column for fielding position. Fans loved it, and so teams kept printing cards with the extra column. Presently, there’s a debate in the blogosphere concerning whether such columns should be filled in with the Goldsmith or the Myers-Briggs types, or via the Enneagram of Personality. I prefer the Enneagram myself: because the motivations of each type are clearly sketched out, it’s easy to discern which player is which type.

But then I began asking myself tougher questions: Is a Type 2 (Helper) likely to take more pitches in an At-Bat than a Type 7 (Enthusiast)? Is said Helper more likely to take more pitches when he is in an extreme relaxed state (when he will act more like a Type 4 Individualist than normal) or when he is in an extreme stressed state (when he will act more like a Type 8 Challenger)? Before I moved in with the Team and began collecting significant qualitative data to correlate with its daily on-field performance, these questions were impossible to answer.

So that’s just the scorecards — they gave me the idea for what kinds of questions to ask when the time came, if the time ever came, which it did.

More important is this past winter, when I live-blogged/tweeted a community event the Team put on at the local Holidome. There were autograph lines and Q&A’s and baseball-related carnival games (I topped 70 MPH in the Fast Pitch for the first time ever and then celebrated by eating one of every available sausage variety, which wasn’t all of the ones from the full stadium menu, but was still pretty impressive). There was a huge cake in the shape of the Team’s logo. All the players donned baker’s hats and signed their names on the cake using pastry bags full of frosting. Underprivileged youths gave thumbs up from under small chef’s caps of their own.

I worked up the nerve to approach the Third Baseman [3B], who had signed his name first and then slinked off to a corner behind the cake. He had a rep for brooding, being bookish, reading political history and sociology. So I figured we could chat—I like those things, too. I had actually hoped that I might find him wandering down a corridor, stewing.

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At times and perforce, the homilist’s greatest rhetorical device is knowing when to fall silent and allow the miracles to unfurl in that silence, like an abundant dong released from its underthings. Now is such a time . . .

Mitzvah Chaps is very proud to announce that Dayn Perry — husband, father, dog owner, sports writer, practicing Catholic, non-proselytizing vegetarian, Mississippi native, Chicago resident, zealous and abiding fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, and creator of at least one ugly-ass weblog — and I have collaborated to make a chapbook of Dayn’s writings entitled Drinking with Boileryard Clarke: Dayn Perry Celebrates Himself & Baseball. Dayn made all the writings, I did the arranging of said writings into pages, then printed, collated, and assembled the pages and a cover into a chapbook.

Covers by Daniel Rolf. All other filth by Dayn Perry.

Info:

• Sixteen choice Dayn Perry pieces with accompanying images, many of them reproduced in full, modern color.
• Charming introduction by the author himself.
• Letterpressed covers designed by Daniel Rolf of Sensitive House and printed at Bay View Printing Co.

This is now a real object that you can hold in your hands. Check out the Table of Contents, and a spread from the book.

It is a peculiar object, too, perhaps, given that all of the writings contained in Drinking with Boileryard Clarke (save for the author’s introduction) have previously appeared at this very internet, and are still, to this moment, available for viewing at this internet. So why make a chapbook, then, you might ask.

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Friends, relations, and especially baseball fans: For all your informational quick-fixes, please disregard Wikipedia or any other websource. Henceforth, consult only Rickeypedia: The Rickey Encyclopedia.

Please embiggen so as not to strain your eyes.

Precise.

Provocative Cincinnati Reds prospect Tony Cingrani will make his first Major League start on Thursday, and the pant-groins of stat nerds everywhere are dampening.

This past Sunday, on the way to see 42, my incongruously attractive significant other (AKA NotGraphs commenter GoldenJerseySparklePants) and I were discussing the significance of such a debut as Cingrani’s. At one point I muttered, “…Cingrani’s been dominant…” to which she responded, “What’s Venn-Dominant?”

I had started to correct the miscommunication when we simultaneously realized: Tony Cingrani is Venn-Dominant. Like Doc Brown with the Flux Capacitor, an image immediately popped into my head:

Clicking will embiggen.

You see, Tony Cingrani is so dominant in the categories of Strikeouts, Prospect Swagger, and Italian Name Sounds that they orbit around him, move through him. In him, they have melded into a perfect being. Does this sound contradictory? It’s a teleological matter, probably: are the presence of strikeouts, prospect swagger, and Italian names the cause of Tony Cingrani? Did the molecules align just so? Was he designed by a god, a first mover? Or perhaps the Essence of Tony Cingrani always was, and is just now taking a bodily form. I haven’t the fineness of mind to distill this all…

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The Northwest Arkansas Naturals are more than just the AA affiliate for the Kansas City Royals; they are also perhaps the finest source of boyfriend material in the Ozarks.

Today, the Naturals present two sensuous and aptly named young men for the consideration of area singles: Sugar Ray Marimon (who starts tonight’s games vs. Midland), a native of Cartagena, Colombia, and Brooks Pounders, a right-handed reliever from Temecula, California.

First, let’s get to know Sugar Ray…

Ellos no me llaman “Sugar Ray” sin razón, muchachas. 😉

On his ideal first date:

Me? I like pizza. It makes a first date easy because everyone likes pizza. When you are eating pizza, you cannot be false, you show your real person without thinking about it. Pizza is really hard to be bad, too. Even bad cooks make okay pizza, so you will not be disappointed with your meal on a first date. Or maybe, if the pizza is really really bad, you can say with your date, “This is amazingly bad pizza. I never had pizza this bad. I didn’t think it could happen.” Then, smooch smooch.

On his ideal partner: Read the rest of this entry »

DISCLAIMER: I wrote 90% of this post last night, but by this morning, at least several people were talking about Evan Gattis’s Twitter avatar. None of them, however, provide the indispensable insights offered below.

By now, I’m sure that all of you know of Evan Gattis, his colorful path to the Majors, and his sledgehammer power.

“Is it surf-time yet, dude?”

Things that are awesome about this include: his hair; his ruddiness; the semantics of the ID itself.

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