In the top of the fifth inning of last night’s Giants-Phillies game, Giant broadcasters Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow noticed a San Francisco fan (pictured, wearing orange Fear the Beard t-shirt) amidst a crowd of Philadelphians.

Later in that inning, they noticed that same fan noticing a second, more female, fan — which observation prompted Krukow to utter the words that have inspired (a) this post and (b) millions worldwide.

Some assorted observations:
• Mike Krukow has a Baseball Man voice. I’m not sure what the precise signifiers of the Baseball Man voice are, but one of them is probably “a marked aversion for the final -g- in the present participle.” Other purveyors of the Baseball Man voice include Mark Grace, (Padre TV analyst) Mark Grant, and Rick Sutcliffe.

• Were one so inclined to write a three- or five-page paper called something like “Masculine Identity in Baseballing Telecasts” using only this 17-second clip as source material, it could probably be done with some ease.

• Dawg or dogg: how would Mike Krukow spell it? how would you?

Show Off

If there’s one thing Carson Cistulli is all about it’s feeling good and looking better. If there are two things Carson Cistulli is all about, the second one is making mountains out of molehills wherein matters of baseballing etiquette are concerned.

It’s the latter of these pastimes that I’d like to address presently.

This afternoon, while enjoying an entirely drinkable rosé, I found myself watching the Cleveland-Los Angeles Americans game via MLB.TV. Did I happen to notice that beardless youths Peter Bourjos and Mike Trout were not only playing beside each other in the Angel outfield, but also batting back-to-back in the Angel lineup? No, not at all. That’s ridiculous.

Okay, maybe a little bit.

Fine. Yes. Totally.

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As my colleague — and America’s Kid Brother™ — Jackie Moore noted in the smallest hour of the night, Tuesday’s 19-inning affair between Pittsburgh and Atlanta ended in an unexpected and controversial manner.

For more on the game’s decisive play, I direct your attention either (a) once again to Jackie’s post or (b) the home for entirely reasonable discourse that is the internet.

Equally deserving of our attention is what happened on the other end of the play — batter (pitcher?) Scott Proctor’s end, I mean. For it was Proctor, owner of three career plate appearances and three career strikeouts before last night, who set the wheels of this baseballing soap opera into motion.

What you see down and to the right is a flip book of sorts documenting the initial moments of Proctor’s departure from the batter’s box. Because the image is long, I’ve presented alongside it poet Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach,” something with which the bespectacled reader will want to become acquainted if his dreams of becoming a Real Aristocrat are ever to be realized.

I leave it to the reader’s discretion to determine the exact identity of Arnold’s “ignorant armies.”

DOVER BEACH

The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

To click, perchance to embiggen.

No sensible person would call the thing on Joel Hanrahan’s face a mustache. Some pretty thorough research reveals that there really is no word for what Hanrahan has — or, no English word, I should say. In fact, the Polish do appear to have a term for it: wuj moszna, I think it is. Pronounced just like it’s spelled, one imagines.

Hey, Ron Gardenhire, your team is losing by 15 runs, a position player is on the mound, and your center fielder and shortstop just let a harmless fly ball drop between them. Is that Twins baseball?

Hey, Ron Gardenhire: Evans contends that Lacan’s earliest versions of the mirror stage, while flawed, can be regarded as a pioneering concept in the field of ethology and a precursor of both cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology. Do you find any validity in this argument?

Huh. Okay. Well, anyway, I might be visiting Minneapolis this fall. Any chance you and I could get some drinks?

If for some reason you haven’t heard, I regret to be the one informing you that FanGraphs’ First and Only Full-Time Employee Dave Cameron has leukemia.

This news makes me, Carson Cistulli, upset. Despite the fact that he looks strange and hasn’t seen a movie since 1987, Dave Cameron is a truly thoughtful man and, if I may say, a dear friend. I believe I speak for everyone on the NotGraphs masthead, when I say that we look forward to Cameron recovering fully.

Joe West has a different approach, though. When he learned this morning about Cameron’s condition, he did the only thing that Joe West really knows how to do: he frigging tossed leukemia.

Though most of us have likely questioned West’s decision-making at one point or another, I think it’s clear that West’s instincts are entirely flawless in this matter.

All of which leads me to this entirely giant and heartfelt message:

Anyone who’s played the backyard variety of base- or wiffle- or even kickball will be acquainted with the idea of the ghost runner. This sort of ghost, second in friendliness only to the very famous one employed by Paramount Pictures, happily replaces us on base, content with moving station-to-station like a phantom Molina brother.

For all the popularity of the ghost runner, however, the ghost swing remains a rare sight, utilized by only the avantest of sporting’s garde. Yet it was just such a swing that Milwaukee pitcher Randy Wolf employed in the top of the third inning of Saturday night’s contest against the San Francisco Giants.

As you see in the footage above, San Francisco’s Ryan Vogelsong begins the at-bat with a four-seam fastball to Wolf — to which Wolf responds by leaving the actual bat on his left shoulder and taking a pretty substantial cut right-handed with his invisible bat. The result? That depends. The baseball that you and I see lands in catcher Chris Stewart’s glove for a strike. The one that Wolf was swinging at appears — if we assume that Wolf follows its path with his eyes — appears to land foul somewhere down the first-base line.

Some will call it madness; others, genius. As you might imagine, both parties are right. For now, it’s our duty merely to appreciate Randy Wolf’s brazen declaration on behalf of the whimsical.

Despite the fact that he enters play Saturday with a line of just .245/.303/.372 (.277 BABIP), it’s entirely likely that — owing to a combination of defense, park adjustment, etc. — it’s entirely likely that Sam Fuld is an average major leaguer. Add to this some notable biographical details — that he went to Stanford, for example, or that he has diabetes and worked for STATS, Inc. and went to Phillips Exeter and is Jewish — and one finds in Sam Fuld the makings of a Nerd Among Men.

Fuld himself problematized that narrative on Friday night, however. In the top of the fifth inning, with Fuld on first, Fuld’s teammate Sean Rodriguez grounded to Royals second baseman Chris Getz. Attempting to start the double play, Getz flipped to shortstop Alcides Escobar, who’d moved over to second to take the throw. What happened after that is what you see in the expertly embedded GIF at the top of this post.

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Note: as a number of reader-commenters have suggested here, it’s very possible that the basepaths at the pictured stadium are only 60 feet long, therefore negating all of the inspired work you find in this post. This, once again, reveals why “facts” are harmful and ought to be ignored.

A couple days ago, in response to a piece I wrote that waxed poignant on the pleasures of baseball and its capacity to constantly generate data of all sorts, reader/commenter/modern man Danmay noted that, perhaps stranger than one club hitting over half of a league’s homers is a club averaging almost a triple per game.

I can reveal now that the team hitting all those triples are the Lions of Savigny (or, Savigny-sur-Orge to be precise, a suburb of Paris), a club in the French Elite division (treated with awe-inducing prose here). I can also now reveal that, owing to the new technology of “drawing red lines on images from Google Maps,” it’s possible to determine if, in fact, the dimensions of Savigny’s home park, Stade Jean Moulin (whose dimensions are absent from internet), might influence the Lions’ triple totals.

But first, a test. Regard, below, an image of very famous Fenway Park (also courtesy Google Maps). Because we know (a) that home to first at Fenway Park is 90 feet and (b) that home to the left-field wall at Fenway is just over 300 feet, we can test our method to see if it works.

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In the late 1970s, a certain American new wave band asked one of life’s tough questions.

More than 30 years later, Andrew Stoeten, Dustin Parkes, and Drew Fairservice (left to right) of Canadian-based Getting Blanked have asked a similarly difficult question — this time in picture form.

The answer, if it even exists, will likely be revealed by a close reading of one of the triumvirate’s live game chats. But that’s a giant, big if, people.