In case you haven’t read the relevant press release, let it be known, bespectacled reader, that the Phillies will be hosting a 1980s Retro Night this Friday at Citizens Bank. While that particular event promises to be awkward in all the ways one imagines it could be awkward, it’s had the tonic effect of directing the author (after some super-high intense web-surfing) to the above-embedded video from Game Five of the 1980 NLCS between Philadelphia and Nolan Ryan’s Houston Astros.

Please join me, reader, won’t you, as we experience this experience together?

0:13 — For the first time ever, Larry Bowa is caught on film expressly not gesticulating wildly at someone or -thing.

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Sometimes inspiration comes over the author like the strong but tender hands of a Belarusian massage therapist named Miroslav or Milorad or Mirobad or something else beginning with M. Other times, inspiration strikes violently, not unlike in our friend Garth Algar’s encounter with Dream Woman, Donna Dixon (skillfully GIF’d and embedded above).

In the case of the present post, the author’s experience has been one firmly in the latter camp. The idea? Composing a pantheon of sorts for the joueurs of bat-and-ball.

Below is a brief list of the most notable Greek gods (with a full list available here, courtesy Wikipedia). Which current player is MLB’s Zeus, do you think? Which’n is Dionysos, god of wine and doing it?

They’re important questions, reader. And your answers are important, too.

God/dess: Aphrodite
Associated With: Love and beauty
Defining Acts: Offered Helen of Troy to Paris. Saved Paris from dying at hands of Menelaus. Both lover and surrogate mother to Adonis — which, somehow that’s okay.

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Clicking and embiggening are both options here.

It’s the conviction of this author that, among its many charms, baseball’s greatest (charm, that is) is its capacity to constantly produce data. While such a claim would likely redden the face of a Real Baseball Man, let it be known that, by data, I’m not merely thinking of columns of stats; in fact, because of the frequency with which games are played and because of the intimacy which necessarily develops between players and coaches and beat writers and fans, baseball also produces narratives about masculinity and heroism and failure, etc.

The act of record-keeping is truly central to the game. Really, nothing besides politics and the weather is so thoroughly documented for the benefit of public consumption — and neither politics (which is horrifying) nor weather (which is boring) are so pleasant to discuss with strangers.

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In case you haven’t noticed, at NotGraphs we’re not into dumb things like “timeliness” or “relevance.” Hence, even though this series of outtakes from Season 1, Episode 5 of HBO’s Eastbound and Down was uploaded by YouTube user xKZ91 on September 30, 2009, it hasn’t really been seen until today — i.e. the day it was expertly embedded into a post on the present and awesome site.

The principal players in this scene are Will Ferrell as Ashley Schaeffer, Danny McBride as Kenny Powers, and Craig Robinson as Reg Mackworthy. The principal mode is transcendence. The principal feeling in your soul is completion.

The author wouldn’t mind faire-ing a couple of bises with the French First Lady.

If there’s anything more annoying than a young, childless person spending two-plus weeks in the South of France at the height of summer, it’s to hear that same young, childless person complain about spending two-plus weeks in the South of France at the height of summer.

Because, it’s a fact, reader: the South of France is an exercise in charm. The women are almost uniformly beautiful*; the weather is warm and dry; the vin is equal parts delicious and affordable; and the picturesque, winding rues are absurd in their picturesque-ness and winding-osity. Moreoever, an inability to understand the native language means that one is free from accidentally overhearing inane conversations that might interfere with the traveler’s illusions about this land of milk and fine honeys.

*Led, notably, by First Lady-cum-supermodel-cum-heiress-cum-classically-trained-musician Carla Bruni.

For the baseballing enthusiast, however, there’s a small sable cloud attached to the vast expanse of silver lining that is this wonderland of sophistication and perpetual drunkeness — namely, the difficulty in ever watching even a second of live baseball.

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Bon to the jour, bespectacled readership. I am Carson Cistulli, and this is FranceGraphs.

In our most recent — and, not incidentally, only other — edition of FranceGraphs, we looked at the slight, but significant, differences between the French and American versions of FanGraphs. Today, we cast a gaze at the French baseball league, the Championnat de France de baseball Élite — or what we’ll call the Elite division, for short.

French baseball, as with French (and other European kinds of) soccer, utilizes a promotion/relegation system of which the eight-team Elite division is merely the top. Below this is the 18-team National 1 division and 24-team National 2 division, the latter of which is composed of winners from numerous regional leagues.

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If you’ve wondered recently to yourself, “Where in the world is Carson Cistulli?” the answer to that question is, perhaps surprisingly, not that he has gone from Nashville to Norway, Bonaire to Zimbabwe, Chicago to Czechoslovakia and back, but rather that he was in Tuscany over the weekend and, presently, has found his way to the south of France.

If you’ve never been to this country (i.e. France) before, you should know that it’s pretty similar to the United States, except for the fact that (a) the unemployment rate here is exactly 100% and (b) you can get arrested for not smoking.

Another thing you should know is that, as is the case with a lot of the foreign media that arrives here, FanGraphs actually looks different in this country. Embedded above is a totally clickable and embiggenable image from the author’s own computer screen. The attentive reader will note that, while not crazy different, there are, in fact, some small edits that Sarkozy and Friends have made to the Baseballing Experience that is Our Fair Site.

Dave Cameron, everybody.

As the reader might very well know, this past weekend-plus witnessed the descent upon Long Beach, California, USA, of the membership of the Society for American Baseball Research, for their 41st convention.

Malcolm Gladwell lookalike and Citizen of the World Eno Sarris has already provided some critical details of the FanGraphs event held Thursday night in conjunction with SABR 41. In what follows, I’d like to utilize that most helpful of typographical symbols, the bullet point, to provide as breezy and superficial an account of the Convention as possible.

To wit:

• Did I witness Dark Overlord David Appelman kill a man? No. Did I witness David Appelman order a man to commit suicide in front of him (i.e. Appelman)? Hmmm… Next question, please.

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The bespectacled reader is assuredly familiar with that phenomenon known as the double entendre. Fewer, but still a sizeable portion, of the readership will have a working knowledge of the single entendre, utilized most recently/notably by Dirty Southerner Lil’ Wayne. In addition to these two, my grandfather claims to have once encountered, when he was serving in the Philippines, an instance of triple entendre — although he admits readily that it could’ve just been something on his glasses.

For all that, though, there have been no instances recorded by modern man of however many entendres Logan Morrison was able to capture in a single tweet this past Thursday. Scientists, in conjunction with the ghost of Milton Berle, are working round the clock to determine the specific number, but the general consensus is that Morrison’s tweet contains no fewer than four — and perhaps as many as seven — entendres.

It’s truly a shining moment, I think we can all agree, both for humans and sexy sex jokes.

It’s a fact, of course, that into every life a little rain must fall. Author Carson Cistulli is prepared to accept that fact. What Author Carson Cistulli is not prepared to accept, however, is the news — courtesy Hardball Talk’s Matthew Pouliot and the internet, generally — that beautiful stranger Charlie Blackmon has fractured his left foot playing the only game he ever loved.

“How’d he do it?” maybe you’re asking. And, “Is it really the only game he ever loved?” maybe you’re asking after that. These are questions with answers, reader, but answers are of no concern to the grieving — even those grieving a faux grief for one (in this case, Charlie Blackmon) who is neither friend nor family nor even passing acquaintance.