Given that Scott Baker is conceding only about 2.5 walks per nine innings and sits among the league’s top-10 in Zone%, you’d think that a batter like Corey Hart, having only walked in 6.8% of his career plate appearances, would be surprised to draw a base on balls from Baker.

Decidedly to the contrary, we have this footage from Friday night’s Twins-Brewers game. So unmoved is Hart by Baker’s second-inning walk that he (i.e. Hart) decides to utilize the ubercasual behind-the-back bat toss after the decisive fourth ball.

It’s hard to see, but you can actually see Hart utter the words “Ho” and “Hum” as he makes his way down to first.

What follows represents an instance of the genre known as Armchair Sociology. “Neither science, nor literature: it’s Armchair Sociology!”

For a number of reasons — perhaps because of my stylish Latin Teacher glasses or my laissez-faire attitude towards “showering” “regularly” or my constant preference for style to the exclusion, almost entirely, of substance — friend and boss Dave Cameron has made a habit of referring to yours truly as a “hipster.” Nor does it appear as though this practice is isolated to Mr. Cameron. Some cursory googling of the search terms “Cistulli” and “hipster” reveals multiple returns (generally good-natured) within the baseball nerd community.

It’s a problematic word, hipster, insofar as there’s no one who voluntarily identifies as one*. This makes any earnest use of the word suspicious. If some adjectives are flatly descriptive (tall, clear), while others represent judgments of value (generous, jerk-faced), hipster belongs firmly in the latter category, and the connotations are almost all negative.

*Indeed, if such a person exists, he or she should know that a hipster would never call himself a hipster. Catch-22 and all that, innit?

It’s problematic, secondly, when applied to yours truly. For, while the hipster regards himself — in Mark Greif’s words from a pleasantly rigorous piece in the New York Times — as “a natural aristocrat of taste,” it’s the case that I, Carson Cistulli, am just an actual, real-live aristocrat.

I recognize that many Americans have never seen an aristocrat up close, let alone talked with and/or made a study of one. As such, it’s forgivable that people would make such a mistake. It’s only when playing tennis against (and witnessing the fluid topspin groundstrokes of) the aristocrat or gazing through his library — full of Loeb Classics and P.G. Wodehouse novels — that his true nature is revealed.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Greif provides another definition of hipsters that is relevant to most of the readers who’ve found their way to this site, describing them (i.e. hipsters) as those who “play at being the inventors or first adopters of novelties: pride comes from knowing, and deciding, what’s cool in advance of the rest of the world.”

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Towards the end of this most recent weekend, concerned (and likely bespectacled) reader Matt Defalco noted some strange traffic patterns occurring at our parent site — which patterns he captured and rendered into a highly compatible image format.

To wit:

As you can see there, via both your eyes and large portions of your cerebral cortex, Red Sox-er Josh Beckett’s player page was visited almost 27,000 times on Sunday — or, approximately 26,500 more times than the next most-viewed page.

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If you’re the sort of person who possesses a Y chromosome — and the anatomical features that come along with same — you’re very likely also the sort of person who understands intimately what sort of pain Brewer catcher Jonathan Lucroy experienced directly after this encounter with a foul ball off the bat of Rays outfielder Matt Joyce in the sixth inning of Tuesday night’s contest between Tampa Bay and Milwaukee.

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While neither grainy nor sepia-toned, the image you see skillfully embedded here (from the fourth inning of Sunday’s game between Philadelphia and Seattle) possesses one quality which merits publication in these electronic pages — namely, the number of people in it who’re wearing eye patches.

Granted, that number of people is only one, but per NotGraphs Editorial Policy, one is actually a totally sufficient number of eye patch-wearing Mariner fans for image-embedding and musing upon.

Lest the sensitive reader propose that the intent of the author is to mock the fan in question, allow me to state sans pause, “Woah, woah, woah” and also “Hold on a minute there, buddy.”

Allow me also to add promptly that, far from mocking the fan in question, it’s actually my intention to celebrate the eye patch and what it symbolizes. For, if we agree that the key to Pleasant Living is the capacity for turning one’s weaknesses into strengths (and I hope we’re all agreed on this point), then the eye patch is the signo under which we’ll have our collective vinces — for it turns a pretty significant weakness (that is, eyelessness) into an equally significant strength (that is, a perpetual reminder to the world that ye, wearer of said patch, have lived — and, on occasion, lived dangerously).

It should be noted, first and foremost, that it was my initial instinct to title this post “Kenley Jansen’s Windswept Cutter,” because, if Kenley Jansen’s cutter looks like anything, it looks like a regular fastball being intercepted by a strong Northerly crosswind. Unfortunately, “intercepted by a strong wind” isn’t what windswept means — nor, so far as I can tell, is there any word that means such a thing. I think you’ll agree with me, bespectacled reader, that this reflects poorly on our Dear Language.

So, that’s Issue No. 1.

Issue No. 2 is that Kenley Jansen’s cut fastball — what with all this as-if-being-blown-by-the-wind movement — is emasculating. The specific one you see here is from Saturday night’s game between the Dodgers and Astros. The batter is Chris Johnson. The count? 1-0. His (i.e. Chris Johnson’s) emotion after swinging? Instant regret.

Per the Pitch F/x data from Brooks Baseball, this pitch from Jansen was thrown at 90 mph with 1.8 inches of glove-side run and 8.0 inches of “rise.” In fact, the pitch directly preceding this one — another cutter — was thrown both faster and with more movement. That it looked less impressive on camera is a testament both to (a) the importance of camera angle to how we perceive a pitch and (b) how a batter’s reaction (in this case, the instant regret of Chris Johnson) can also color our perception of a pitch’s quality.

Whatever the variables, they all conspired here to create something that — much like every Merchant Ivory Production — a baritoned narrator would likely describe as “breathtaking.”

While it’s unclear what sort of dark forces would compel every media source to misreport same, one thing that is clear is the totally unadulterated image you see above here. As plain as the disgust on Joe West’s face is Joe West himself, ejecting a couple that’s now become famous for briefly visiting Make Out City during the recent Vancouver riots.

I think it’s time we stop asking “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” and start asking “Quis custodiet ipsum Joe West?”

Graduation-style posed handshake for Mr. J. Durbin.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, these two eerily similar utterances come to us courtesy that long ago carnival ride known as “the 1990s”:

Albert Belle, Retired Ruckus-Raiser:

I’m not going to change my personality because someone wants me to change.

Ad-Rock, Pioneering B-Boy:

You think I’m gonna change up my style just to fit in?

Note: Chloe Sevigny really is in this video — at the 2:15 mark. This was actually before her first film role, in 1995’s Kids, when she was an intern at Sassy magazine.

In case you missed it, please be advised, reader, that the Mets continued their important research in the field of Ways to Lose last night, falling 9-8 to the Braves in 10 innings after not only conceding a two-run lead in the bottom of the ninth, but then, in a truly inspired flight, losing the game on a walkoff balk.

Reliever D.J. Carrasco delivered the coup de grâce, but it would be unforgivable not to recognize the contributions of Francisco Rodriguez, who allowed the ninth-inning, game-tying home run to Brooks Conrad, and also to Lucas Duda for mishandling a Jordan Schafer grounder to extend the inning and put runners on first and third for Jason Heyward.

The balk itself, you’ll notice, isn’t particularly grievous — but a balk nonetheless. Truly, though, the star of this particular show is Heyward, whose excited gesture back to home-plate umpire James Hoye and subsequent fist pump are stirring in the best possible way.

There are seminars on race, gender, and sexuality at universities all over this American nation, and yet none of them, to my knowledge, has ever produced a compelling taxonomy of the Phillie Phanatic.

As regards the human portrayer of the Phanatic, both video evidence and the internet suggest that it’s likely a heterosexual man.