Digusting.

Word from the internet today suggests that Major League Baseball is “probing” (as it’s definitely characterized in at least one headline) an obscene gesture that Andre Ethier made in the direction of a photographer before Monday’s game against the Milwaukee Brewers at Dodger Stadium. While we’ll leave it to the self-starter to track down the image in question, the reader can rest assured that he’ll be morally ravaged upon seeing it.

It remains to be seen what, if any, action the league will take with Ethier. The bigger question ought to be why this particular gesture is the one getting MLB’s attention.

As the collection of images above makes perfectly clear, Ethier has a pretty well established history of obscene gesture-making — if not always in a manner familiar to North Americans.

Regard:

1. In India, to make this gesture beside a woman in tank top means something to the effect of “I want to make you pregnant with 99 children at once.”

2. For Estonians, this is not a sign of joy, but rather a suggestion of what one would like to do to another’s goat.

3. Here, Ethier indicates how many pieces the pitcher’s testicles will be in after he (i.e. Ethier) has busted the latter’s balls. [Of Italian origin.]

4. Just generally obscene.

5. This is a variation on the dance from the Spice Girls’ hit “2 Become 1” — and obscene for that reason.

Resolve: Is Wisconsin’s Union Terrace our country’s greatest public space?

I don’t think I’m telling any tales out of school, reader, when I submit that the City of New York has played, and will continue to play, a major role in this country’s popular culture.

The films of Woody Allen, sitcoms such as Seinfeld and Friends and 30 Rock, the music of Jay-Z and Mos Def and the Beastie Boys, the ubiquity of publications like the New York Times and the New Yorker and New York Magazine: each features, with some degree of prominence, the city that has been called by all sorts of people the “Biggest of Apples.”

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The Actual Thing you see pictured here (and which you’re free to click for embiggen-ing purposes) comes to us not from the wild frontier of the internet, but rather from the Dark Overlord of FanGraphs Inc. himself, David Appelman.

While, as per usual, Appelman’s exact whereabouts are unknown, wherever he is is also the sort of place that sells the item which is (a) currently washing over your senses and (b) called the King Pepper-brand Baseball Bat Pepper Mill.

As the cardboard display makes plain enough, this pepper mill possesses the following qualities:

• Ideal für BBQs
• Perfekte Geschenkidee
• Hochwertiges Mahlmechanism
• Grosse Pfefferkapacitat

Per the internet, this item is available for just 29.95 American dollars. How much that is wherever Appelman has found himself — that’s harder to say.

Note: this post features a poll at the bottom. Rate the Rangers’ radio broadcast for yourself.

Eric Nadel’s alma mater (a) is picturesque and (b) allows students to take every class pass/fail.

Continuing what I started over the weekend with a review of the Atlanta Braves television broadcast, what follows is a review of the Texas Rangers radio broadcast.

For the purposes of the present review, I listened to selections from a pair of games on KESN-FM — the May 11th game against Oakland that was delayed by rain and (ultimately) postponed, and then this past Saturday’s game against the Los Angeles Angels.

The broadcast team is composed of Eric Nadel and Dave Barnett. As seems to be the case with other radio teams, the pair seems to call a game in shifts, with Nadel taking the first couple innings, Barnett taking the next couple, and so on.

Analysis
As I’m likely to reiterate elsewhere in this review, Nadel and Barnett provide analysis that, as a listener, I wish were a 3 out of 5, but, given the present level of discourse in America’s broadcast booths, probably rates as a 4 out of 5. There are no citations of FanGraphs, no attempts to integrate advanced metrics, and yet there’s generally a respect for sample size and separating, for example, pitcher performance from team performance.

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How the author feels on the inside.

More than three weeks after being shut down by Sony for security reasons, the PlayStation Network appears to be functional again, allowing those of us who use it (i.e. the Network) for MLB.TV to go back to complaining about unconscionable blackout rules and choppy feeds.

Note that returning to full functionality isn’t quite as easy as snapping your fingers (unless, that is, it takes you 10 or so minutes to snap your fingers just once — in which case, you’ll feel right at home). Each user will likely be prompted to do a system update and to reset his password to something that’s longer than 37 characters with at least one reference to Goethe’s oeuvre.

In case you missed it, reader, you’ll be pleased to discover that, on this past Friday’s edition of Pardon the Interruption, America’s favorite orange-faced sportswriter Tony Kornheiser made reference to our fair site — and, specifically, to a post by our man Dave Cameron — during a segment on uber-prospect Bryce Harper.

Though modesty prevents us from sharing the entire segment, I can inform you that co-host Michael Wilbon’s reaction would best be described as “totally incredulous.”

As for Tony Reali, his reaction may or may not become the lyrics to The Official Baseball-Nerd Rally Song.

Regard:

Note: this now features a poll at the bottom. Rate the Braves’ broadcast team yourself.

Chip Caray is the handsomest of the Carays.

On Friday, I submitted for the readership’s consideration, some basic criteria by which one might assess the quality of an MLB broadcast. In what follows, I attempt — perhaps with less modesty than I ought — to apply that criteria to the Atlanta Braves’ television broadcast.

Over the past week, I watched (most of) a pair of Braves games on Atlanta’s SportSouth — first, Julio Teheran’s debut at Philadelphia on May 7th, and then Friday night’s contest against those same Phillies, but this time at Turner Field.

The broadcast team is composed of play-by-play man Chip Caray and color commentator Joe Simpson. Former Brave Brian Jordan joined the telecast on Friday night, as well.

Analysis
Simpson is the stronger/-est member of this broadcast team (depending on whether you consider Brian Jordan part of said “team.”) He demonstrates little understanding of statistical analysis — he and Caray made unqualified references, for example, to how many RBIs Brian McCann had at Citizens Bank Ballpark and how Joe Mather was “batting .500” against Cole Hamels (in six at-bats) — but he was helpful, I thought, when discussing pitchers.

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The website for CSN Chicago features a soundboard of 45 different lyric gems, courtesy of White Sox play-by-play man Hawk Harrelson.

Push play to hear all 45 in glorious, consecutive fashion.

A million space bucks to reader/commenter juan pierre’s mustache.

Vin Scully on the ones and twos in 1964.

As I’ve made clear in these pages — mostly by means of words, but also occasionally by means of a sexy dance — a great concern of mine, so far as the art and science of baseball commentary is concerned, is in developing criteria by which the learned fan might anticipate the watchability of a particular game. Already we can do this with something like precision via the NERD Game Scores available in each morning’s edition of One Night Only at FanGraphs’ main page. A catalogue of all 30 of the league’s center-field camera shots further prepares the enthusiast for his nightly viewing. (Watching Roy Halladay pitch at Turner Field is much more satisfying, for example, than watching Halladay at his home park — or, worst, at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park.)

A stone that’s been left almost entirely unturned in this pursuit of happiness, however, is a discussion of what makes for an excellent baseball broadcast. In what follows, I outline some criteria for doing just that.

First, allow me to reveal my biases, such as they exist.

Above all, my preference is for spirited banter. Brewer radio commentator and ubermensch among just regular menschen Bob Uecker is unparalleled in this regard. Uecker’s commentary regularly ascends from the level of mere “word picture” to something considerably more noble, and one can find him, with startling frequency, composing spontaneous paeans to The Good Life. Should it be revealed that Uecker speaks entirely in a fixed meter of his own invention, this would be the pinnacle of unsurprising.

Of course, there are some caveats to this issue of spirited banter. For one, it is not merely enough for a broadcaster just to talk a lot or guffaw a whole bunch. This is annoying and should be censured early and often. Moreoever, there’s the Case of Vin Scully. To the best of my knowledge, Scully has never once recounted one of his drunken episodes on air, and yet probably comes closest to rivaling Uecker in terms of charm — which, charm is probably the best word to describe this quality we’re discussing. Let’s just use that, how about.

With that, we might consider three major criteria for assessing the quality of a broadcast, as follows.

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The learned reader will likely be aware that, as part of our ongoing effort to become the new face of masculinity, we at NotGraphs have slowly but surely taken to cataloging the very best both of mustache- and spectacle-wearing from baseball past and present.

Accordingly, it makes sense that we would be interested in those rare cases where mustaches and spectacles — like two hypothetical trains in an elementary logic problem — meet at a single point.

Thanks to the giant knowledge of reader/commenter/shoulder-brusher-offer Yirmyahu (during today’s occasionally meandering, ever insightful NotGraphs Chat) we are now treated to such a meeting in the person of former major-leaguer Lee Tunnell.

A brief tour of Tunnell’s player page reveals that he was just a moderately successful swingman over parts of six seasons in the 1980s. His life achievements very clearly don’t end there, however.

Image courtesy of Topps via The Baseball Cube.