Both relentless and unrelenting, our feast-day celebrations continue today with the dynamic-est of duos.

Life: Besides birth dates, Messrs. Lefty O’Doul and Dazzy Vance share a peculiar trait, which is this: despite not playing regularly until their respective age-31 seasons, both managed to make cases for the Hall of Fame in their truncated major-league careers. Vance, who’s actually in the Hall, threw only 33 of his career 2966.2 innings before his age-31 season, but then proceeded to lead the league in strikeouts (by a conspicuously stupid margin) over the next seven seasons. O’Doul, for his part, recorded only 78 of his career 3659 plate appearances before his age-31 season, and then proceeded to post a 141 wRC+ from 1928 to 1933, before retiring at age 36. His career batting average of .3493 is fourth all-time, behind only Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, and Shoeless Joe Jackson and his .413 on-base percentage is 29th.

Spiritual Exercise: Finish this analogy without thinking even for a second: “The TV show thirtsomething is to baby boomers as blank is to blank.”*

*Note: your answer is immaterial — only that you responded immediately is important.

A Prayer for the Talented Thirtysomethings

Dazzy Vance and Lefty O’Doul!
We’re gathered here today to talk about
which Back to the Future movie
most accurately depicts time travel.
Either that, or to celebrate all the notes
John Cage didn’t play — you guys choose.

Dazzy, for seven consecutive years,
you suuported fascism indirectly
by striking out opposition batters
at a heretofore unimagined pace.

Lefty, for a similar amount of time,
you were the prize in every box
of Cracker Jack, figuratively speaking.
Literally speaking, you were a batter
with considerably above-average contact rates
and the name of a non-alcoholic beer
in your own, actual name.

Sitting here now, I can’t help but imagine
all the questions NPR’s Terry Gross might’ve
asked you two, just given the chance —
like about your biggest childhood influences
and if you ever had a revelation or not.

Off the top of my head, I think that’d be, like,
the second- or third-best episode of Fresh Air ever —
not as good as when Jay-Z revealed the secret
to making his world-class Denver omelettes,
but way better than when Kiss’s Gene Simmons
burped the entire alphabet, like, six times,
then discussed vaccinating a rabbit in its privates.

Imagine, reader, that you’re a Frenchman. (I apologize in advance if this offensive to your sensibilities.) You live in France, work in France, and, as is so common these days among the citizens of this most fraternal Republic, speak French exclusively (except for the phrase supercool, which you utter with some frequency).

Now, reader, pretend you — still being French — grow curious about this sport called baseball. (I don’t know why this is happening to you; it just is.) To sate your curiosity, you take to the interwebs — and, specifically, that clearinghouse of all world knowledge, Wikipedia.

After learning briefly, in your native language, about the rules and history of the game, you contrive to understand what is meant by these different positions you keep hearing about: the agile arrêt-court, the more offensively oriented champ gauche, and, finally, the lonely and sometimes heroic lanceur.

Following the internet hyperlink for this last term, you’re met not only with a thorough discussion of the position, but with an image of the pitcher who will be for you — one who’s never, ever, never, ever seen a pitcher before in your life — the Platonic Ideal of All Pitchers, if only momentartily. In short, you are met with an image of

That must be confusing.

As a service to the readership, I took 30 seconds out of my busy schedule to run that paragraph from the image up there through Babel Fish. The results are below.

Does that last sentence seem inappropriate to anyone else?

A launcher is a player of baseball which launches the ball towards the zone of catches close to the beater. Its objective is to withdraw the beater without qu’ it can strike a sure blow nor to profit d’ an automatic base. He seeks to prevent the beaters from marking points. Also, Americans are obese imbeciles.

Our experiment in feast-day celebrations for great baseballers continues today, unabated by law or conscience.

*Note: Edited from “Ward, the Multi-Talented,” per order of Whimsy.

Life: John Montgomery Ward has at least half-a-dozen claims to baseballing fame. With the exception of Babe Ruth, he’s probably the most successful two-way player ever, posting a 119 ERA+ as a pitcher in ca. 2500 innings and then, after an injury to his arm, accumulating 39.1 WAR as a field player (mostly at shortstop). Concurrent to his playing career, Ward attended Columbia Law, and graduated from same in 1885 (at age 25). Immediately thereafter, he began to establish himself as the first great voice of labor in baseball, leading the formation of the first professional sports players union (The Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players) and a new baseball league, the Players League. Also, after his playing career, he became one of the country’s best golfers — you know, just for fun.

Spiritual Exercise: First, think of Monte Ward. Now, think of the Owen Wilson character from the movie Meet the Parents. Those guys are jerks, right?*

*Warning: Might not be an actual spiritual exercise. But, seriously, those guys are both jerks.

A Prayer for Monte Ward

I haven’t watched the YouTube video of you
stealing from the rich and giving to the poor
because I’ve been too busy watching the one of
Charlie Sheen accepting the Oscar for Gauntest Face
and this other one that’s a stop-motion video
of a beautiful flower first sprouting from the ground
and then bursting into bloom and then turning into
Charlie Sheen accepting the Oscar for Gauntest Face.

Still, people whose taste I trust have described your
performance with superlative adjectives —
a fact of which you’re likely unware, owing to
your death and subsequent internment at
Greenfield Cemetery in Uniondale, New York.

In your living years, though, you appear to’ve been
both well-bred and a champion of workers’ rights —
a combination that would win you respect in our time
and the right to date almost every female graduate
of both Vassar and Wesleyan Colleges.

NotGraphs knows a pop-culture meme when it sees one.

Video — and amusing tale — very much courtesy of (the recently re-designed) Pitchers and Poets and (also, apparently) Let’s Go Dodgers.

With each day it becomes increasingly clear that our feast-day celebrations for notable baseballing figures aren’t going away.

Life: “Wee” Willie Keeler played 19 years in the major leagues, and his .3413 career batting average is the 14th highest of all time. The diminutive Keeler is famous for his simple batting advice — i.e. to “hit’em where they ain’t.” He’s also noted for having perfected, while playing with the Orioles of the mid-1890s, the “Baltimore Chop,” which is either (a) a technique wherein the batter hits the ball into the ground purposely so’s to induce a high bounce, or (b) a signature move in a mid-Atlantic variety of the martial arts.

Spiritual Exercise: In his poem “The Snow Man,” Wallace Stevens describes a character, out in a field during winter, who “beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” How, do you think, is it possible that “nothing” can both be and not be — and how, if at all, does this relate to Keeler’s famous approach to hitting? Finally — and most importantly — with whom, between Keeler and Stevens, would you prefer to have a drink?

A Prayer for Willie Keeler

You won the award for best spiritual wisdom
when you declared that your preferred strategy
while batting was to “hit’em where they ain’t” —
and won it again shortly thereafter
by advising a young teammate not to bite
the hand that feeds him, but certainly
to find out whose arm it’s attached to.

When a New York paper reported that you’d
experimented with chloral hydrate, nitrous
oxide, and even peyote in your efforts
to apprehend the mystery of your art
you neither denied nor confirmed the claim
but responded that to characterize hitting
as an “effort” of any description would be
to badly misunderstand the practice, continuing:

“I neither try to hit the ball,
nor don’t try to hit the ball,
nor try not to hit the ball
nor don’t try to not hit it.

And though I’ve occasionally
not tried to try and hit it,
and, even once, didn’t not try
to try and not hit it, I’ve found
all these approaches unsatisfying.”

Allow this post to remind all manner of book-writers: NotGraphs is in the business of receiving your books for free, reading them, and then writing thinly veiled advertisements on their behelf.

Courtesy of Amazin’ Avenue’s Eric Simon, the NotGraphs Literary Bureau has recently come into possession of the forthcoming 2011 Amazin’ Avenue Annual.

A review will almost certainly follow next week. In the meantime, here’s a the table of contents:

Foreword
by Ken Davidoff

Introduction
by Eric Simon

Part 1: Looking Back On 2010
Chapter One: Ten For ’10
by Eric Simon

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s contribution to baseball’s mostly new feast-day tradition is like ten works of art in just one work of art.

Life: Despite a career WAR of 116.1 that places him 14th all-time amongst field players, Ott’s legacy is a strange one. For example, he never once won an MVP Award in his 22-year career, and yet was a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Beyond this, anecdotal evidence suggests that modern fans are unaware of Ott’s dominance in his own time. Writing for The Hardball Times, Steve Treder attributes Ott’s lack of notoriety to his (i.e. Ott’s) mostly bland personality, the complications stemming from his home ballpark (the Polo Grounds), and his earlyish death at the age of 49.

Spiritual Exercise: Ask yourself, “What is fame?” Is it, as Socrates says, “the perfume of heroic deeds”? Or is it, as history suggests, merely a popular musical film from 1980?

A Prayer for Ott the Undeservedly Obscure

Mel Ott!
With your small stature, nondescript features,
and gruesome death at the hands of Javier Bardem
you represent the single biggest influence on the work
of American filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen.

In an interview with the Chicago Reader
they describe you playfully as the
Ferrari 308GTS to their Magnum PI.

In another, with Asian Banker magazine,
they ask, “What exactly is Asian Banker, anyway?”

It’s these simple but penetrating questions
that inform the Coen Brothers’ celebrated process,
and the sort of questions, too, which reveal
the crime that is your undeserved obscurity —
a crime, if not against humanity per se,
then certainly against some kind of local ordinance
in one of our country’s more enlightened towns.

Mankind has often wondered aloud — or in the form of modern epic poems — where the line is exactly between self-promotion and community service. This post seeks to ride that line as one might a 1950 Triumph 6T Thunderbird motorcycle — that is, very stylishly and with seemingly no effort.

The reader might be aware that we at FanGraphs recently released our preseason fantasy guide, The Second Opinion. Given its low price-point and white-hot content, the Second Opinion itself is more or less a gift to humanity.

The reader might also be aware that, unlike last year, we neglected (at first!) to provide a PDF version of same. Reader demand, however, has prompted the Dark Overlord not only to provide a PDF download, but to suggest that a more satisfyingly formatted one might be available next year.

On its own a PDF can be slightly unwieldy — good for printing, certainly, and maybe searching, but not necessarily ideal for reading. However, with iBooks, users of the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch can import the Second Opinion PDF into a considerably more friendly “reader” format. Search functionality also remains available in this form, too, allowing readers to access all player-specific information (in preparation for — or even during, I suppose — a fantasy draft). Furthermore, links to FanGraphs player pages remain active, in the event that readers require deeper statistical information on a player.

So, uh, “Ta-da!” is what I mean to say about all this. And also maybe “What a country!!!”

In the event that you didn’t see, Major League Baseball announced over the weekend (at least, that’s the earliest that I, personally, saw it) that, while they’d be streaming spring-training games on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, they would not be doing so on connected devices (PS3, Roku, Boxee) until opening day.

Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t what one might call a “tragedy” — and is likely something that, like snow in the first week of the season, will be forgotten quickly — but it’s a bit frustrating for this author who (a) purchased a PlayStation 3 almost expressly for the purpose of watching baseball and (b) sometimes needs/enjoys to work on the computer while a game is playing.

In any case, this prompted me to download (for $15) the MLB At Bat app for the iPod Touch — another device I acquired over the winter as part my civic duty to resuscitate the global economy. For those who already subscribe to MLB.TV, there’s no additional cost beyond the app.

I watched parts of yesterday’s Phillies-Yankees and Angels-Dodgers games. Here are some notes on the experience of watching those games on the iPod Touch.

• Make sure, when prompted, to approve location detection. If for whatever reason you don’t approve it, go back to the main screen and go to Settings → General → Location Services, where you’ll be able to change location detection to “Yes.” Otherwise, video won’t work.

• In terms of video quality, I was accessing the internet via my home wi-fi connection (< 3mbps), and the video streaming was very clean about 90-95% of the time. The Dodgers game was choppy for the first couple minutes, which prompted me to go back to the PHI-NYY game. After returning to the LAA-LAD game about 10 minutes later, it was working fine. • I got kicked out of the app back to the main screen maybe a half-a-dozen times. This never happened mid-stream, but generally when I was trying to load video or a new screen. Given that the app loads rather fast, this is only minimally inconvenient; however, I can imagine that for a fan wanting to toggle between games, for example, it could be frustrating. I'd wonder if this would be addressed in a software update. • A slightly unrelated note: if you're watching spring-training baseball games, be prepared to hear the word "berm" with some frequency. Both the YES Network's Michael Kay and (Seattle-based) KIRO's Rick Rizzs used it. It's the grassy area beyond the outfield wall in spring-training ballparks.

It’s no lie to say that NotGraphs is re-appropriating the Eastern feast-day tradition for its own, mostly nefarious, ends.

Life: The son of former major-leaguer Floyd, Brian Bannister is, in many ways, unlike his father. While the elder Bannister was a first-overall pick blessed with considerable natural talents, the younger has taken a far more deliberate approach to his game — in fact, becoming known for his interest in such sabermetric concepts as defense-independent pitching and Pitchf/x analysis. Despite his analytical efforts, Brian Bannister’s major-league resume has remained unexceptional, prompting him to take a contract from the Yomiuri Giants in January of 2011.

Spiritual Exercise: Socrates states famously in Plato’s Apologia that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Does this sentiment apply to Bannister’s approach to pitching? Is it perhaps the case that Bannister’s examinations have hindered his performance — something akin to the concept of “paralysis by analysis”?

A Prayer for Bannister the Very Examined

Brian Bannister!
I always wonder
but still haven’t figured out
which user name is yours
at popular website
Royals Review.
My first guess is
you’re the guy
whose profile image
is GM Dayton Moore
skeet-shooting
all these Sade CDs
for some reason
but you could also be
the one whose image
is Zack Greinke
organizing a picket line
outside his own actual house.

If I could choose
an image for you,
it’d be this painting
I once saw at a gallery
of a calculator
pushing its own buttons.
As to why said image
is fitting, one could
certainly venture
any number of explanations
though this might
be an instance
where a mystery is best
left unexamined.