“@pgammo: Photo” @notgraphs

— Tim Cooney (@T_Coons) December 12, 2013

Around the Christmas holiday, in particular, it’s not uncommon for members of the vulgar crowd to wax earnest about the importance of charity. “It’s better to give than receive,” they say. “It’s better to give than receive,” they say again, a lack of imagination being one of the defining characteristics of that regrettable demographic. Idle chatter, is all it amounts to, so far as this suddenly indignant author is concerned.

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As a player who declined Seattle’s qualifying offer in November, Kendrys Morales is a free agent for whom any signing club besides the Mariners would need to surrender a pretty valuable draft pick.

As a player who’s capable of playing mostly just first base or DH, Kendrys Morales has been made largely redundant by the Seattle Mariners’ acquisition today both of Corey Hart and Logan Morrison (who join Jesus Montero and Justin Smoak as field players ideally deployed at one of the aforementioned positions).

One assumes, therefore, that Kendrys Morales’s reaction to Seattle’s most recent transactions — which transactions limit his options, and also probably the value of his next contract — that Morales’s reaction isn’t very different from the one portrayed here in what has never been referred to as Internet Technicolor.

Totally click, totally embiggen.

In his film Annie Hall, Woody Allen (playing Alvy Singer) suggests to Diane Keaton (playing his ladyfriend and the title character, Annie) that “life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable. Those are the two categories.”

He continues:

The horrible would be like terminal cases, you know? And blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me, you know. And the miserable is everyone else. That’s all. So when you go through life you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s — you’re very lucky to be miserable.

One might reasonably assume that — per Allen’s definition — that losing function/the entirety of one’s digit(s) would place the victim of such a misfortune among that class known as the Horrible. Indeed, perhaps in many cases, this is the result. In the dual cases of great right-hander Mordecai Brown and great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, however, such an injury actually facilitated invention and greatness.

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Imagine if an animated elephant played baseball, is more or less the essence of your friend’s point.

The record — which, in this case, has been carefully prepared by great Italian-American sporting writer Nick Piecoro — the record shows that the Arizona Diamondbacks have acquired today Los Angeles Angels corner-type Mark Trumbo in a three-team deal also involving the Chicago White Sox.

What your totally high friend wants to know, however, is what if — instead of acquiring Mark Trumbo — what if Arizona accidentally acquired cartoon elephant Dumbo instead? Because, according to your friend, “that’d be hil-larious.”

“Hilarious, indeed,” is what you’re forced to also say, at this sad, sad juncture of the human comedy.

Halladay never even took organic chemistry.

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Just a day after announcing his retirement from baseball, former Philadelphia and Toronto right-hander Roy Halladay returned Tuesday with an even more startling confession — namely that, despite answering to the name “Doc” for almost the entirety of his 16-year career, that he isn’t a medical professional in any sense of those words, nor does he possess any formal training whatsoever in the health sciences.

“No, of course not,” Halladay said when confronted on Tuesday by a member of our Investigative Reporting Investigation Team and asked if he’d ever attended medical school. “I assumed it was pretty obvious from how I was drafted out of high school. I didn’t even go to college.”

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So far as the author knows, it is not the case that the genre commonly referred to as “clip art” — it isn’t the case that clip art was either (a) ubiquitous or even (b) extant at all during the Victorian era. What he does know (i.e. what that same author knows) is that, in the present — an epoch commonly denoted as the Kate Middleton Topless Photos Era™ — a thing available even to people who went to state schools of the American South is this wide-ranging and conspicuously charming collection of Victorian clip art made possible, it would appear, by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology.

Among the images included in said collection are a number concerning the rules and equipage of the Pastime.

Like this one, for example, which appeared originally in Everybody’s Cyclopedia and illustrates quite clearly the most relevant dimensions of a base-and-ball field:

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While the author has attempted to argue — with his family, with his wife, with his own internal self — while’s he’s attempted to argue, on a number of occasions, that baseball isn’t merely a diversion from reality, that’s not to say that it (i.e. that baseball) isn’t sometimes a diversion from reality.

During the regular season of actual Major League Baseball, one feels particularly courageous so far as this point is concerned. “Ha!” one says. “I could very easily go without the Pastime. Probably take up cooking, or something not unlike cooking.” During the offseason, however — with its lack of ubiquitous programming options — one begins to realize that the human soul, rather than being strong, is actually weak. Like a person, for example, who’s weak instead of strong.

It’s with a view to addressing the crippling effects of this withdrawal from the Pastime, one assumes, that our kind, if maybe also criminal, friends in Australia appear to have provided something in the way of an antidote — which is to say, actual baseball, available to watch somehow.

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The reader is young and clueless and in need of guidance — not unlike a toddler with a checking account. Peter Gammons, for his part, is like a man that is also a chalice that is presently running over with capital-W Wisdom.

What Peter Gammons says to do, today, is “Triple it, maybe” — advice which the reader will ignore definitely at his or her own terrible, deadly peril.

The following tweet, which appears to contain breaking news on the reading habits of certain major-league baseball clubs, is entirely and in-no-way altered from the original (click to embiggen):

Click to embiggen, something Gaedel himself never could do.

Basically all the big philosophers advocate on behalf of a perpetual contemplation of death. “One can’t truly live,” goes the reasoning, “until that same one accepts his mortality as fact.” A reasonable point, that, probably.

Today’s brief recognition of the Ultimate Darkness is facilitated by some trifling internet surfing by the author — which surfing led both to Eddie Gaedel’s Wikipedia page and also obituary. Capital-T Truth has revealed that, while generally remembered as a willing participant in one of Bill Veeck’s many amusing promotional ventures, Gaedel was actually afflicted considerably by life’s afflictions.

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