Also world peace, ability to fly, and a pony. RT @Ken_Rosenthal: #Mariners want Ellsbury or Choo plus SP.

— Benjamin Gibbard (@Gibbstack) November 6, 2013

Like other artists of note, Benjamin Gibbard didn’t become a towering figure within his chosen genre (in this case, American indie-rock music) by not suffering. In fact, signs point to him having suffered greatly in this life. The evidence is clear: Benjamin Gibbard is a Seattle Mariners fan.

The reader has perhaps heard of this team. An obscure outfit based in this country’s Oregon Territory, the Mariners have actually been an entirely active participant in the Major Leagues of Baseball since 1977. And while the reader would be excused for assuming that the club had taken one or three sabbaticals en route to the present, the record indicates quite clearly that Seattle’s membership has, in fact, been contiguous since the date of their enfranchisment.

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Brandon H. told Jonah K. who told all the Internet which told the author of this post that Major League Baseball appears recently to have uploaded a number of archival-type videos to their YouTube channel — including (and, for the purposes of this post, limited to) one particularly hot and sexy and hot video featuring right-hander Pedro Martinez in the bloom of goddamn youth.

“¡Ay, caramba!” announces the reader who has watched this video and also came of age, probably, during the earliest seasons of The Simpsons. “Ai, caramba!” announces a different reader after watching this video, but mostly because he’s a native Portuguese speaker. Whether one is from Brazil or Mozambique or Portugal itself, however, doesn’t matter: this video provide full-body pleasure sensation every time.

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What the world needs now is maybe love, or even sweet love. What the world wants, however, is images of top free agents in front of actual and probably hot stoves — such as the ones that follow, for example.

Robinson Cano in front of a chimenea, popular in Mexico:

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So far as rousing public addresses are concerned, David Ortiz’s Game Four one of those lacks the gravitas, probably, of Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day Speech. On the other hand, one finds that Henry V’s career WAR production was much less impressive.

Hey, can we agree on one thing? It's time to permanently retire Reggie Jackson's nickname http://t.co/8PP8AuwYoT

— robneyer (@robneyer) November 4, 2013

When Rob Neyer says “jump,” the present author is compelled to inquire as to which altitude might most satisfy him. And when Rob Neyer suggests by way of social media that Reggie Jackson’s nickname ought to be retired, the author says, “Hear, hear” — and whatever is the equivalent of “hear, hear” in at least three or four of the Romance languages.

What else the author says is: “There are other nicknames that ought to be retired, as well.” Nicknames like the following, for example, which are entirely authentic and not just produced by pairing randomly generated player pages from Baseball Reference with choice phrases from Yelp reviews.

1. Neil “Bacon Dust” Allen

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Some people are pretty surprised that Wodehouse wrote a story once about baseball.

It has often been said of this world that all one needs to survive in it is an endless supply of brandy and the collected works of PG Wodehouse. In fact, this isn’t the case at all. One would die of malnutrition, almost certainly, if confined to that particular diet — and would likely lose a taste for literature, however uproarious, at some point en route to Blackest Death. That the man who said it often did so from within the confines of a hospital for incurable pauper lunatics indicates that it probably oughtn’t be filed under wisdom proper.

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Baseball fans generally understand what is meant in referring to the “2013 season,” for example, or the “2014 season.” When do these seasons actually begin, though?

Below are points both for and against the resolution that the 2014 season began yesterday, October 31st. The points have been arranged in the style of the Team Policy Debate in which the author once participated with a Russian kid named Simon in ninth grade.

First Affirmative Constructive
The 2014 season did begin on October 31st, i.e. the day after the conclusion of the 2013 World Series. The point of any season, ultimately, is to identify a champion. When said champion has been decided, that season can be considered complete. When the season is considered complete, the following one (i.e. season) necessarily begins the next day. The 2013 World Series concluded on the evening of October 30th, with the Boston Red Sox being identified as the champion. Therefore, the 2014 season began the following day, October 31st.

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The dispassionate fulfillment of one’s personal duties is probably one of the top-10 or -15 virtues there is, so far as virtues are concerned. It isn’t so important as unyielding insouciance, of course, nor a certain proficiency in the construction and maintenance of the four classic tie knots. That said, it’s almost certainly more desirable than knowing how to ride a unicycle — a practice which, if the author’s sources are correct, is actually punishable by law in Singapore.

Sometimes a man must attend to his business, is what one acknowledges. Of late, it has become clear that the author’s business is to report, in a timely fashion, such instances as when a hitter in the Korean Series (Game Seven of which takes place in a few short hours) releases his bat with a flourish after making contact.

According to priceless internet citizen Dan of My KBO, two such instances occurred last night — video of both being present below. Note that, once again, the author has deliberately inverted the Korean names which appear here, for reasons even he barely understands.

Jun-Seok Choi’s name was invoked not 24 hours ago in these pages under very similar circumstances. Here he is flipping his bat following a fifth-inning home run in Game Six.

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The image embedded here, stolen from a New Yorker piece by the now-retired Adrian Cardenas, depicts the former Phillies and then A’s and then Cubs prospect breaking up an A.J. Burnett no-hitter last season (i.e. 2012).

Also stolen from that same piece is the following paragraph (although one will note that the other paragraphs around it are also worthy of some consideration):

I quit after trying to balance my life as a professional baseball player with my life as a student during the last three years of my career. In the spring and summer, I played ball. In the fall, I studied creative writing and philosophy at New York University. But with every semester that passed, I loved school more than I loved baseball, and eventually I knew I had to choose one over the other. As I submerged myself into an academic environment, I thought often of my parents, who knew nothing about baseball but raised me with a passion for music and language so great that sports seemed irrelevant by comparison.

Article brought to author’s attention by pretty virile-seeming older gentleman Don Hammack.