The United States is inarguably a better country from which to follow major-league baseball than France. “For a lot of reasons,” is the answer. “Why, precisely?” is the question.

That said, it would appear as though, so far as consuming postseason baseball is concerned, there’s actually some advantage to living abroad. The reader perhaps already has some notion of why — namely because, while MLB.TV viewers in US and Canada are relegated merely to “companion coverage” of the divisional series and NLCS, international users have unfettered access to the live television feed for every game. The logic of this arrangement is not immediately obvious to the author, although one guesses “cash money” has something to do with it.

Below are five representative screenshots from an international viewer’s experience of MLB.TV’s postseason coverage. (Click any image to embiggen.)

1. Here’s the Media Center page, with notes (circled in red) regarding the options for US/Canada users versus international ones:

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As sort of a complement to Greg Rybarczyk’s work at Hit Tracker Online, writer Chris St. John — whose prospect analysis at Beyond the Box Score, incidentally, is also great and will suffice — created, a couple years ago, a metric called Home Run Damage, a tool by means of which St. John is able to identify objectively the most awe-inspiring home runs of any season.

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Thought it doesn’t appear — like, at all — to be the quickest route from Tampa Bay, a Google Map has revealed today that, if the Rays have any interest in reaching the World Series Batting Cages located on Woodley Avenue, just south of JFK High School in Granada Hills, California, they’re going to have to go through Cleveland to do it.

Of the unusual driving directions, Google representative Simon Warble had this to say: “This is the single dumbest use I’ve seen of our Maps product, ever — including that time you inquired about public-transit options from a Chuck E. Cheese in Denver all the way to Sierra Leone. You have clearly just looked up one thing with the words world and series next to each other and pretend-mistaken it for Major League Baseball’s championship. Below inane, is how I’d describe it.”

Added Warble: “I feel compelled to add that I’m fictional person you just invented.”

“We’d be happy to have the Rays come by,” said World Series owners Peggy and Lionel Sheephats, “but we’d prefer you not make up weird names for us like Sheephats. Also, we agree with Simon Warble about your use of Google Maps. Seems like a lot of effort for what amounts to maybe one-third of a joke. And that’s being generous.”

Apropos of everything, what follows are three separate animated GIFs of split-changeups from Danny Salazar’s most recent start (box) — which GIFs the author made last week but, in lieu of publishing them immediately, just left them on his desktop for occasional inspection, which is normal, and not weird, according to the author’s therapist.

Here, for example, is Danny Salazar throwing his split-changeup to Alejandro De Aza for a strikeout looking in the first inning:

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Nick Swisher is not a bit tamed, Nick Swisher too is untranslatable.

While everyone, even illiterate people, certainly should read American and dead poet Walt Whitman’s master opus Song of Myself, it’s also the case that the idle moment often eludes us in these tough times: there are bills to pay and mouths to feed and season finales to watch and season finales upon which to comment via social media.

Nick Swisher, a self-described “man of the people” (probably), has done those same people what’s known in Swisher’s parlance (probably) as a “fucking solid” in this particular case, and condensed the spirit of Whitman’s work into one enduring and masculine pose — i.e. the pose captured in the image above.

“What do we want?” Nick Swisher seems to be asking.

“Multitudes,” he wants you to answer, probably.

“When do we want it?” Nick Swisher has now asked this time.

“Perpetually,” he’d like you to respond.

If there were a magical-realist novel about Josh Satin, it would begin with a description of Josh Satin, rounding the bases like normal after having hit a home run against Brewers reliever Jim Henderson on September 26, 2013.

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Not merely some — but, in fact, most — feature-length motion pictures fail to produce as much in the way of pathos as this short video of Jim Leyland does in the wake of Detroit’s division-clinching victory on Wednesday, which video includes: Jim Leyland crying a proud father’s beautiful, faltering tears; Jim Leyland being escorted into the Tiger clubhouse via bear hug by devoted son-figure Torii Hunter; and Jim Leyland performing spontaneously a dance which, for whatever it lacks in technical proficiency, compensates for it by managing to remind the spectator that the first act of human dance, whenever it occurred, must also have been an expression of pure and spontaneous joy.

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Some time this past spring, the author resolved that he would attempt, in these pages, to document for the wide readership this season the bat-flip in all of its different and glorious incarnations.

Like most claims made by someone with a marinara stain on a weird part of his underpants, however, this one wasn’t to be trusted. In point of fact, this site’s coverage of bat flips has appeared only in fits and starts — like the love of a father who expresses his emotions only in fits and starts.

As the alternative is absolutely no coverage of bat flips, however — or no paternal love whatever — one must satisfy him- or herself with what is made available.

Credit to concerned readers JayAre and PronkTwp for bringing the author’s attention to the footage in question.

A new discovery has left Mark DeRosa scratching his head.

After sitting down to eat breakfast on Wednesday morning over the previous night’s edition of MLB.com’s FastCast recap program, Toronto area resident Mark DeRosa was surprised to find not only that Mark DeRosa had produced a pair of key hits in the Blue Jays’ 3-2 extra-inning victory over the Baltimore Orioles the day before, but that Mark DeRosa still played baseball at any level at all, let alone the major-league one.

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