Heartbreaking update:

@cistulli upon further review, I’ve learned that the ticket is for one game in April, not all of ’em. Goldstar regrets the error, or should.

— Ian Miller (@teen_archer) February 21, 2013

The author, who has spent portions of his life eating little more than vegetable soup and also other kinds of vegetable soup, understands entirely that $16 is different than $0. However, it’s also demonstrably the case that $16 for seven Oakland Athletics baseball games is mostly as close to $0 as baseball tickets will ever get again in all our lives.

Click this hyperlinked text to take advantage of this offer, which might also be just an internet virus accidentally.

Credit to Facebook friend 4eva (until one of us dies) Ian Miller.

How does the present author love British expatriate Craig Robinson? If he’s being honest, probably less intensely than Elizabeth Barrett Browning loved whomever is the object of her 43rd sonnet. But still quite a bit, it’s fair to say.

The latest reason for any reasonable person to love Craig Robinson is owing to what’s contained in the following pair of images — i.e. useless and brilliant Lego representations of former major-leaguers Dennis Eckersley and Fernando Valenzuela.

To wit:

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Is it…

(a) Wacky next-door neighbor of the internet Jose Canseco…

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North Carolina State sophomore and left-hander Carlos Rodon, who struck out 135 batters last year in 114.2 innings, is pitching this very moment against Appalachian State. His slider is excellent, and has allowed him to record five strikeouts against the first 13 batters he’s faced of the game. It has also been hit very far out of Doak Field.

Here’s a slider for a swing and miss to Appalachian State DH Dillon Dobson:

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Because I refuse to meditate upon his personal life for even a moment longer than is necessary, I’m unsure as to how the very profligate Dayn Perry not only (a) made his way to a site called Twit Amore — which site encourages visitors to “Discover who they love on Twitter” — but also (b) decided to engage said website in the service of that Discovery.

As the image above indicates, however, Perry did both of those things — and the results, we will say, are really of benefit to no one. If Perry has ever loved the author, he has done so only with the aid of a preposition — which is to say, he has loved on and astride and towards the author, but never just the author himself, in the accusative form of the noun.

It’s a matter of public record that Boileryard Clarke was conceived at New York’s Auburn State Prison during a terrifying 12-minute conjugal visit on Valentine’s Day of 1868, raised by a ornery bull terrier named Dom behind a lower Manhattan tenement house, and experienced compassion just once in his life — but would never divulge why or for whom.

What Boileryard Clarke never cared for — likely because he never was one himself — was children. And as these real and not-fake images demonstrate, Boileryard Clarke continues to terrify them even in spectral form.

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Dayn Perry and I are recording his clearly absurd (and now, it appears, semi-weekly) podcast appearance at 1pm ET tomorrow (Wednesday).

Feel free to submit questions for Perry — whose days on Earth on very clearly numbered — in the comment section below.

New York Met outfielders are entirely candid about their prospects for the 2013 season, it appears — as the following (and necessarily) censored tweet reveals:

In soccer, the Dutch are famous for having re-invented the game in the early 1970s by means of what has become known as “Total Football” — a strategy devised by Ajax and Dutch national-team coach Rinus Michels, which demanded technical ability from every position and emphasized a fluidity of play.

As the graphic here suggests, there’s reason to believe that Hensley Meulens, manager of the Netherlands’ entry in the forthcoming WBC tournament, is about to do for baseball what Michels did for world football 40 years ago. Faced with a roster featuring four young and talented shortstops — Xander Bogaerts (Red Sox), Jurickson Profar (Rangers), Jonathan Schoop (Orioles), and Andrelton Simmons (Braves) — Muelens has turned lemons into delicious and Zeitgeist-defining lemonade, choosing to deploy all four of the aforementioned players at shortstop at the same time.

“How fine is the line between genius and madness?” Muelens appears to be asking. Except in Dutch, probably. Or in Papiamentu, maybe, too — i.e. the other official language of Muelens’ native Curaçao.