Given enough time — and the gift of eternal life, one assumes — a monkey typing at random would almost surely produce all of Shakespeare’s plays.
Given an afternoon in Peter Gammons’ pocket, Peter Gammons’ cell phone will produce an endorsement, via Twitter, of my colleague Jackie Moore’s recent piece about Ken Caminiti.
Even at such a time as he’s drafted, ascends through the minors, and develops into the major leagues’ best ever player ever, it might still be the case that high-school prospect Fenway Parks is unable to find even one mention of himself on the internet via his Google Computer.
Credit to Kiley McDaniel for this important discovery.
On the field, Chase Headley has committed himself to excellence as both an offensive and defensive player. As the following tweet reveals — courtesy MLB Trade Rumors and in-no-way altered from the original — as it reveals, Headley has also committed himself to becoming familiar with the most important ideas of our time (click to embiggen):
Home-run legend and current Dodgers hitting coach Mark McGwire will sign anything, it appears — as the following (and necessarily) censored tweet suggests:
Periodically, in these pages, we have considered the blinking habits of the guests of MLB Network program Clubhouse Confidential, hosted by the robustly coiffed Brian Kenny. Dave Cameron’s own blinking habits have been considered with no little enthusiasm in these electronic pages — as have those of other, notable members of the sabermetric community.
Recently, godfather of sabermetrics himself Bill James appeared alongside Kenny. Below is the data concerning his blinking patterns.
Bill Baer of Crashburn Alley has dedicated at least a portion of his evening to reminding us, the tired surfers of the internet, that Carlos Ruiz one time conspicuously mastered his opponent (in this case, Atlanta left-hander Eric O’Flaherty) in May of 2012.
What the present author has considered — and asks below in the form of a rather late quiz — is how much Carlos Ruiz actually cares about what just happened in the GIF embedded here.
The author had occasion Sunday — during the Milwaukee Brewers’ On Deck fanfest event — to ask occasionally mustachioed and always Canadian John Axford three questions of considerable import. Below is an audio record of Axford’s answers — and a more or less accurate transcript of same.
Even an important BBWAA-endorsed journalist like the present one doesn’t know precisely what Craig Kimbrel’s breaking ball is doing tonight. One assumes, however, that it’s doing something very similar to what it did on October 3rd, 2012, against Pittsburgh’s Jose Tabata — i.e. Kimbrel’s last actual pitch of the regular season.
John Paul II’s card from a 1988 Topps set released only in Europe.
The Topps Company has long made a practice of publishing notable facts about players on the reverse sides of their baseball cards. It’s by way of these brief, but revealing, sentences that collectors (ardent or otherwise) have been able to gain some insight into who their heroes are as men, and not merely as athletes — by learning, for example, how right-hander Jim Slaton spent most of his time (on a boat) and for whose construction firm, specifically, Rob Deer worked (his father’s).
With the revelation recently of long-forgotten video from 1987 of Pope John Paul II taking purposeful cuts at a California-area indoor batting cage, we are reminded that he was once among the Italian baseball league’s top players. As such, Topps issued cards for the Pope annually as part of Italian card sets aimed at European consumers.
The present author has located a number of such cards. Here are notable facts from five of them:
• John was influential in the production of Vatican II, the long-awaited sequel to the original Vatican.
This is a clip from the film City of Baseball — about Nettuno, Italy, and its status as sort of a capital city of baseball in the bel paese.
Beyond its obvious charms, the clip serves as a lesson to aspiring documentarians: regardless of the film you’re making, do as much work as possible with old, Italian men.
