Recent reports from myriad reputable media outlets all confirm: FanGraphs is the most popular internet site on the internet. What this means, so far as Fame and Riches and Fame are concerned, is that we can and do have more of them. What else this means, though — especially in light of the main site’s universally beloved redesign, which features NotGraphs perhaps slightly more prominently than before — is that NotGraphs is now being visited more often by a sort of reader who might not be prepared for the sort of charming falsehoods which are this site’s bread and also its butter.

To that end, CEO and founder and noted sexpert David Appelman has suggested that NotGraphs begin featuring disclaimers which speak to the site’s legitimacy, or lack thereof. “Might they be of an irreverent nature?” I have asked Appelman regarding said disclaimers. To which question he has responded by slapping me and cursing my existence. So, yes, is the answer I’m supposing.

The present author has composed five such warnings, each of which is likely to be eclipsed in quality by the bespectacled readership, who are encouraged now to submit their own amusing and legal-ish disclaimers.

1. NotGraphs: The Misleading Voice in Baseball Journalism.

2. NotGraphs: The Names Are Real. The Problems, Likely Fake.

3. NotGraphs: Lies, Damned Lies… End of List.

4. NotGraphs: Missing the Forest and the Trees.

5. NotGraphs: Exercising Due Negligence.

A friend of mine from college — to whom I’ll refer as “Justin,” largely owing to how that’s his name — went to a dinner party at the Chelsea Hotel shortly after he graduated in 2002. He was surprised to find, among the guests of said party, Arthur Miller — as in the actual Arthur Miller, who wrote basically every play you’re required to read in high school.

“I seriously never thought of him as a real person,” Justin said about the experience — which sentiment I invoke here on account of that’s more or less how I felt about Rob Neyer before making his acquaintance at a meeting of the Northwest chapter of SABR in 2008, I think it was. In fact, “making his acquaintance” might be the incorrect phrasing. More appropriate might be “imposed myself upon” or “harassed in word and deed.” In any case, until that point, Rob Neyer had only existed for me as a popular and beflanneled internet evangelist of sabermetrics — someone, like Arthur Miller, with whose work I was quite familiar, but with whom I never expected to actually interact.

Owing to a series of events that are mostly the product of luck, I’ve had the opportunity to become something like close with Neyer — close enough such that not only (a) I have the privilege of receiving a birthday card (such as the one pictured here) from him, but also that (b) he willn’t feel entirely as though I’ve violated the terms of our friendship by rendering the receipt of said birthday card into a post on the absurd internet site of which I’m the editor.

Here, for the benefit of the reader, is a photo of the envelope of Neyer’s birthday card — with addresses obscured for Maximum Privacy™:

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There are jokes, reader, and then there are jokes — the difference being primarily that one kind of them is italicized.

On a probably related noted, the editors of Tumblr account Baseball Card Vandals improve baseball cards via Sharpie-brand markers, with results that one might alternately describe as “grotesque” and “whimsical” — and even “Dadaist in spirit,” were one feeling emboldened.

Like in this instance:

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Let’s not ask what circumstances have led the author to a Starbucks in Michigan City. Let’s, instead, open a pack of 1987 Topps — i.e. the rarest sort of baseball card there is in human society — at that same Starbucks.

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Click to embiggen in terms of size.

As has been noted already in these same electronic pages, CEO and founder David Appelman recently instituted the first phase of a hot new redesign for FanGraphs.

Here, for the first time (!), we reveal a sneak peek of the completed FanGraphs redesign. “Hello,” it almost seems to say, “my name is the future!”

Image courtesy the singular Dan Szymborski.

FanGraphs CEO David Appelman says an animated backdrop might be coming soon, as well.

ARLINGTON, VA — Citing the need for “a hot new design that absolutely screams ‘2013’,” FanGraphs founder and CEO David Appelman has partnered with internet powerhouse GeoCities to produce a new layout for the popular baseball stats and analysis site.

“I’ve been real excited with the sort of growth FanGraphs has seen in recent years, and the attention we’ve begun to receive from the mainstream media,” said Appelman, “but, for some time now, I’ve really thought it was essential to produce a home page that represented visually what we’re trying to do intellectually. GeoCities was the obvious choice to help us with that.”

Appelman’s decision was, of course, made more difficult by the fact that GeoCities — which rose to prominence as one of the internet’s earliest web-hosting services — by the fact that it hasn’t been available in the United States since 2009.

“That was definitely a bump in the road,” said Appelman with a laugh. “But my vision is so clear on this — I absolutely demanded that we make this happen.”

As of press time, Appelman was working on uploading an amusing MIDI file to accompany the site’s landing page.

Because he never made the majors and because he was out of affiliated baseball by 1990, Steve Sharts does not have a player page at FanGraphs. What he does have, though — by virtue of his amusing name, if nothing else — is a place in the heart of most every male in the coveted 18-34 demographic. Plus the author’s colleague Dayn Perry, one assumes, who’s not between the ages of 18 and 34 but who is contemptible and of low breeding.

The Texas Rangers announced on Thursday the dates and locations for their 2013 Winter Caravan. Here, for those interested, are the primary way it differs from a typical Silk Road caravan.

The following tweet is entirely and in-no-way altered from the original (click to embiggen):

If a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, a hurricane can happen on the coasts of Florida. If new Oakland A’s shortstop Hiroyuki Nakajima flips his bat in Japan, however, Jeff Sullivan will definitely capture video of it, render it into GIF form, and then optimize it for the people.

Science, is what that is.

Footage from series of Nakajima videos posted at Mercury News.