My poor kid is sick and now it’s like a Madison Bumgarner start in here. #snotrockets

— Drew F (@DrewGROF) December 10, 2012

Baseball has offered to the English language a number of expressions with which to colorfully and compactly describe otherwise mundane or more complicated ideas. To say, for example, that something has “come out of left field” means that it’s surprising and unexpected. To “hit a home run” with a project means to do a great job with it. To “get to second base” with a special lady means — according to my wife, whom I trust implicitly — means to quietly read in the same room as her and not touch her or even look at her, if at all possible.

Most of these expressions, however, have lost their original vitality through repetition. In the face of this, however, the very kind and even more baritoned Drew Fairservice of Getting Blanked offers us the above-embedded message regarding the similarities between a Madison Bumgarner start and his own spawn’s ill health.

Now, NotGraphs is happy to release — in the same spirit as Fairservice’s missive — is happy to release today five (five!) new baseballing expressions for common use.

Five expressions like these five:

Expression: Delmon Young Career Arc
Meaning: Promise, followed by disappointment — also, then maybe followed by a very public display of anti-Semitism.
Example: “My college career was real Delmon Young career arc. I started with a scholarship, but flunked out by sophomore spring. Also: Jews, amirite?”

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There’s no reason to believe — even though it’s true — that the present author has a wife who’s beautiful both in the face part and mind part of her body.

Below are three photos by that same wife-lady from a trip the author and said wife took to a pair of High-A California League games in Lake Elsinore and then Rancho Cucamonga in 2009, I think it was.

All images are both (a) embiggenable via clicking and (b) stolen directly from the aforementioned wife’s very poorly maintained website.

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Click to (ahem) embiggen.

Which is to say, I never considered myself the sort of guy to visit the Caribbean.

As reliable content-generator and hot, sexy tuba-ist David Temple noted yesterday in these pages, this year’s Winter Meetings — at which Meetings the author, who is a real-live baseball writer now, was actually present — were decidedly yawn-worthy in terms of deals that were actually made. That having been said (and with due respect to Tim Dierkes et al.), there are a number of rumors that have been entirely ignored by the sporting media — rumors about which any reasonable person is likely to ask “Why is no one talking about this???”

Rumors like these five, specifically:

Bryan LaHair’s surname is French for “The Hair.”

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As she noted during her Wednesday appearance on FanGraphs Audio (live on tape from the Winter Meetings!), Sports on Earth’s Emma Span was not always a highly decorated and widely hailed commentator of athletic contests on this (if no other) planet. Before that, she was a highly decorated and same-amount-as-hailed writer of short descriptions for all manner of direct-to-video films.

With regard to perhaps sampling Ms. Span’s prose stylings from that important moment in her career, the internet refuses to fail us. For it’s at electronic auction house eBay that we find one of Span’s charming nugae: detailed item info for Stanley the Stinkbug Goes to Camp.

Drink deeply, citizens of the world:

Lovable but naturally smelly Stanley the Stinkbug struggles to make friends at his new summer camp, in spite of his powerful odor, in this inspirational and warm-hearted kids’ cartoon about tolerance, acceptance, and God’s love. Judge Reinhold voices Stanley, joining a talented cast that also includes Tim Conway and Don Knotts.

Span’s sympathies for Stanley are obvious and beautiful — like something that is both beautiful but also obvious at the same time. Stanley’s pain is Span’s pain; his lessons about tolerance are her same lessons; his complex relationship with noted star of 1988 comedy Vice Versa Judge Reinhold are her same feelings about the entire Santa Clause trilogy’s Judge Reinhold.

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Q. Describe the plot of a non-extant Coen Brothers film in fewer than 140 characters.

A. Ahem:

“Adam LaRoche is going to come back. Even if I have to go to Kansas and take him and his cattle to Fla.” –Davey Johnson twitter.com/MLB/status/276…

— MLB (@MLB) December 4, 2012

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Congratulations to FanGraphs’ Greekest contributor, Eno Sarros, on his admission to the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Being inside the Opryland is a lot like being outside in French Polynesia. Plus, balloons.

Here are five things the author has witnessed within his first two hours at baseball’s Winter Meetings:

1. Famous baseballing writer Peter Gammons perform a maneuver not exactly like, but pretty similar to, a crane kick while attempting to navigate a particularly crowded walkway.

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When I was a younger person than I am right now — like by 10 or so years, actually — I emailed David Berman (author of Actual Air, frontman of the Silver Jews, and graduate of UMass-Amherst’s MFA program that’s way better than Iowa’s dumb MFA program that’s dumb) and asked him where, if I were in Nashville ever, I should make a priority of going. The Gold Rush, is what he responded — if for no other reason than the members of 1980’s hair-band Cinderella were regulars there.

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