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

Ha! Alf kills you.

Apart from some notable exceptions, the quality of commentary on baseballing broadcasts leaves something to be desired — in particular for the handsome and bespectacled sort who’ve made NotGraphs part of their (a) lives and (b) RSS feeds.

Below are five candidates to fill whatever color vacancies are currently open around baseball — or are likely to become open in the near future.

5. ALF, from TV’s ALF
You know what would really annoy Willie? Were ALF to secure gainful employment, delighting home audiences all over the greater Los Angeles area — even as Willie continued to insist (impotently) that ALF was a slovenly and freeloading houseguest.

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It has come to the author’s attention that, as part of a recent update and reformat of MLB’s At Bat 12 app, there’s been included a tab (pictured right) that allows users to access and watch any one from 16 different classic baseball games. Most readers will likely find the majority of the games either too old (such that the broadcast technology is borderline prohibitive in terms of “watching”) or, otherwise, so recent that they (i.e. these games) are insufficiently shrouded by the mists of time.

There is, however, a collection of three or four games — starting with Game Five of the Orioles-Mets World Series in 1969 and ending with Game Five of the 1984 NLCS between the Cubs and Padres — that are both (a) available in brilliant Technicolor and (b) old enough that one can experience them again for the first time, as it were.

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Some men smoke a cigarette after making love. Other, more virile men — like Luis Tiant, Sr., for example — smoke a cigarette while making love. It’s a practice borne out of necessity, of course: Luis Tiant, Sr., is always smoking and he is always also making love.

Late American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was known, during his lifetime, as a prominent voice on the nature of what’s possible in the visual arts. Yet, no one could have anticipated the prophetic nature of the work embedded here — which, for convenience sake, Rauschenberg referred to as one of his “White Paintings,” but which is very clearly a depiction of all the Marlins fans in existence protesting the trade of Josh Johnson, Jose Reyes, etc., to the Toronto Blue Jays.

“Startling,” one is compelled to say. “Transcendent,” says another.

For reasons that needn’t be explored now or ever, the author of this post found himself watching in bed this morning, via informationPhone, the video embedded here of retired footballer Zinedine Zidane’s performance in the quarterfinal of the 2006 World Cup against Brazil.

As the panoply of Zidane compilation videos on the internet suggests, Zidane was both (a) very talented and (b) widely hailed. What one can’t help from observing — from this video specifically, and his career generally — is how Zidane, whenever he touched the ball, almost always improved his team’s fortunes. In baseball, we can derive from a player’s line the number of runs he’s created relative to a replacement player. Were such a thing possible in soccer, Zidane would likely have been among his respective league’s leaders every season — despite never scoring many goals himself.

A large part of Zidane’s excellence, of course, owes to the rare combination and volume of skills in his possession: a deft touch, physical strength, and seemingly preternatural understanding of the pitch and location of all the players on it. What’s also notable, however — at least for the purposes of this very brief post — is what I’ll call Zidane’s capacity for wit.

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…. Puppies are being shot.

— Henry Schulman (@hankschulman) November 12, 2012

Henry Schulman, who covers the baseball Giants for the San Francisco Chronicle, is either finishing an idea here from a previous status update or has the saddest possible offseason newsbeat imaginable.

With the advent of the offseason, FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron has resumed his role on MLB Network’s Clubhouse Confidential, hosted by the vigorously coiffed Brian Kenny.

One thing Cameron hasn’t resumed is blinking — although mostly because he did little of that sort of thing in the first place.

Below, I’ve recorded Dave Cameron’s blinking stats from the above-embedded discussion of the American League Cy Young award. Beg and End mark the beginning and end marks of Cameron’s time on camera. Time is total time, in minutes and seconds, on camera. Blinks represents the number of blinks during the relevant interval. (Note: there are errors, likely. Scorer’s bias, indeed!)

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Because I not only attended important Northeastern schools, but also because I want other people to know that I attended important Northeastern schools, a thing I like to do is be seen in public reading The Atlantic in either its print or electronic form.

For readers who possess similarly vain aspirations — and who also give one or more damns about baseball — the magazine’s profile of the Arizona Fall League is worth some attention, in which it (i.e. that League) is referred to by author Chris Arnold as “‘graduate school’ for top prospects.”

To wit:

Here in the Arizona Fall League, far from the flashbulbs of the World Series, the future stars of Major League Baseball are trying to make the final leap to the big show. For 20 years, the AFL has served as an off-season “graduate school” for top prospects. In some ways, it feels like the culmination of an antiquated system: While football and basketball have relatively straightforward paths to the pros—paths that lead through the NCAA—baseball stands apart with its scaffolded leagues of minor-league farm teams. But spend some time with the players and scouts at the AFL, and you start to get a sense for how that grueling, long-odds system is uniquely suited for this grueling, long-odds sport.

The grad-school metaphor is pleasant enough that I feel little compulsion to unpack it. I will say this, however: the AFL participants probably read way less Derrida than actual grad-school students.

Right-hander Jeremy Jeffress was traded Thursday from Kansas City to Toronto. What follows is an entirely and in-no-way altered tweet concerning his (i.e. Jeffress’s) contract status (click to embiggen):