For everyone’s reference — and also for their moral improvement — here are two animated GIFs from tonight of Texas reliever Yoshinori Tateyama throwing his screwball (a pitch that Mike Fast, formerly of Baseball Prospectus and currently of the Houston Astros, documented with some precision last June) against a pair of Oaklanders.
Here, for a called strike, against the largely menacing Yoenis Cespedes:
La Terreur
It was that inveterate patriot Archibald Bunker, I believe, who once said “There is no prospect more frightening than that of a happy Frenchman.”
Indeed, ever since it was famously divided into three parts by Caesar himself, all Gaul has produced a singularly morose sort, noted mostly for their practice of gloomily smoking cigarettes and cursing a God whose existence they deny.
Regardless of one’s feelings apropos the Frenchman’s usual conduct, history suggests that it’s preferable to the alternative. In point of fact, the last recorded instance of a Frenchman desmonstrating something like enthusiasm was in 1794. A blood-stained sketch from that period depicts a grinning Robespierre beside a guillotine basket full of noblemen and -women’s decapitated heads.
Which is why, of course, the image embedded above — with panicked and trembling fingers, it goes without saying — arouses no little concern in the author. Nor is it anything less than a certainty that the photographeur responsible for said image is very, very dead.
Credit to reader Noah, who is currently living in La France and brought this blood-curdling image to the author’s attention.
Our highly reputable and totally real think tank has published five papers of late in assorted journals. Here they are, as follows:
Old Dog, New Tricks: Encased Meats at the Modern Baseball Park
Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 9:38, 20 September 2012
Protecting the Family Jewels: A Cultural History of the Cup
Journal of Sport History, Spring 2012, Volume 39(1)
Sal Fasano and Sons: Facial Hair and Constructions of Masculinity
Journal of Sport and Social Issues, August 2012, Vol. 36, No. 3
The Kingdom of God Is Inside Yu: Yu Darvish’s Slider as a Means to Religious Experience
International Journal of Religion and Sport, Volume 1, 2012
To the Max: The Collected Correspondence of Max Scherzer
Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, Summer 2012
Q. Who has two thumbs and likes watching Trevor Rosenthal pitch? A. Cardinals fans who’ve avoided farming accidents.
— Carson Cistulli (@cistulli) September 22, 2012
Q. Who has two thumbs and likes watching Trevor Rosenthal pitch?
A. Cardinals fans who’ve avoided farming accidents.
Q. Who reads at a college level and likes watching Trevor Rosenthal pitch?
A. Not a plurality of Cardinals fans, one assumes.
Q. Who has two thumbs and harbors largely unfounded notions regarding the intelligence of the Cardinals’ fanbase relative to other fanbases.
A. The author of this post.
Q. Who might suggest, were he alive, that the author’s motivation for harboring such notions about Cardinals fans is a product of his (i.e the author’s) attempts to make a display of whatever he has in the way of “social capital.”
A. French sociologist, and author of Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu.
Q. And what are we to learn from this brief examination?
A. That human frailty is ubiquitous, grotesque.
Partial to embiggening? Try clicking, then.
The image on the left — which, it must be said, has been painstakingly assembled by the author via a freeware graphics editor from the relevant Twitter page — is of Diamondbacks outfielder Adam Eaton and his Intended astride a pair of horses. The image on the right is of Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett — also totally riding horses — in the roles of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, respectively, from Ridley Scott’s 2010 adaptation of what someone, somewhere has likely described as a “classic tale.”
Now here’s what the reader is being asked to do: compare and contrast the images above.
I’ll start:
Compare
Great Swedish actor Max von Sydow is just out of the frame in both images.
Contrast
Great Swedish actor Max von Sydow is adjusting his codpiece just out of the frame in only one of the images.
Now you.
Occasionally, in some manner of print or electronic publication deeply concerned with sport, the editors will denote one or the other athlete as “most improved” among his peers. What follows has little — one might even say nothing — to do with that.
What concerns us here is something that happens on other types of occasions — specifically, during the stories of P.G. Wodehouse. Occasionally, in Wodehouse’s stories, gentleman’s personal gentleman and widely hailed savant Jeeves will make a statement to the effect that he has plans to read — or, alternatively, has just concluded reading — an “improving book.” What he means is not, as some might expect, a book that gets better the further it goes along, but rather one that makes stronger the character, clearer the thoughts, and richer the imagination.
The purpose of this post is to accept nominations for Most Improving Player — that is, the baseball-ist who, by virtue of his play or conduct or some ineffable je ne sais quoi, has improved the reader most this season.
Nominations for this very important distinction will be accepted in the comments area below. A brief note on the virtues of each nominee are not only permitted but encouraged.
Players who belong to a reader’s preferred team, while not strictly forbidden, are frowned upon — both by the author and also former commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
To wit:
While Max Scherzer’s shoulder is tired, his capacity for experiencing awe is constantly renewed.
Detroit Tigers right-hander and perpetual case study in human potential Max Scherzer was removed after two innings from his start on Tuesday due to “shoulder fatigue.” While an MRI revealed no structural damage, Scherzer and the organization will proceed with caution.
To address concerns about his health, the Tigers media relations staff has distributed the following statement, composed (it seems) entirely by Scherzer himself.
It’s almost impossible, in light of my recent medical concern, not to be reminded of that great record-keeper of the ephemeral, Tang Dynasty poet Tu Fu — his entire oeuvre, really (or, as much of it as is available to a commoner like me, whose Chinese has suffered from disuse in recent years), but, in particular, the second section of his poem “Meandering River”, which David Young translates as follows in his excellent collection from Oberlin’s Field Translation Series:
Here’s a completely authentic and totally unadulterated message from avant-garde sportsman Max Scherzer’s Twitter account this morning (click to embiggen):
Voltaire: no stranger to the knocking of public boots.
Here are three literary genres, and the parts of each most vital to their success:
A Poem
The first line, probably.
A Novel
The first line, probably.
A Daily News Story About a Couple Using a Yankee Stadium Bathroom Stall to the End of a Spirited and Innings-Long Spell of Urgent Lovemaking
Every word, one realizes almost immediately.
“I have all the talents!” Arthur Rimbaud announces — in French, unfortunately — during his long poem A Season in Hell, published in 1873. “I have all the talents!” Brewers third baseman Aramis Ramirez is clearly thinking, about 140 years later, after hitting an impressively long home run off Mets starter Chris Young.
