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

To the Very Talented and Enigmatic Max Scherzer, Detroit Pitcher:

With regard to your start tonight against Boston — with regard to all your future starts, really — allow me to note, Mr. Scherzer, that you needn’t cross the Pennine or Graian hills, or traverse the Candavian waste, or face the Syrtes, or Scylla, or Charybdis in order to fully realize your innate excellence; the journey for which Nature has equipped you is safe and pleasant. She has given you such gifts that you may, if you do not prove false to them, rise level with God.

With All Due Reverence,
Carson Cistulli

It was recently brought to the attention of the author that Blue Jays hitmaker Edwin Encarnacion might bear more than passing resemblance to a certain, presumably extinct, predatory theropod.

Upon brief inspection by the author himself of some extant video footage, said resemblance was rendered unavoidable — both for that same author and, it should be noted, for the entirety of the NotGraphs readership.

For the sort of reader who’s always looking for more on developing stories as they develop, I’ve embedded some video footage from this afternoon’s Tigers-Blue Jays game (box) — during which game the aforementioned Encarnacion hit a fourth-inning home run and during which he also, once again, affected the posture of what we can only presume are his earliest ancestors.

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Insofar as it took him 32 pitches to record three outs and he walked two batters in the process, Friday’s appearance will likely not be remembered as the best of Jonny Venters‘ career, nor — as of now, at least — would it really even be considered representative of his work to date.

That said, the very entertaining Venters did provide the home audience with the following sequence, against Kinda Obese Everyman and Philadelphia third baseman Ty Wigginton in the seventh inning of Friday’s Braves-Phillies game (box). What the attentive reader will notice (and what the not-very-observant-at-all reader will probably notice, too) is that (a) not only are the three sinkers which follows thrown to basically the same location at basically the same velocity, but that (b) Ty Wigginton reacts in basically the same way to all of them — which is to say, he offers at them, but mostly with a view to hastening his return to the dugout and thus forestalling any further embarrassment at the hands of this cruel mistress, baseball.

Here are the aforementioned pitches, with Wigginton’s aforementioned swings:

Pitch Two

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The Cubs have given something away. What they’ve actually given away is of little consequence to the present author and, I’m guessing, the present reader.

No, our concern is for what the Cubs could have — or should have — given away. Like a black-market kidney, perhaps. Or a baby prostitute, maybe. Or, as Dayn Perry will have suggested on his next podcast appearance (available later Friday, maybe, or Saturday), the withered remains of Colonel Sanders.

The author’s wife is about to finish making the most impossibly delicious pizza; however, quickly, here are Matt Harvey’s first two, I think, sliders from his major-league debut that started five minutes ago.

Here’s one of them, to strike out whomever the Diamondbacks leadoff hitter was:

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GIFs from the author’s old computer are dull and boring:

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It has never been the case, nor will it ever be — so far as NotGraphs is concerned — that the reader’s wish is the present author’s command. Having been introduced even in the most cursory of ways to the sordid interior lives of this site’s readership, it is patently obvious that to put my wellbeing in the hands of such a group of psychological ruffians would be an exercise in folly.

This bit of common sense having been established, I’ll hasten to add that, as a reasonable gentleman, I’m more than willing to entertain reasonable requests — like this reasonable internet request, courtesy a man whose middle name appears literally to be Funk, for a GIF of Adrian Beltre mostly sliding, kinda, into second base on a double during the fourth inning of the Rangers’ 2-1 loss to Boston on Tuesday night (box).

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For the lay fan, the circumstances surrounding the Ryan Dempster trade (or lack thereof) to Atlanta are what might be called “murky at best.”

For Bob Uecker, however, everything is illuminated — and, just as one wouldn’t hide a light under a bushel, it would be the very picture of absurdity for the author not to share with the readership Bob Uecker’s (and, it should be noted, Joe Block’s) totally accurate and non-fictional report on the trade in question.

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