Ahem (click to embiggen):

In this chapter of Advanced Lipreading, we’re considering some of the difficulties posed to lipreaders by non-native speakers of English. Below are three such real-life examples, with Miami Marlins baseball manager Ozzie Guillen.

Guillen is a native of Venezuela, and, while he’s a fluent speaker of English, has preserved many of the phonological traits of South American Spanish, which can present ambiguities in the labiodental fricative, for example, and the palato-alveolar sibilant — and similar distortions in the corresponding visemes of those sounds.

Read the rest of this entry »

People — and by “people” I mean “a select group of people who, one assumes, are accustomed to making poor life decisions” — people have, at times, expressed interest in hearing those portions of Dayn Perry’s FanGraphs Audio appearances which fail to make the actual, published episodes of same.

What follows is just such a thing — is, in fact, the entirety of the ca. 43-minute phone call I recorded with Perry on Thursday morning, which phone call ultimately produced six entire minutes of content.

Note that, unlike regular episode of FanGraphs Audio, what follows contains profanity (although, it should be said, less than usual for Perry) — and, as well, at least a full minute of the guest audibly evacuating his bladder.

Read the rest of this entry »

The internet giveth, and the internet… giveth even harder:

One of two such headlines the author happened to find in his aggregator.

It should be noted that, by the word study in the title of this post, what the author actually means is “passing observation” — and that, by the prepositional phrase rife with, what the author really means, in this case, is “two MLB.com articles that recently appeared in his RSS reader.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout the annals of history, it has been man’s ambition to capture, in GIF form, video footage of one man sliding both (a) awkwardly and (b) face-first into another man’s butt-part. It was to facilitate such a moment, in fact, that Abner Doubleday, Patrick Henry, and the entire writing team from Benson invented the game of baseball on a humid and musky and pungent and redolent and musky summer day in 1839.

Doubleday and the writers of Benson have died, of course, but I have it on good authority that Henry is not only alive, but flourishing, as an adult film star known as the Patriot Missile — and likely reading this post, too, his heart (metaphorically) filling (metaphorically) with joy (metaphorically).

Indeed, for reader MikeS has not only witnessed just such an episode as Henry and Co. envisioned, but has utilized the Team NotGraphs Hot Hotline to the end of alerting this site’s editoriat to same.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s Hunter Pence absolutely explode-tackling his third-base coach while running to the plate: atmlb.com/LWIfff

— MLB (@MLB) July 8, 2012

The author has often stated — at cocktail parties, at area bars after those same cocktail parties — that neologism is his favorite sort of gism.

Thus it was with no little pleasure that the author found, in the midst of his Twitter feed this morning, the above-embedded message, courtesy Major League Baseball itself.

A brief inspection of the web — noted for being worldwide in its dimensions — reveals that neither explode-tackle nor any of its variants (explode-tackling, will have explode-tackled, etc.) is in anything like common use.

What it (i.e. the WWW) does reveal is that Juan Samuel has ordered a Code Red to be performed in and around and on the head part of Hunter Pence.

Midway on his life’s journey, noted Italian epicist Dante Alighieri found himself in a dark woods, his heart pierced with terror.

Midway through Friday’s victory over the Kansas City Royals, Tigers outfielder Delmon Young found himself in a not entirely different situation, over 700 years later.

Regard (and consider strongly embiggening):

The Internetting Gentleperson will surely not consider his or her day complete having failed to lay eyes — and hot, heaving clandestine breaths — upon this entirely authentic, unedited tweet:

Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — With the news today that the New York Mets‬ have claimed right-hander Chris Schwinden off waivers — this, after Schwinden was originally waived by the Mets themselves on June 2nd and then subsequently claimed and dropped by the Blue Jays, Indians, and (most recently) the Yankees, all over the course of a month — America’s leading poets, novelists, and writers of non-fiction are pretty sure that Schwinden’s month-long journey is a metaphor for something, although for what, precisely, is unclear.

“There’s something distinctly rich about Schwinden’s experience in June and so far in July,” said Elinora Straus, head of the Creative Writing department at Vassar College. “In particular, to have settled with the team that originally released him: that’s stirring. ‘Why, though?’ is the question. ‘I don’t know, actually,’ is my answer, presently.”

Read the rest of this entry »