During the eighth inning of Friday night’s game between Houston and Texas (box), Astros first baseman Carlos Lee hit a pop fly down the third-base line.
While, in many cases, a third baseman will defer to the shortstop on such a batted ball, it’s also fair to say that deference is not a quality with which Rangers third baseman Adrian Beltre is particularly familiar.
It’s with great pleasure — and a blood alcohol content cheerfully north of zero — that the editoriat of NotGraphs announces the Double-Entendre of the Year for 2012: backdoor cutter.
The Double-Entendre of the Year is an award intended to celebrate a base-and-ball term that marries function with the slyly transgressive. It’s chosen by our Highly Reputable and Totally Real Think Tank during their annual team-building retreat to the coastal city and carnal playground of Dubrovnik.
A brief list of previous winners:
2011: Front-Hip Sinker
2010: Fisted Single
2009: Donger
2008: Fisted Single
2007: Fisted Single
It is soooo HOT in AZ! How hot is it?? Just saw a woman driving her car with oven mitts on!!! #Hot
— Geoff Blum (@blummer27) May 15, 2012
Regarding the veal, try it. In terms of your waitress, consider tipping her.
Minneapolis — Considerable speculation has flooded the internet blogs regarding Albert Pujols’s motives for throwing his glove at Angels teammate Erick Aybar following the club’s 6-2 victory over the Twins on Wednesday (box).
In point of fact, the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has learned that the gesture was in response to an ongoing argument the pair have regarding the utility of deconstructionist thought.
“Pujols, he doesn’t recognize the internal contradictions of philosophical discourse,” Aybar said when reached for comment. “The moment we attempt to utilize rhetoric in the service of describing metaphysical reality, we have obscured reality.
Said Pujols in response: “I regard Aybar’s claims only as an attempt to deliberately obscure discourse and nothing else. He argues against language until it no longer exists.
“So how I do refute him? I throw my glove. ‘Deconstruct that,’ I said. Q.E.D.”
LaHair with his giant Winner’s Cup, courtesy NotGraphs.
The attentive reader will know that my colleague and champion of the vulgar Dayn Perry has made a practice in these pages — via his Nickname Seeks Player series — has made a practice of (in his words) “assign[ing] cool nicknames to players rather than perpetuate the tired, lamewad practice of assigning cool players nicknames.”
While Perry’s point regarding the assignment of nicknames is unassailable, it’s also the case that sometimes nicknames are not assigned at all, but are instead revealed — as if out of the ether.
Such was the case, this afternoon, when out of my friend Dan Woytek’s mind (itself not unlike the ether) and onto his computer email screen came a suitable nickname for major-league baseball’s current leader in BABIP and owner, now, of a career BABIP somewhere north of .385, Bryan LaHair.
This is the nickname in question: In Play, No Outs.
This is your reaction to it: surprise and/or amazement, probably.
This is what you might proceed to do now: tell at least one person.
This is what you’ll probably also do: the other things you had planned.
Follow Dan Woytek on Twitter at @dwoytek, in case he says one more amusing thing before he dies or you die.
Tuesday night, Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton became just the 16th player in major-league history to hit four home runs in a single game (box).
Here are notable reviews of those home runs by some of America’s most celebrated critics (with links to video of each individual home run).
No. 1
“Josh Hamilton’s first home run is taut, terse, brisk and immediately engaging.” – Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
I was surprised, at the completion our offseason crowdsourcing project, to find that FanGraphs readers had ranked Houston Astros broadcasters Bill Brown and Jim Deshaies fourth overall among the league’s 31 television broadcast teams.
Of course, I could also be excused: there has been little reason for anyone to go out of his or her way to watch the Astros over the last couple-few years.
With a new, data-driven front office in place, however, and a team that’s currently ranked 10th in FanGraphs’ totally infallible SI.com power rankings, there are reasons to watch the Astros at the moment.
What I didn’t expect before turning on Sunday’s game between Houston and St. Louis was the degree to which Brown and, in particular, Deshaies could augment a fan’s viewing experience. The duo are both genuinely entertaining (not just “entertaining for baseball broadcasters”) and responsible with the numbers.
By way of illustration, here are five brief sound clips of Deshaies — literally all of them from the first three innings of that Sunday game against the Cardinals.
Baltimore’s Chris Davis made his major-league pitching debut against Boston on Sunday, earning the win with two innings of scoreless work while striking out two, walking one, and allowing two hits (box).
For the benefit of both (a) our readers and (b) baseball’s various advance scouting departments, we present this entirely complete and infallible scouting report on Chris Davis, right-handed pitcher.
Role: Late, Late Inning Reliever
When you talk about Chris Davis, you’re not talking about a starting pitcher or middle reliever or set-up guy or closer; you’re talking about a guy who’s gonna get the job done in, like, the 16th and 17th inning. He has a career average leverage index of 2.35 — considerably better than second-place Brian Wilson’s career 2.07 mark. Words like “gamer” and “clutch” are insufficient: you need to translate them into German and then back into English to fully characterize Davis’s mound temperament.
Stuff: Unclassifiable
What does Davis throw, exactly? Don’t ask PITCHf/x:
Reader and home-surgery enthusiast Brian writes in thusly:
In the bottom of the Nats 5th today, Gio Gonzalez slid into third base. I was listening on radio, and the play by play guys had a hard time deciding if he slid in headfirst or feetfirst, or if he slid feetfirst and then also headfirst. A friend who saw it on TV describes Gio’s slide thusly: “Imagine a dog flopping over on a slick floor, legs flailing in all different directions.”
I would like to see this.
Like the best civil servants and/or young women who become erotic dancers because their fathers never loved them enough, the members of Team NotGraphs are desperate to please both reader Brian and everyone else. Accordingly, we present this footage of Washington left-hander Gio Gonzalez, in a clear violation of Newtonian physics, sliding both head- and feet-first simultaneously.
