BayBank! It was a thing!

Baseball fans of all stripes were disappointed to hear Thursday of an injury to Mariano Rivera that will keep the closer out for the remainder of what was supposed to be the last season of his storied career.

In Rivera’s honor, NotGraphs presents…

Three Epigrams Concerning Mariano Rivera

Epigram No. 1

Legend has it that Mariano Rivera once performed an area bris using only his cut fastball.

Pardon me, did I say “legend”? I meant “the Daily News.”

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A popular myth holds that George Washington once threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River. Right-minded people everywhere know the truth, of course — that it wasn’t a silver dollar but the testicles of British general Henry Seymour Conway, and that it wasn’t the Potomac River but the Atlantic Ocean.

Right-minded people are also aware that another strong-armed American, Nationals uberprospect Bryce Harper, has recently made his home at the mouth of the Potomac.

What we don’t know is which of the above-named and strong-armed Americans (i.e. Harper or Washington) is the strongest-armed.

To sort out this mystery, we turn — via poll — we turn to the metaphorical (and, in about 30% of cases, actual) sons and daughters of George Washington himself.

We turn to a poll like this one:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Jane Austen once wrote, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an impossibly elegant and sophisticated Franco-Italian heiress who is also a former supermodel.”

Milwaukee Brewer outfielder Ryan Braun, known to be a great admirer of Austen’s work, clearly agrees, as indicated by this totally undoctored image (courtesy the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team) of Braun and French first lady Carla Bruni walking hand-in-hand in front of people whose lives are less important than theirs.

The timing of the episode is notable, as Bruni’s husband, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, enters Sunday’s elections about eight percentage points behind Socialist candidate Francois Hollande.

More on this story as it develops.

Seneca, quoting Epicurus, writes in his Moral Epistle No. 11 that one should — in order to conduct oneself as virtuously as possible — one should “Cherish some man of high character, and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you, and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them.”

Seneca continues:

Choose a master whose life, conversation, and soul-expressing face have satisfied you; picture him always to yourself as your protector or your pattern. For we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler.

While I won’t attempt to guess at which Master the reader has chosen for these purposes, allow me to take for granted that, for probably 50% or 70% of our readers, said Master is probably the fictional character Alfred Ogilvie of both 1976’s The Bad News Bears and 1977’s The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

Indeed, Ogilvie possesses the three virtues most cherished by this publication: he’s bespectacled, is facile with baseball numbers, and, as the above image indicates, enjoys the company of women in high-waisted fashions.

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Last night, Ryan Braun hit three home runs at Petco Park, the second (and probably most impressive) of which reached the top floor of the Western Metal Supply Co. building in left field (video).

The sequence led Bob Uecker, the famous and wise radio voice of the Milwaukee Brewers, to provide — for the benefit of both the home audience and broadcast partner Joe Block — a totally true and in-no-way-fictional history of the Western Metal Supply Co. itself.

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This is slow-motion footage (courtesy Fox Sports Prime Ticket) from this past Sunday of Kenley Jansen’s ninth inning cut fastball to Xavier Nady, a pitch on which he (i.e. Jansen) struck him (i.e. Nady) out.

Regarding the feeling that said footage inspires in your bosom, to what degree does it (i.e. that feeling) possess the following four characteristics of a mystical state, as defined by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (text from Wikipedia)?

• Transient — the experience is temporary; the individual soon returns to a “normal” frame of mind. It is outside our normal perception of space and time.

• Ineffable — the experience cannot be adequately put into words.

• Noetic — the individual feels that he or she has learned something valuable from the experience. Gives us knowledge that is normally hidden from human understanding.

• Passive — the experience happens to the individual, largely without conscious control. Although there are activities, such as meditation, that can make religious experience more likely, it is not something that can be turned on and off at will.

Step One: Regard the following, embiggenable image of Mets first baseman and noted Member of the Tribe Ike Davis dressed a cowboy.

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Sometimes readers will ask me — on the present site, on Twitter, on the lawless streets of America — they’ll ask me, “Hey Carson, will you keep me abreast of products that might be of some use to me, as a consumer of base-and-ball?”

To which query I’ll respond: “You want me to keep you a breast of products like that?”

To which they’re like: “Yeah, abreast.”

At which point, I’m like: “A breast?”

And then they’re like: “Yes. Abreast. It’s a real English word, and has nothing to do with the female anatomy, like you’re clearly pretending it does.”

In any case, my answer to the original question is: “Yes, but probably only, like, a month after such a product has been released, because what am I, a machine?”

A thing that fits all of the above criteria was brought to the author’s attention over the weekend in the form of this tweet:

You know how the Red Zone channel only shows you all the important stuff? Check out MLB version here with mlb.com/fullcount

— MLB (@MLB) April 28, 2012

In fact, some cursory research reveals that the operator of the MLB Twitter account is not lying. MLB Full Count (link) is a video service (in collaboration, it seems, with Yahoo) that provides “look-ins” to games in progress — and, it would also seem, highlights of completed games. Also, it’s free.

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A Catskills resort where comedy team Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo probably killed.

What a lot of people — including probably even their own families — don’t know about Boston Red Sox television broadcasters Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy is that they are not actually trained broadcasters but rather a famous Borscht Belt comedy team from the 1930s.

While the pair has ably concealed their true and respective identities for years, they accidentally slipped into an old bit last night (called “Mittens and Gloves”) that used to get huge laughs at the Concord Hotel, I’m telling you.

Said bit is transcribed below (and available in Technicolor video).

DON: [Holding up gloved hands] How ’bout the mittens?

JERRY: Nice. [Beat] They’re gloves.

DON: They’re mittens!

JERRY: They’re gloves!

DON: They’re mittens!

JERRY: Mittens? Mittens don’t have fingers. [Pauses, looks incredulous] Mittens do not have fingers.

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