We have long known that R.A. Dickey and The Marshall Tucker Band occupy an almost identical space in the public imagination, yet few — if any — attempts have been made to make their similarities clear.

Let NotGraphs handles this bidness.

1. They are both going to climb the highest mountain. (Or, at least, highest-ish.)

2. In both cases, women appear to be the impetus for the climbing of said mountain.

3. They both have their names emblazoned in gold thread on the ass pocket of their respective dungaree pants.

Fin.

Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas.

Here are three dreams I’ve had about baseball:

1. I’m at a familiar cafe in Madison, WI. One moment, the barista is there, behind the counter like normal; the next, he’s gone, replaced by Dick Allen. No one seems to notice, except for… no, it couldn’t be… yes, it is… Haley Joel Osment.

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Arthur Rhodes has pitched for 20 seasons and nine different major-league teams. In addition to his mastery of left-handed batters, Rhodes has also mastered his passions via the practice of Zen Buddhism.

Central to the practice of Zen is koan study. Wikipedia informs us that a koan

consists of a story, dialogue, question, or statement, the meaning of which cannot be understood by rational thinking but may be accessible through intuition or lateral thinking. One widely known koan is “Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?”

Recently, NotGraphs has found a collection of koans that encapsulate Rhodes’ compiled wisdom, generally involving dialogues he’s had with younger teammates. NotGraphs will share these periodically for the spiritual benefit of the readership.

Rhodes on the meaning of baseball:

Mitch Moreland asked Arthur Rhodes, “What is Baseball?” Rhodes said, “Three pounds of flax.”

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Most of the things I did today are shameful, and concern for the reader’s modesty forbids me from recounting them (i.e. those things I did) in these pages. Among the less shameful activities in which I engaged, however, was to visit the very excellent Grey Matter Books in Hadley, MA, and buy the book you see pictured here, lying on a friend’s rug.

A Baseball Winter: The Off-Season Life of the Summer Game is an account of the 1984-85 offseason of five clubs: the New York Mets, the California Angels, the Atlanta Braves, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Cleveland Indians. As editor-authors Terry Pluto and Jeffrey Neuman note in the Acknowledgments, “its focus [is] on the backstage aspects of the game: contract negotiations, trade talks, in short, the games as it is played off the field.”

Having read the first 10 or so pages, I can speak to one of the book’s virtues — namely, that it’s written in diary form, with three- or four-page entries for each (or most) of the days of the offseason. The style lends itself to a sort of urgency, a sense of witnessing the events as they unfold, that’s very pleasant.

Albert Pujols was here.

Among the playlists by which MLB.com classifies the videos at their internetting site is one called Must C. It’s in this category that one finds particularly noteworthy (i.e. “must see“) moments captured on film.

As part of the “Must C” conceit, each video is assigned a word that begins with that letter (i.e. C). One can find, for example, among the most recent selections “Must C Championship: Cardinals clinch 11th title” and “Must C Craig: Craig blasts a homer, makes great grab” and “Must C Clutch: Freese ties it with a two-run double”.

As we enter the 2012 season, there will undoubtedly be occasions on which the MLB.com editorial team will be tasked with producing c-words under great pressure. We at NotGraphs humbly submit the following three words, which also happen to be the three c-words most recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

C-Word: Chemtrail
Example: Must C Chemtrail: Pujols launches homer, sprays chemical agent at high altitude as part of secret government program.

C-Word: Chermoula
Example: Must C Chermoula: Pujols shares his favorite Mediterranean dishes.

C-Word: Challan
Example: Must C Challan: Pujols issues an official form or document, such as a receipt, invoice, or summons.

This is what the Spice Girls meant by 2 becoming 1.

Image courtesy Wikipedia user UCinternational.

It’s well known — both to our readers and the IRS — that the majority of this site’s fluid assets are directed towards the funding of our Highly Reputable and Totally Real Think Tank, a collection of our era’s most capable scholars, intellectuals, and amateur pornographers.

While neither prolific nor sober — and while typically found attempting to play Hide the Salam with the innkeeper’s daughter — the Tank does occasionally produce something of note.

In this case, that something is what follows — namely, a list of actual injury designations from baseball’s past. Absent from the game’s earliest injury reports are any attempts at true anatomical precision. One finds no reference either to ACLs or rotator cuffs, but instead a more colorful, if way less helpful, medical lexicon.

A. Swamp Knee
B. Sticky Cleat
C. Mexican Hangover
D. Jagged Britches
E. Palsied Bat
F. Accidental Polygamy
G. Questionable Paternity
H. Emergency Divorce
I. Sprained Liver
J. Wrenched Liver
K. Entirely Ruined Liver
L. Spotted Dick
M. Whiskey Butt
N. Manifest Destiny
O. Secular Imagination
P. Black Face
Q. Death Breath
R. Dungaree Fever
S. Mal du Suisse
T. Mal du Spavinaw, Oklahoma

Apophatic [ap-a-FAT-ik] Theology is that method by which one endeavors to describe God by describing what God is not — the suggestion being that fewer persons and places and things belong to the latter category than the former.

Apophasis [uh-PAW-fa-sis] is also the process by which one might most efficiently compile a list of major-league ballplayers, past and present, who could — via their fists or feet or, perhaps, just a particularly menacing stare — injure NotGraphs’ oldest contributor (by far), Dayn Perry.

Which is to say that, to construct such a list, it’s much easier to identify those players who do not have the capacity to fell Perry. Thanks to the search functions at Baseball-Reference, it’s easy to compile a list of such players.

Image courtesy Jason Thorpe.

Because my wife’s parents’ home is equipped only with the dial-up variety of modem, I do much of my internetting (while visiting and enjoying greatly the company of my in-laws) at the local library.

This is a photo of all the library books at same.

If my colleague Dayn Perry has taught us anything — besides that drinking in the AM isn’t a crime or anything so shut up everyone I’m not an alcoholic — it’s that everything we love will die.

Confirming that notion is this image, courtesy Google Earth and entirely embiggenable should it have been clicked, of Detroit’s Tiger Stadium as it looks today.