Papelbon continued by referring to Charlie Manuel as his “personal Norman Schwarzkopf,” Bud Selig as “a Ban Ki-moon-like figure,” and his NL East foes as “[redacted] frigging [redacted].”

Hans Urs von Balthasar: Not just a leading 20th century theologian anymore.

Each year, a number of new terms enter baseball’s colorful lexicon. Below are the twenty new words and phrases for curveball. To gain entry, each term has to have been used or overheard in a “legitimate” baseball situation — that is, either on a diamond, in a press box, or in one of Craig Counsell’s numerous and vivid erotic dreams.

Here are this year’s entries, arranged in alphabetical order:

Breathtaking Short Film
C Cup
Crotch Winder
Freudian Slip
Furious, Spinning Lap Dance
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The three people you meet in heaven are not Spike Lee, Shaquille O’Neal, and Dustin Pedroia, it turns out, as that triumvirate is currently occupied watching the Jets-Pats game in the Meadowlands tonight. Naturally.

H/T: Every person on my Twitter feed.

Or at least to the first 40 seconds of this video. And maybe it’s Joe Esposito. I think you know what I’m trying to say.

At the very center of Stoic philosophy lies the notion that the happiness of the individual is incumbent not upon the circumstances surrounding that individual, but rather on the individual’s capacity for bringing his will in line with nature — of concerning himself, that is, only with that which is within his control.

While this concept is largely foreign to moderns, there are still those who find within the precepts of Stoicism a key to the secret of a happiness most elusive.

Among that minority is San Francisco’s talented right-handed reliever Sergio Romo. Romo, well-versed in the work of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius both, has reached a point now, by virtue of his spiritual fitness, where he is capable of retaining an inner tranquility under even the most fraught circumstances.

At the DMV, for example:

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Mathematics shows us that three apes, hitting keys at random on typewriters for an infinite amount of time, will almost surely produce Hamlet. Reality, however, shows us that a Nokia 8210 left alone in the pea-coat pocket of well-respected baseballing journalist Peter Gammons will produce the above tweet.

Impress your friends and confound your enemies and frighten a couple neighbor children and force the police to take you downtown for questioning and get released after a few hours with this GIF of a half-coy, entirely irksome Melky Cabrera, courtesy of Bay City Ball’s Chris Quick.

The attentive reader will know that we at NotGraphs are acutely aware of the crippling nature of waking life, and will know, moroever, that the majority of us here engage in what Rabelais’ most faithful translators render in English as “tippling” — a practice that serves as a sort of spiritual analgesic in the face of life’s attendant cares and sorrows.

If a certain MLB press release — concerning the broadcast, on the MLB Network, of a documentary about the 1986 postseason — is to be believed, it would appear as though NotGraphs has found in former Red Sox pitcher Oil Can Boyd a “brother from another mother,” as it were.

Consider these choice comments from the aforementioned communiqué de presse:

[Former Boston manager John] McNamara on Boyd not being available to pitch in Game Seven of the World Series because he was drunk:
Well you said it, … that’s the exact reason.

Former Red Sox pitching coach Bill Fischer on Boyd not being available to pitch in Game Seven:
I came to the park and Al Nipper came up to me and said, “You should check on your long man. He was boxed up, under the weather from drinking, so we locked him in a room.

For anyone, like myself, who enjoys jumping to conclusions, then perhaps you’ll agree that the most entertaining one (i.e. conclusion) is of great surprise — surprise not that Oil Can Boyd was, on this singular occasion, too drunk to you-know-what, but that a man whose nickname apparently celebrates his affection for fermented beverages would have ever pitched sober ever.

In conclusion, therefore, vis-à-vis, a thing you can click and, in so doing, embiggen:

Sabermetric Good Guy Steve Slowinski, of both FanGraphs and D-Rays Bay, asks in the latter of those two electronic publications, “What would a Matt Joyce Extension look like?”

Presuming that, by “extension,” he meant for a Springfield XDM 9mm Black 19+1 (available at Bud’s Guns Shop for $549) this is the answer:

Noted Italian-American gridiron football coach Vince Lombardi once famously announced “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Less noted — and, it turns out, less Italian-American — baseball writer Carson Cistulli once (less famously) said, “Scotch isn’t the only thing I drink; it’s the only thing I drink after noon.”

To this important conversation, third Italian-American Lawrence “Yogi” Berra has recently added a rich and compelling dimension, stating (according to Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal) “I’ll have a vodka with extra ice, and the scallops.”

Among the other scraps of wisdom extracted by Gay during his recent trip to Moneyball and dinner with the Yankee legend and his wife Carmen, we learn that:

• Berra’s greatest criticism of the film concerns actor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of Art Howe — and, in particular, Hoffman’s girth. “Art’s a good guy,” says Berra. “And I never saw him that fat. He’s thin.”

• Father of Sabermetrics Bill James has “no doubt” that Berra is the greatest catcher who ever lived — even if the career WAR leaderboard suggests differently.

• Yogi Berra is still alive.