Let us throw up at a ballgame, you and I.

Collars high, gents!
Wangs paraded, cavaliers!
Our testicles are covered with moss and lichen.
This is because they are boulders.

So let us throw up at a ballgame, you and I.

We enslave what we do not kill.
We cuddle with hookers in secret.
We do not visit places so much as we colonize them.
Pregnancies! Muzzle-loading weaponry! Crests on jacket breasts!

Yes, let us throw up at a ballgame, you and I.

Cannonade sex perpetrated with a buccaneering urgency!
Begin each day with a fresh haircut!
Solaced by the species difference between us and the middlebrow remainder!
Phalli forever as crisp as apples!

Lo, doughty brothers, let us throw up at this and every ballgame.

The poet Phillis Wheatley believed that suffering in general and forced servitude in particular were large, good things, so long as they led to salvific awakening. Hall of Famer Mr. Bert Blyleven would seem to disagree.

Indeed, Hall of Famer Mr. Bert Blyleven has assayed this stinking life and determined that if suffering is the price of a divinely crafted world steered by something utmost and bearded, then he’ll just have the buffet, thanks …

Something Hall of Famer Mr. Bert Blyleven did not say but provably thought during a recent broadcast:

“If there is a God, then he lacks the power to stop what is happening to the Twins. Thus he is not omnipotent. Or perhaps he isn’t aware of what is happening to the Twins. Thus he is not omniscient. Or perhaps he chooses not to halt what is happening to the Twins — i.e, he is the absent clock-winder held up by the Founders before they became Evangelicals in the 1980s. Thus we are but handmaidens to his most baleful whims. If this — this — is my embarras de choix, then make mine darkness.”

So we shall, Hall of Famer Mr. Bert Blyleven, so we shall …

Here are three depressing baseball caps.

The first one is of Kirk Cameron’s birthday party, which features Subway sandwiches — one already half-eaten by someone who, later that day, would receive a sobering diagnosis — and a shit cake. Looking on in mounting desolation are two female sales professionals and the lives and paneled office in which they are encased.

And this is a cap featuring the motorcar that euthanized Camus.

And here the hell is Larry the Cable Guy speaking at some presumable length, like Cicero before his tongue was tugged out and served as an antipasto, about the U.S. economy.

There exists a world in which entire television networks are devoted to the movement of currencies. There also exists a world in which at least one of these networks has invited Larry the Cable Guy to instruct the wrathful-upon-sofas as to what is wrong with what is wrong, insofar as quantitative easing and Keynesian multipliers are concerned.

Both worlds are ours. Hump us in the faces one and all, both worlds are ours.

A tweet from Brett Lawrie:

So he’s working out with some degree of zeal. He’s doing deep knee bends, leg lifts and trunk twists and then finishing up with a slimming routine, especially after last night’s London Broil, green-bean casserole and gelatin salad. I get it. Right?

Although, a part of me — the part of me that thinks he hears something in the basement even when he’s not at home — believes I’m missing something. From this pathetic remove of years and brown defeats, I wonder whether he’s invoking a rock and or roll Sousa march or perhaps a popular talkie or a dance that forces The Bandstand to aim their cameras above the girdle.

Maybe he really likes to work out, or maybe he’s conjuring up a secret something known only to Young American Thunderclaps and, hence, not to wasted me. I was really hoping he was talking about exercising — good-boy’s push-ups followed by a half-hour on the vibrating belt machine followed by a restorative crap. But I’m sure he’s not.

Brett Lawrie probably talks quite a bit about things I don’t even know exist, being as I am much, much closer to death than Brett Lawrie is.

The spats-wearing reader will recall the writer’s affections for a certain base-and-ball-ist and member of the landed gentry by the name of Malcolm Clapsaddle. His name, you will agree, is wondrous, a cornucopia within which are numberless sets of Russian nesting dolls, and within each of those: multitudes.

And so, still, yet, alas, thus, and alack this is Malcolm Clapsaddle surrounded by the things that one would suspect: Malcolm McDowell, a devastating gonorrhea culture and a saddle. It is thus because thus it is:

This has been Malcolm Clapsaddle surrounded by Malcolm McDowell, the clap and a saddle.

Brian McCann is the hard-hitting catcher for the Atlanta Braves. Arn Anderson once teamed with Tully Blanchard to haunt the squared circle and our dreams. Both are Gentlemen of Verona. They are also quite possibly the same man …

In the upper left of the abovely embedded image, you see Arn Anderson dressed up like Brian McCann. Mr. Anderson has gone so far as to dress himself in baseball woolies and surround himself with central-casting teammates. He points menacingly at the opposition, which is what wrestlers are wont to do. Why is he going to such lengths and depths? Because he might as well be Brian McCann.

In the bottom right of the abovely embedded image, you see Brian McCann adopting the buffalo stance known as “Looking Like Arn Anderson.” Observe his hairy, sweaty skin the color of hamster bedding. Admire his championship belt, which signifies, by turns, the rewards of valor and or deeds of a dirty nature already done. Why is Brian McCann going to such lengths to look like Arn Anderson? Because he might as well be Arn Anderson.

This has been the zipper- and latex-clad, becocked work of the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team.

Aaron Cook of the Red Sox was spiked during a play at the plate on Saturday. One consequence is that Cook is now on the disabled list. Another consequence is that Boston’s pitching woes continue apace. A third, greater consequence is that a laceration that looks like it’s delivering a prepared speech is cool …

Thank you, Aaron Cook, for momentarily entertaining us. Now away with you.

Maker of love, babies and fine cabinetry Robert J. Baumann passes along what follows, which is, as the title of this breathless dispatch suggests, Bartolo Colón surrounded by a colon …

Sure, we could have spared you the distressing visuals and instead surrounded Mr. Colón by the punctuational colon (pictured here: :, with this text added in advance of the closing parenthesis so as not to inflict an emoticon upon the unsuspecting reader), but we at NotGraphs have never been one to shy away from the visceral and corporeal. So what you see is Bartolo Colón surrounded by a human colon, the disemboweled colon of David Appelman, it turns out.

Did Bartolo Colón somehow vanquish David Appelman? Of course not. David Appelman, in the service of human amusements, ripped out his own colon, placed it around Bartolo Colón’s neck in a perfect and ceremonial double-windsor knot, polished off a vast belt of scotch and a plate of gorilla legs, and then punched his way out of the county jail.

I am less runner gaining purchase on inches,
Scant toe-breadths of this game’s soil, the color of punished citrus,
Than I am boat, loosed from moorings and set adrift,
Pushed away from the dock by a careless hand.
A hand that grasps nothing, least of all you.

On my dumbed feet of mud and oatmeal,
I am left to your vacant mercies.

Your leg doesn’t lift from its considered hinge and hang in half-freeze.
Rather, it slides askance and your arm lurches and rises
Like a grouse flushed from brush.
It is quick despite its heavy power to decide heavy things.
And here I am, lost in tangled heaven.

So stop being a dick and pitch the ball.

The undistinguished among us might call what follows “some GIF of a Pablo Sandoval Chia Pet.” The distinguished among us, the boudoir-invaders among us, will instead call it “The Intoxications of Science.” Click. Click twice, it would seem:

During Red Bull breaks, the Framers of the Constitution invented science, and they did so in hopes that one day the Sons of Thunder (i.e., you and I) would be momentarily entertained. And don’t you know that you are?

You have seen this. Now go to Buffalo Wild Wings and father many babies. Name them all “Maximus.”