I’ll not bore you with the sequence of banalities that led me to do a Google Image search for “Don Russ,” but please know that I have done precisely this. In its origins it is, of course, an homage of sorts to the Donruss family of cardboard sports products. Google and its lidless eye sensed this straightaway:

No, I did not. I want Don. And then I want Russ. Herein fail not!

Thank you.

What follows are the two most compelling images that turned up, with the stipulation that the eligible photos must contain a guy named Don and a guy named Russ. First, we have this:

The caption tells me that the three men pictured above are, from left to right, Don, Russ and Higgy. It is 1957. Higgy appears to be a young Danny Thomas. Higgy. 1957.

Next:

Above you see Mark, Don and Russ. Russ is in favor of peace, while Don just wants a cold one and some barbecue chips. Ol’ Don. I like that guy.

This is the offseason, and I have been searching on the Internet for Don and Russ.

Young Kevin Youkilis is the only varsity athlete to be bullied by an asthmatic National Merit Semi-Finalist.

Young Kevin Youkilis uses flash cards to remind him of his deepest regrets and of the specific ways in which he will one day show them all.

Young Kevin Youkilis will not be voted “Most Handsome” or “Most Likely to Succeed”; Young Kevin Youkilis, in an informal and unsanctioned straw poll, will be voted “Most Likely to Try Too Hard. So Hard It’s Almost Adorable.”

Young Kevin Youkilis, if he’s honest with himself, is probably too old to identify so strongly with the full complement of male Peanuts characters. But sometimes he does so much it hurts. “Linus, man, I know,” he says at night while reading his tattered copies.

When Young Kevin Youkilis needs to half-smile for photos, he thinks of that time he saw Meghan Connelly’s bra. And baseball.

Young Kevin Youkilis’s hair has been called “frustration’s pelt.”

Although Young Kevin Youkilis’s hair is the only thing holding the sweat in, he still wishes his stupid hair would just go away.

It shall.

On Young Kevin Youkilis’s Trapper Keeper, which is festooned with images of geometric shapes and planetoids in determined orbit, he has written, “My heart and will are too big and mighty for Cincinnati.”

They are.

(Thank you[k]: Ducks on the Pond and my man Navin)

Thanks to the presumably fine folks at Rising Apple, I have learned of the existence of pop artist David Kushner. I surveyed his Etsy page in the manner of a man about to spend money on things his wife will neither understand nor outwardly countenance, which, it turns out, is precisely what I am. Why am I so tempted to part with U.S. currency that would be better deployed in the service of things known widely as “basic essentials”? Eyeballs awake:

And …

I loathe the Mets of the 1980s, but, as with Goya’s macabre explorations of the Inquisition, sometimes sanctioned repugnance of awful scale yields pretty pictures. So it is with all of this.

And now I shall sell whatever copper plumbing I can find in order to commission a portrait of Ted Simmons necking with Lola Falana.

Baseball, while lonesome, is nothing like life.
Otherwise no one would play.

It doesn’t diminish you, rend you in quite the same way.
But it can diminish you.
It teaches you things about baseball, not about our vain grasps at some animal spark.
It is within a rubric of one.

The metaphors, like metaphors, do not hold.
It need not take you away from something.
It need only be something.
Which it is.
It need only take you toward something.
Which it will.

So here’s your first glove.
Smell it. That won’t change much. Pound it.
Put it in the oven if it’s too stiff.
I mean that.
Rip the ties tight with your teeth.
I remember that the best players would do that.

Keep a ball in it at night.
This is important for purposes of seasoning.
And liturgy.
One day it will feel like a dead hand.

I hope you’re better at this than I was.

Via The Big Event comes unsurprising word that the Oakland A’s 2012 calendar is chock full of infelicities and grim reminders. The belowly embedded image, much like my revenge-fists, shall do the talking:

Mr. Peter Hartlaub goes on to tell us that within the A’s 2012 calendar we find four months devoted to players traded, one to a player injured, one to a manager fired, and one to the dark heart and ways of Cliff Pennington.

Depressing stuff for any A’s loyalist, no? So in order to cheer them up, here’s Davey Lopes with enough devil-may-care jubilance to go around:

Blogger Murray Chass, America’s Least Favorite Grandpa^TM, is famously promiscuous with his base-and-ball opinions, and his latest gumbo of a dispatch is no disappointment. His masterstroke comes when he recounts why he’s decided not to put the maximum 10 names on any Hall-of-Fame ballot regardless of the candidates’ merits:

Having 10 players enter the Hall at the same time would detract from the honor for each player. In addition, the induction ceremony would take forever and require a break for dinner.

Once more, for championship emphasis:

… and require a break for dinner.

And so …

The nominating ’tis done. The Presidium for Patriotic Arrangements has vetted and culled the list of nominees down to the 10 deemed most loyal to the Party. From these names you shall choose, and you shall do so with a reverence befitting your assigned caste. Vote carefully, citizens, for the nickname “Dionysus with Rabies” is at stake …

Now back to work with you.

My favorite base ball-ists from my period of actual, sentient fanhood are as follows: Ozzie Smith, Albert Pujols, John Tudor, and Ray Lankford.

In light of these facts, the following bears mentioning:

I am delighted by this turn of events. Mr. Lankford was galactically underrated during his time on the diamond and the subject of misguided scorn by those inclined to misguidedly scorn. Today, though, Mr. Lankford and I are united through media sociale. And it is wonderful.

I suspect, though, that Mr. Lankford followed me out of righteous pity. After all, I’ve been following him for months, and I recently re-Tweeted one of his vanishingly rare Tweets. He might have followed the trail and discovered that my Twitter background is a mosaic of his Topps rookie card. “The poor dear,” he may have said to himself before hitting the Follow button in the manner that one gives an extra pence to the newsboy. It is my hope that he will one day muss my hair and tell me to run along.

What we do is assign cool nicknames to players rather than perpetuate the tired, lamewad practice of assigning cool players nicknames. Last time out, Zack Greinke narrowly edged out Sam Fuld for the honor of being called “Science or Bravery?“. So Mr. Greinke has been added to our Hall of Honouur, which is so stately, so regal, so much itself a celebration of the Norman Conquest, that an extra British-English unstressed “u” is required for proper spelling …

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There exists a modern analog to the Oracle at Delphi, and that analog is Yahoo! Answers, where wisdom is dispensed like rubbers from a truck-stop vending machine. So what were baseball fans wondering about four years ago? This, natch:

And what sayeth the Oracle? Many things, actually, all of them varying shades of inane. It turns out that the modern analog to the Oracle at Delphi is stupid and unhelpful. What else will disappoint on this hollow, purposeless day?

This is Vic Tayback’s grave: