Rays catcher Jose Molina is of course famously renown for his ability to frame pitches for strikes. Less heralded is his ability to frame founding documents — documents smithed in gory glory by that cocksure parliamentarian, Uncle History.

Bear witness, for God and country …

Bedrock Protestant Evangelical Christian principles for a called strike three!

Grab some pine, quislings.

(HT: Idea via Les Carter, attorney to the stars)

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a good man. I am scarcely a man at all. The only time I demonstrate the steadfastness typically associated with archetypal man is when my full complement of vices is challenged by those circumstantially invested in my survival and or continued employment. That is to say, if you’re looking for a man, then cast thine eyes elsewhere. No, not upon Cistulli and his wrists of cooked pasta.

With all that said, foulest poo — thanks to its grim baseline — can easily be improved upon, and in keeping with this general principle it is worth noting that a ringtone has demonstrably made me a better man. You see, I was weary of the old default-settings ringtone of my Battery-Powered Mobile Business Handheld Cellular Telephone, much as I am weary of my dumb face and essence. The ringtone, though, I could do something about.

Thanks to an app called Ringdroid, which is possibly favored by pregnant teens and their baggy pants and rap-hop music and krokodil habits, I was able to make a ringtone out of any old audio file. As for the interface, even a moaning dolt with hot dog fingers can use it.

For the sound in question that is now my Business Ringtone I chose this, which is a series of professional utterances first celebrated on the august pages of Eye On Baseball …

You may not call me, but if you ever did, then this is what I would hear. And I am the better for it. Barely.

It is not the reader’s concern what specific question I was moved to ask Mademoiselle Google — a question regarding perhaps the human condition and or the author’s current straits. What is of interest is that Mademoiselle Google anticipated the query to come. She was incorrect in her anticipations, but they cast light upon what shall henceforth be known as “The Four Hot Mysteries”:

The call is coming from inside the house? To that I would say, “The Cubs are inside the Internet.”

Also, to answer The Four Hot Mysteries above:

1- In either case, to what end?
2- There is no place that does not see you.
3- Sometimes.
4- Four.

This sort of thing is precisely the reason I typically use HotBot.

I recently Photoshopped the head of Toronto mayor Rob Ford — who’s better known in proper circles as “Melvin Nosotros Good Times” — onto the body of famed baseball halfling Eddie Gaedel. I surveyed my work and thought it stupid.

But then David G. Temple, the handsome Muay Thai expert with wind-swept hair and a far-off look in his eye, posted some Photoshoppage of a pizza on top of Tropicana Field. Upon viewing Mr. Temple’s contributions, I thought, “My dumb work has been sanctioned.”

Here, then, is Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s head sloppily placed on Eddie Gaedel’s body:

At this point, the reader will note that, unlike Mr. Temple and his post, I can scarcely be bothered to construct a false meta-narrative around my lousy photo. For I am Dayn Perry, practitioner of lassitude.

In the interest of redemption, though, I leave you with one of the sky-scraping tweets of our century — one that carries with it the whiff of our baseball …

#Hero #NeverForget

Because the waking life holds nothing for me, I took an afternoon nap recently. Within the gauzy bounds of that nap, I learned that Pedro Martinez, baseball merchant of the sublime, had recorded and released a country music album. I purchased and downloaded it but — in keeping with the general state of shit — I woke up before I could listen to it.

I was so struck by this dream that I hinted at it to the world …

Pedro Martinez Country Music Album.

— Dayn Perry (@daynperry) November 2, 2013

This was at once a statement of fact, the first entry on a list of demands and — like all forms of communication — a distress signal. As badly as I wanted Pedro Martinez Country Music Album to exist, I might as well wish for an electric sandwich.

Things as they are, I am left with nothing but remnants in the foul-smelling penumbrae of my imagination …

In Donald Barthelme’s “How I Write My Songs,” whomp-whomp is a refrain, and so the title of one track on Pedro Martinez Country Music Album will be “Whomp-Whomp,” which could be a thinly veiled song about coitus — suggestive yet necessary, like a bra. “Got Damn, Woman” will be another track, honky-tonkish in execution. “Funeral for a Mockingbird” is yet another, acoustic until Pedro himself drifts in with the pedal steel in the second verse. “Angina in Carolina” is his hymn to long-haul truckers. During production, Pedro used accomplished Nashville session players, I feel sure.

I know little else about Pedro Martinez Country Music Album. It visited me in a dream, is all.

I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of Mickey Kefauver’s forthcoming biography of Hack Wilson, The Aching Beauty of an American Sot. Kefauver’s work contains multitudes, and among those multitudes is a walking tour of Wilson’s gut. By “gut” I do not mean any sort of belt-straining protuberance, but rather the life and ultimately self-immolating work of Wilson’s innermost innards.

Let me share a couple of passages. First, this medical revelation upon Wilson’s being hospitalized in 1933, for drunkenness in general and suspected Catholicity in particular:

It turned out that those medical professionals were wrong: the man had “auto-brewery syndrome.” His stomach contained so much yeast that he was making his own in-house brew, literally.

Hack Wilson was a drunk, but he was a drunk not of his own volition, you see. A bounty of yeast had turned his belly parts into a craft brewery, and so the gut-beer flowed without ceasing, like the prayers of the already damned.

Second comes this, when Kefauver, in the service of a more soaring narrative, shifts momentarily to the second person and in doing so snatches the reader up by his tailored lapels:

But he was dying when he called you, from a progressive fibrosis of the lungs brought on not by smoking — he never smoked — but, 
apparently, by years inhaling the alcohol fumes that surged up from his gut.

It was indeed the gut-beer that killed Wilson, but not by daily sieges upon the liver or even the boozy crash of a motor-car. You see, Hack Wilson died because he was overtaken by stomach fumes without ceasing, like the damnations of a prayerful man.

“Hello?”

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If you’re weary of the usual fare when it comes to broadcaster’s home run calls (i.e., “Back, back, back, gone!” or “Golly toots, a long potato!”), then please do consider encouraging your local mic-wielder to take some of the following suggestions for a test drive.

For instance, when a fair-hit ball clears fencing, the announcer might exclaim …

– “This all-you-can-eat seafood buffet just got pregnant!”

– “Are you ready for some football?!”

– “Go find a new a new grandpa, kid, because the one you know and love just got slaughtered!”

– “RBI, Brandon Phillips!”

– “Torquemada’s biscuits!”

– “King Kong’s ding dong!”

– “Donald Sutherland’s panties!”

– “Last night, I drank alone in the dark, just as my father did!”

– “The vicar died clutching not his rosary, but rather his secrets!”

Or …

– “Hand over your badge and service revolver, O’Boyle. You’re on unpaid leave as of this moment!”

Thank you for your measured consideration.

Offered up with little introduction — and even less discretion — I present to you following decidedly juvenile Baseball-Reference player name searches …

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To a Photograph of Dave Parker

1.

In love poems we talk about eye color.
Your eyes are the color of the virginity that Brooke Shields just lost
And the luxury Oldsmobile she’ll give birth to nine months hence.

In benedictions we ask the firmament for mercy and riches.
You are large and bearded like the godhead in sanctuary etchings.
Through oral tradition, you taught us how to anger presidents with a lean.

Yours is the Sunday hat of fat-armed Baptist aunts.
But on you its wide brim and flop languish for disapproval.
Its tincture, cocaine in a sunbeam.

The words on your shirt are not explanation. They are augury.
Noise is going to happen because this more-than-man is mining for runs.
Prick up your ears only if you want to be deafened.

2.

In sea chanteys we sing to forget what our roasted muscles know by rote.
But do take heart and know that the shore hovers ahead.
Or perhaps that is a discotheque. Or the nearest precinct.
This is why you hum chamber music at the plate.

Gotthold Lessing wrote that wine and love are the only two things
That keep a man from being a stone. In you, though, there is
An artery that has grown through your finger and into your cigarette,
Which it now garrisons with plush blood.
That is the elusive third thing
That keeps you from being just a man.

3.

Your tongue prowls out of what we thought was your mouth
But turned out to be the stoop of a brownstone in Red Hook —
Back when it was dangerous, obviously.

4.

In elegies we lament.
So I lament that the buildings of the boulevards
That housed the best nights ever had or never had
Are long shuttered,
Like coins over the eyes of a dead Roman.