I, a Cardinals loyalist, am still formulating my basest emotions insofar as Pujols-to-the-Angels is concerned. Briefly, though, I’m not angry; I’m disappointed in the world, which, I suspect, are my factory settings. I’m frustrated by sports populism which turn high-level business decisions into personal affronts. Again, though, I’m mostly disappointed in the world, which is stupid and dumb and stupid and fart.

Or, alternatively:

(Image and related sadness courtesy of Monkey with a Halo)

This comes to us via Blue Jay Hunter’s perfectly lovely Twitter feed. Please enjoy:

This is from “Bring Your Kid to Work Day,” and I tell no tales when I say this contains multitudes. The younger Master Rauch looks excited, as he should be. “Bring Your Kid to Work Day” is always rousing for the tyke in question, and I imagine this is doubly so when your pops is a ballplayer or a dinosaur. The elder Rauch, however, wears quite a different countenance. While his boy can fittingly be described as “a happy young man,” Mr. Rauch, save for his sated girth, resembles one of the indigent defeated from a Walker Evans photograph.

This affirms what parents have long known: children are drought and famine.

The convention floor now displays before unshielded eyes the full complement of Bacchanalian excesses. Delegates have died from too many drinks, opiates and hastily administered “Happy Clancy’s” in the men’s room. Such is the political process.

The bloodshed, though, has yielded 10 names, all listed below and all approved by the codpieced Utmost Culminating Exchequer. So which ballplayer shall forevermore be known as “Hot Lettuce”? Please vote in the manner most likely to spare your life …

Thank you for exercising the franchise.

If you’ve been following baseball today, you’ve been following the buccaneering romps of the Miami Marlins. In recent days, of course, they’ve inked Jose Reyes and Heath Bell, and today they reportedly made a whopping offer to Albert Pujols. As you can imagine, everyone who’s anyone is talking about the bundled derivative that is the Miami Marlins. One Hanley Ramirez, however, seems not to appreciate that he is no longer What We Talk About When We Talk About the Marlins. In fact, he’ll have none of it:

So if you see Hanley Ramirez within the next news cycle or three, please be a dear and let him know you were just talking about him.

Our ongoing quest, in the manner of a noble knight-errant, is to assign cool nicknames to players rather than indulge in the tired, lamewad paradigm of assigning cool players nicknames. Before we launch the latest installment, however, a trip through 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. …

“Bad Miracle” – Wily Mo Peña
“Captain Black Tobacco” – John Danks
“$45 Couch” – Yuniesky Betancourt
“Liván Hernández” – Liván Hernández
“Frog in the Pot” – Carlos Zambrano
“Aqua Velva Man” – Chase Utley
“Victorian Sex Rebel” – John Axford
“Good, Round Friend” – Prince Fielder
“I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass” – Kyle Farnsworth
“Interrobang” – Adrián Beltré
“Turbaconducken” – Ty Wigginton

And the nickname now available for purchase? It’s “Hot Lettuce”!

Denotations, Connotations, Implications, Intimations, and Incriminations:

It is a landmark day in the young annals of Nickname Seeks Player: a reader contribution. Faithful page viewer Bryz, who surely has better things to do, passes along this championship explanation:

I am in the middle of student teaching right now, and I had to bring the leftover remains of a chicken Caesar salad to school for lunch. Not desiring some cold chicken, I chose to nuke my salad via microwave prior to eating it. I took the first bite of chicken… not bad! Then I moved to a Caesar dressing-covered piece of lettuce. One chew, two chews, pause, spit it back into the bowl. It was terrible. Apparently lettuce above room temperature is like drinking cold (not iced) coffee; it’s just not right.

I was telling this story to a fellow student teacher and friend of mine at the end of the day, and I explained how the salad sucked overall because of the hot lettuce. That was when I thought instantly of the “Nickname Seeks Player” posts at NotGraphs, and I felt that something I had just said would fit perfectly: “Hot Lettuce.”

Lettuce by itself is rather blah. It’s nothing outstanding by itself, and I bet no one has ever said with gusto, “I want some lettuce today!” It’s something you add, but I don’t think you’ll really miss it if it’s gone. But hot lettuce is a whole different story. It is something that is just… filthy. Nasty. Has the power to make you do a spit-take. Thus, what I am imagining in a “Hot Lettuce” type of player is someone that overall was unspectacular, but when he got hot (performance-wise, not Adrian “Don’t touch my head!” Beltre hot or Carson Cistulli-attractiveness hot), watch out! This player being hot turns him into a dominating force.

We like it. The concept of “Hot Lettuce” as a nickname, that is, not actual, foul-tasting hot lettuce.

Prototypes from Baseball’s Gauzy Past:

More from Bryz:

Players that I feel fit this description might be John Mabry. 2.1 career WAR, and 1.6 of it was amassed in his 2002 season chronicled in Moneyball. Rich Harden is another player that I like, because he’s mixed in some “meh” seasons (regular lettuce) with some great seasons (hot lettuce). There’s certainly also other, non-green wearing, non-former Athletics players that could come to mind for this nickname.

I would add: Mike Damn Laga.

Guiding, Determinative Query:

What current major-league player should be nicknamed “Hot Lettuce”?

The convention floor, which is filled with hot lettuce and used, tortured rubbers, is open for nominations …

Pictured above is a fish with a baseball in its mouth. Was it put there to silence his entreaties and complaints? Or is this how the fish catches the baseball?

Or was the ball placed in the fish’s mouth in order to provide a brief amusement — an amusement designed to make someone forget, for a fugitive moment, that he, like the fish, will one day die and that what lies beyond is as unknowable as it is unavoidable and that a nothingness that spans the black balance of forever might constitute … the best for which we can hope?

The fish with a baseball in its mouth is dead. And so we all shall be, probably sooner than we dare to contemplate. Is there meaning to be found in the inexorable misery that is as much a part of us as blood, bones, viscera, and dreams reduced to momentary consolations? It scarcely matters.

This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

You will often hear those given to bemoaning bemoan the notion that Kids Today don’t play pickup baseball with the frequency or vigor that they did back in the days of the bemoaner. But, lo, there is good news! Thanks to an enterprising Japanese astronaut, we now know that any young stripling can hone his baseball chops with nothing more than a bat, a ball and a readily available zero-gravity environment. No need for friends or neighborhood confreres! Witness, my love:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsNFqMtNZvI&feature=player_embedded

He balked.

(HT: The Internet)

Ultimately, I blame myself. I thought the first attempt at the Eric Sogard Meme was complete enough, if not entirely exhaustive. But there was one so conspicuous in its absence that it rendered previous efforts meaningless. I come now to atone:

This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

The Internet teaches us that A’s catcher Kurt Suzuki is attempting to gain weight this offseason by shoving down his gullet at least 4,000 calories each day. As Aaron pithily notes, Suzuki is being a crashing bore about the whole thing by choking down things like smoothies and turkey burgers. Clearly, Mr. Suzuki, in his bid to become larger and more in charger, needs some help.

So, in the interest of making Mr. Suzuki a more compelling Leisured Gentleman, we present these alternative routes to consuming four score and 3,920 calories in a day:

• – 34.5 Bud Light Limes (Bud Lights Lime?).
• – 61.5 shots of vodka.
• – Unlimited portions of intravenously applied Angel Dust/PCP, which might also help the hoisting gentleman in the gymnasium.
• – 2.2 pounds of deboned human flesh. To this end, some helpful Internet hotlinks!
• – By extension and in the service of a logical end-game, 2.2 pounds of deboned Nancy Grace cutlets.
• – 133.3 ladles-full of Old Country Buffet’s rabies-free chicken gravy.
• – 1.6 cans of snuff tobacco.
• – 33.3 tablespoons of motor oil vinaigrette.

So, Mr. Suzuki, as you can see there’s really no cause to soldier on with banalities like “vegetables” and “meats not likely to lead to a CDC-declared Hot Zone encircling the blast field.”

Thinking man’s base ball-ist Eric Sogard is, natch, something of a local hero on these electric pages. So because of his heroism and because he is indubitably a Thing That Contains Multitudes, we are duty-bound to make a not a man out of him — I feel certain that Raquel Welch and Adrienne Barbeau have already attended to those refreshing matters — but rather make a meme out of him.

What follows is this Internetting Gentleman’s — this memesmith’s, this smither of memes’s — attempt to do just that …

Read the rest of this entry »