The convention floor, still covered by confetti, spilled cocaine and unmentionable fluids, is closed for business. And so with names placed into nomination and the list of nominees trimmed according to the whims of those in awful power, it’s time to vote.

At stake are stakes, and those stakes are the right to call oneself “Good, Round Friend.” Now, for the unassailable process that is Internet polling …

Thanks for voting! Now please enjoy some illegal drugs.

The Internetting Gentleman is surely by now familiar with this Taiwanese video interpretation of the Red Sox’s recent and rib-tickling collapse. And that leads to this, which is a crudely animated rendering of Jon Lester, John Lackey and Josh Beckett in clubhoused repose, eating chicken, drinking beer and playing video games without ceasing as though an imperiled life depended upon their eating chicken, drinking beer and playing video games without ceasing.

Click and then watch closely to see the exact moment that team morale gives up and dies peacefully while surrounded by loves ones …

This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

Our ongoing quest, in the manner of a noble knight-errant, is to assign cool nicknames to players rather than indulge in the tired paradigm of assigning cool players nicknames. Before we launch the latest installment, however, a trip through our Hall of Honour, which, as you surely anticipated, is made entirely of fine Corinthian leather …

“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

And the nickname now hanging perilously in the balance? It’s “Good, Round Friend”!

Denotations, Connotations, Implications, Intimations, and Incriminations:

Near the end of Arnold Lobel’s “Owl At Home,” a timeless rumination on a sexless and epicene bachelor, the titular character refers to the moon as his “Good, Round Friend.” And so, on this fine day, the NotGraphs collective shall also refer to someone as “Good, Round Friend.” And this someone shall be a ballplayer.

This ballplayer should be rather large in frame and bearing and should also be an amiable and charming hail-fellow-well met. Or, at the least, he should impress you as such within the dreamscape of your fondest imaginings, since you will never meet him and he cares not a whit whether you live or are murdered with a shillelagh. So: portly and awesome. Like Falstaff. Not like a self-important tenor.

Prototypes from Baseball’s Gauzy Past:

Babe Ruth was fat and convivial. So he works. David Wells works, I suppose, particularly since, insofar as the qualities of a “Good, Round Friend” are concerned, a case of the gout is self-recommending. Terry Forster? Ray King? The healthy preponderance of all middle relievers?

Guiding, Determinative Query:

What current major-league player should be nicknamed “Good, Round Friend”?

The convention floor, which is, appropriately enough, brimming with good, round friends, is open for nominations …

As you may have noticed, the World Series will not feature the New York Yankees. This is bad news, of course. If the Yankees make the World Series, then baseball has a competitive-balance problem. If the Yankees don’t make the World Series, however, then television executives will see their expensive and relaxing dinners reduced to being merely expensive and somewhat relaxing. And that’s the worst fate of all.

Also bad for the Republic is that a Yankee-less World Series can move an otherwise temperate and moderating gentleman to film himself screaming while driving down a darkened expressway. If you savor profanity, sound arguments and a buccaneering spirit, then please do enjoy …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQsEQDO0r9Q&NR=1

Baseball, you just lost a fan — a fan who can appreciate fine Corinthian leather.

As you may have heard, certain sinister Boston layabouts spent much of the 2011 season acting like doobage enthusiasts sans doobage. Well, America’s Worst Sports Section^TM is back on the case like a maggot on a leach on a lamprey, and they have a gallery that invites you to decide, with gentle nudging from America’s Worst Sports Section^TM, whether certain key members of the Red Sox got fat as the season deepened and the KFC boxes and cans emptied of shitty beer mounted. Here’s one representative photo of the previously un-indicted Clay Buchholz:

If you’re like me, then so moved were you by the implications of the photo above that you began scampering around on all fours, rooting at the floors, sprouting cloven hooves, and making your finest and most bellowing hog-to-the-slaughter noises. Look, will you, at that indolent sworper of a man in the second photo! The Caligulan excesses! The betrayal of The Nation! Fack!

By all means, peruse the entire gallery. It’s striking how lighting and angles can reveal before God and all The Fat and The Lazy.

So shape up, Sox, or that guy in Globe mail room who knows Photoshop will give you all piggy snouts.

(A piece of fried chicken shared like the strand of pasta in “Lady and the Tramp”: HBT)

NotGraphs, of course, has a lengthy and proud history of using animal GIFs and or action-video footage as stand-ins for baseball happenings. Unbelievably enough, we have not yet decided to stop doing this. And so courtesy of the lovely and talented Crashburn Alley comes the forthcoming bit of wonderment. Please and thank you click!

Now that you have sufficiently absorbed the image in question, we are compelled to ask:

Thank you for voting, and may the ungovernable berserker-sheep among us grant you safe passage.

Briefly, between pitches, please take note:

Now, fans of baseball, back to the game, as the urgent breaking update suggests.

If you carefully read the terms of service printed on every MLB game ticket, you’ll notice the following bit of muddled legalese:

XXIV(f): If Major League Baseball (hereafter, PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL CONCERN) can’t have you, then no one will.

A bit troubling, no? Indubitably so, but you might be left wondering how MLB wields such far-ranging plenary powers. The answer, which is also the correct answer? They take pictures of you at the ballpark and allow anyone with an Angelfire Internet Computer to ogle you and your native indignities. From the Computer Link:

Below are panoramic photos taken from the 2011 MLB postseason. Each panorama was created by stitching together hundreds of photos taken over a 20-minute span. By logging in via Facebook Connect, you can tag yourself, as well as friends who attended the game. You can even zoom in to identify individual faces. (Emphasis and bloodcurdling font mine, but should totally be theirs, too.)

Each of us is special, but each of us — above all, this writer — is also a misshapen idiot. If we wanted to be seen doing what we do at a ballgame — i.e., sweating, grunting at dot races, drooling on our foul-smelling shoes, screaming in tribal unison at the mascot with the t-shirt cannon, catching our breath from eating too fast, picking at scabs, idly probing our own orifices — then we’d log on to Chatroulette between innings. Some things, however, are best left unseen, and those things are we, the stinking people of the world.

So thanks, MLB, for ruining everything.

Thanks to the joke-cracking excesses of Sophocles, it was, for a long time, no longer funny to make puns out of people’s names. For centuries this was a reliable source of Comedy Gold and, on more than one occasion, spared the stinking human animal from extinction. Inevitably, though, fresh produce wilts, and comedy is and has always been a nutritious vegetable.

But, lo, despair not! When French industrialist Jean-Sebastien D’Internet, for whom the Internet is named, invented the moving image in 1997, puns made out of names were disinterred and revived as a thing that can be useful and even amusing. Doubt this? Take off your tight-fitting doubting pants, click, and then bear awed witness:

You see, the Cruz Missle, unlike its nefarious progenitor the (Pablo) cruise missile, does not end lives, destabilize right-wise monarchies and violate non-aggression pacts. It “merely” wins important baseball games and perhaps our hearts. Check that: especially our hearts.

Perhaps you woke up this morning and, while undertaking the ablutions necessary for triumph at the office, in the gym and in the bedroom, thought to yourself: on this day, I shall not lay eyes upon a nude Jose Reyes and a Chris Carpenter freshly pruned of his base-and-ball chemise!

Know that these espousals were as hollow and empty as hollow and empty things:

That, of course, is Jose Reyes, his surely tensed organ blanketed by artful shadow, as part of an ESPN the Mag feature that will make you feel various feelings.

Are we done here? No, we are not done here …

When one’s co-workers are transformed into a shouting and leaping throng of bodice-rippers, it is known as “Success in Business.” Today, if you Move Enough Product, the same might happen to you.

In summary: Jose Reyes is naked, and Chris Carpenter is working on it.

(Bestripped gratitude: BuenoWaino)