On July 1, 1990 I, in the seats of Busch Stadium, witnessed Zane Smith of the Pirates take a no-hitter into the ninth inning. He eventually yielded a safety — a groan-able safety — but his sparkling effort was something I would invoke and proudly speak of over the years. For I was there! Excelsior to my experiences!

Except that it did not happen. As I would learn years later, Smith was superlative that night, but after 5 1/3 innings of work he had given up five hits. He pitched a 1-0 shutout, but he didn’t come close to a no-hitter in any meaningful sense. The Zane Smith I saw that night in St. Louis came within two or perhaps three outs of a no-hitter — for I remember it! — but the other Zane Smith, the homunculus in the box score, did no such thing.

Someone bearded — someone numbered among the Tedious Fuckers of High Civilization, someone possibly harboring the ghastly beliefs native to his century and bearing — may have said something like this: “Experiential memory is to be doubted as much as any disavowal on the tongue of a parliamentarian.”

As for me, I stopped talking about Zane Smith’s taking a no-hitter into the ninth on July 1, 1990. I recall moments that are squarely a part of this game’s iconography — Kirk Gibson’s homer, for instance — and I now don’t doubt my ability to process and recall transmitted images sourced from This, Our Television. But those moments to which I bore corporeal witness? Surely they are forever straddled by qualm. “Whatever the event does leave behind,” Wittgenstein once thundered, “it isn’t the memory.”

I suppose I agree. However, had I been present at that Cambridge lecture hall, I would no doubt recall his words as, “Memory is cash made music. Tell the forest what she has said.”

Not long ago, though, I told a friend about what I had seen that man do. I was there, in the 400 section at Wrigley field, along the first base line, and I saw him do what he did. I stripped the diffidence from me like a bodice — damn you to the damned, Zane Smith-related inaccuracies! — and I told my friend what I had witnessed. I told him what Carlos Zambrano had done …

I told him that I had seen Carlos Zambrano commit a balk because of his concern regarding no lesser menace than Eric Milton, who was surely taking a riverboat-gambler’s lead off of first. When Eric Milton, that hellbent Mercury, unzips a secondary lead one does what one must, even if what one does runs afoul of the laws of baseball. So Carlos Zambrano committed a balk with Eric Milton on first, and I told my friend about this. And I was right about this.

The homunculus in the box score and I then hanged Wittgenstein from an overhead timber and spilled his blood in the sawdust with filet knives.

Do not stab and retract, the homunculus in the box score told me, as we murdered Wittgenstein. Stab and lift, as though turning the gears of a war machine.

We feasted on his leg bones and talked about that time we saw Jim Palmer get a rosin bag pregnant.

If you will, please regard the following post that was emblazoned upon to the Facebook page of CBSSports.com’s Eye On Baseball — the home for all baseball fans …

Pete Rise! The accidental genius of auto-correct or inspired creation? It matters not. For Pete Rise now walks among us.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Hollywood, California picture-show movie executive thought he was making a demand that would be met. “You’ll play yourself,” he thundered at Keith Hernandez and then offered a liver-spotted hand.

Hernandez took a long, measured pull on his Yves Saint Laurent luxury cigarette, held it for a moment, exhaled slowly, and let the silence do the work for him. “I’m not going to play myself,” he told the Hollywood, California picture-show movie executive and then leaned forward to put out his Yves Saint Laurent luxury cigarette on the Hollywood, California picture-show movie executive’s liver-spotted hand. “That’s because I’m not myself.”

Keith Hernandez rose from the table, perched high-end shades on the bridge of his nose, buttoned the top button of his camelhair blazer with the other hand, and then with a third, spectral hand retrieved a pearl-handled .38 from his sock. A narrating voice — the voice of Hollywood, California actor Jason Robards — began to intone the following:

“Keith Hernandez was right. He was not himself, and these motherfuckers needed to know that. Keith Hernandez is essence. He is … musk. But he is not himself. Yes, he’ll be in the Brendan Fraser-Albert Brooks smoldering turd known as ‘The Scout,’ but he’s not going to play himself. This is because he’s not himself. All the other ballplayers, managers and broadcasters can play themselves, but Keith Hernandez is going to play … Keith Hernandez. Now it’s time for Keith Hernandez to get laid on an Air France Concorde.”

Keith Hernandez, you see, is not himself.

(Love shall be made to @theiri for bringing this to the author’s attention)

A tweet larded with hot facts:

At this point — and given that Mariano Rivera will absolutely have an Oregano Rumpus in his honor on Sept. 22 — we are left with no more, no fewer than two possibilities:

1 – Mariano Rivera so loves perennial herbs that he requested that an Oregano Rumpus occasion his retirement from baseball.

2 – That the Yankees’ procurement department wants to present Mariano Rivera with a righteous bag of sweet-ass weed; the Yankees’ promotions department, however, is aware that Floyd, who still uses a pager for Gods’s sake, merely dumped some McCormick’s in a plastic baggy and sold it to procurement at marked-up prices befitting the flawless Sonoma Coma strain. The Yankees’ promotions department is also aware that Mariano Rivera, being a gentleman who respects the rule of law, wants nothing to do with illegal street drugs. Knowing procurement’s insistence on giving Mariano Rivera some weed, though, the promotions department spread the word that it’s actually going to be oregano that he receives, which explains the above tweet. Trust me: That was easier than talking procurement out of giving Mariano Rivera a sack of doobage.

Everyone involved except for procurement is aware that it’s oregano in the Ziploc. This is the case even after procurement bong-smoked the entire bag and, in a panic, replaced what they thought was pot with oregano.

Not so long ago, Adam Jones sounded his conch and let all know that something was about to happen …

As philosopher-kings and tribal warlords alike have told us via oral tradition, there is eating and then there is blood-flesh intake as sating ritual of conquest. So it is with Adam Jones.

If warrior-poet Adam Jones returns to base camp at one o’clock in the morning and announces that he shall smash the loaf of a hoofed beast, then the village elders and virgins shall prepare him what he wants.

Then he shall use his implement of war to eat the brick of entrails before him …

Do not eat. Rather, you should enter into a blood-pact with one’s food. Challenge one’s food to pick up crude tools and swing and thrust and stab at one another astride the glimmering embers of the campfire. The others look on, but they hold back owing to the primordial laws of combat. They dare not intercede.

The food is defeated, but only after the warrior-poet’s skin is peeled back and the nerves that snake through his organs are struck by hurled thunderbolts of a lesser god and then singed to the point of reckoning. Only then are ruins of the man reassembled to form a turret mightier than the one that nearly fell in the food-battle just completed.

When a remade man like Adam Jones looks up from his defeated and pacified platter, he gives off an odor that is at once a the smell of a pumice stone, the smell of ribbons of moonlight through forest canopy and the smell of a dead viking’s last sex act being devoured by gray wolves.

Know that it is because of Adam Jones and Eric Young Jr. before him that there is now a NotGraphs category called Regeneration-Through-Violence Food Consumption.

Come with me, won’t you? Come back with me to the early moments of the radio broadcast of Game 5 of the 1948 World Series between the Braves and the Indians …

There was a time — Gentleman Mel Allen’s time, for instance — when you could indulge in the metaphors that you have just heard, even go on at some length within the captive embrace of the metaphors that you have just heard. But our timepieces say that time has passed.

There are things you may no longer do, like smoke in the operating room or slap the children of strangers or get pregnant in an above-ground pool.

You also may not make the metaphors that you have just heard, at least while anyone is listening.

Please regard, with a sense of discernment, the following color-television GIF:

What is beyond dispute is that Vermilion Stockings philosopher-king David Ortiz has dislodged the second-base bag for purposes of mercilessly bludgeoning one of the three unsuspecting fops seated at the table in the foreground. What is left to question is which gentleman shall be beaten into a cadaverous pile of quivering mucus, paste, viscera and bloody snot-hominy. Who shall it be?

The answer, it turns out, is … yes.

As should be apparent by now, “Dr. Internet” is not a specific person. Rather, it is any man who has decided he’s not going to take this shit anymore — “this shit” being the epicene objections of unmanly others on this our Internet.

Recently, a NotGraphs commenter by the nom de Internet of “TheReal” happened upon a Yasiel Puig post by Ham-Nuts Cistulli that, in the service of eroding civilization, celebrated one of Mr. Puig’s opposite-of-elusive bat-flips. TheReal took the necessary step of pointing out that this flourish would not play too well on the streets of fire whence he was forged. But then the lady-lads in his midst predictably took offense. Tired of conversing with his inferiors, TheReal took to the rhetorical top turnbuckle and landed this finishing move:

At this point, you will recognize — in spirit if not in precise diction — the imprimatur and influence of one Banknotes Harper.

True, Banknotes Harper learned business because business wanted to be learned by Banknotes Harper, and the only use Banknotes Harper has for the higher-education asset bubble is the opportunity to make a sherpa’s load of billion-dollar bills via credit default swaps on the student loans of the working poor. Still, the timely wielding of the Business Pecker, whether it be by way of high marks in a possibly-credentialed MBA program or with stacks of redeemable bullion, is something that pleases Banknotes Harper.

And so when Dr. Internet wielded his Business Pecker in order to cow the dole-sucking hordes that deigned to afflict him, Banknotes Harper saw that it was good:

Dr. Internet, you may just have a shot at being an intern to the intern of Banknotes Harper’s interns’ interns.

They’ve all told you the same thing — those who raised you, siblings, lovers, the god you worship, the earthly squires of the god you worship, teachers, physicians, strangers on public transit, neighbors, pets. It’s the stinking, larded pageant of those you have known, and they agree on nothing save for this: that your best is not good enough.

It is not often that you call upon the best you’ve got in the service of completing a task or making what struck you in the conception stages as a pleasant gesture, but even in those scarce moments when you do offer up the best you’ve got, it’s not enough.

Mariano Rivera knows this. He’s aware of all that you’ve befouled. Consider it a mission of conscience for him, this letting you know that he knows you’re diminished by the effort …

You see that he, for a fugitive instant, looks askance while he hails your miserable attempt. He’s aware that this is alms-giving of somewhat embarrassing extremes. To be sure, there is condescension lost in his practiced applause, which strikes you as not unlike the hand-claps of a dutiful grandmother who beats the Gold Medal flour from her hands as she makes the weary lemon cake by rote. The apron hides a will and a cancer …

Mariano Rivera’s prosopon mask of exuberance is to obvious excess, to glut. What you’re doing at this moment warrants so, so much less. But Mariano Rivera feigns joy so as to train you to keep at this toil. He knows you’ll never get there, but have another go at it just the same, would you, you hesitating buckaroo? For he knows hope is not so much an expectation as it is a way of whittling at the days like a sassafras branch until they come to embalm you. Mariano Rivera knows this, but he’s too gentlemanly to say as much.

Your best will never be good enough, but it’s better than it ever has been, so long as Mariano Rivera is watching.

It’s not really important how events conspired to have me stumble upon and examine like a jewelry appraiser this seemingly valueless 1990 Fleer Johnny Ray card …

Johnny Damn Ray! Since tradition demands that you can liken a player only to another player of similar ethnic extraction, I’ll point out that Johnny Ray was Ray Durham before there was any such thing as Ray Durham.

But here’s the point of all this. Take a look at the flip-side …

Please do note the “Vital Signs” section at the bottom. That, friends, is OBP and SLG — the good two-thirds of our cherished triple slash! The miracle is that this happened, as implied above, in 1990, when everyone was stupid.

I like to think it was Hermes Fleer himself who insisted on deviating from the de rigueur AVG-HR-RBI trinity that prevailed in his industry.