Crabs are generally known to be zany, and that’s probably what the Giants were thinking back in 1984 when they were willingly represented before God and country by The Crazy Crab.

Unfortunately, the Giants hired not a zany, crazy crab but rather a disconsolate crustacean crippled by the unsparing demands of this, our stinking existence:

What you see is a crab among cardboard boxes. This suggests that he was recently a foreclosure victim or perhaps worked in thankless, stricken misery at a dank warehouse. Or perhaps he was freshly murdered and dumped onto a loading dock. Whatever the grim backstory, this crab is “crazy” only in the sense that this nihilistic journey into the abyss (some call it “life”) can easily drive one to the brink of madness.

If Crazy Crab is indeed dead, then no more does he feel pain.

This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

As we learned in a previous edition of Found Poetry(!), the good patriots at Reddit are fond of pondering the baseball bat and its utility for dispensing righteous justice. The reader — the handsome reader — will be pleased to know that Reddit Nation is once again musing on this subject dear to us all. This particular urgent matter? Whether a baseball bat or a knife is most desirable for vanquishing scoundrels in need of being vanquished. Let us now read poetry!

Are you military or a martial artist?

I was in a fight with a guy who had a bat once …

I’ve been beaten down with both, and shot.

I’m a professional knife thrower.

I’ve taken an interest in European sword fighting.

I study European Medieval martial arts.

I use both long sword (which is a two handed weapon, mind you) and a one-handed sword with a buckler.

I’m in the Mereenese fighting pits …

I’ve been trained in martial arts for years, including fighting an enemy who has a knife or a long stick/club/bat.

I’m 6’4″ @ 230lbs.

I like slitting things open …

I just started carrying a gun.

It’s 4 AM here and I can’t really think so clearly.

A moderate injury is an acceptable price to deal a debilitating blow to the enemy.

A grown man’s tibia will break with just 47 Joules of transferred kinetic energy.

Knives are fucking awesome …

The stakes are high here.

BEAR JEW!

Thank you for helping keep poetry alive.

In this space, this writer has, for reasons sufficient unto himself, occasionally likened pennant races to the behavioral phenomena of the animal kingdom. While this practice is borne of laziness, it’s mostly in the service of entertaining you, the muscled reader.

The Action Video Footage that follows, which is — and I don’t use this word lightly — awesome, is of a Darwinist brouhaha in the wilds of Africa. It also, fittingly for our purposes, makes for a tidy metaphorical retelling of recent base-and-ball events.

Your cast of characters:

Lions: The Red Sox and Braves.
Water Buffalo: The Rays and Cardinals.
Crocodiles: The Angels and Giants. Or perhaps just crocodiles.

Please enjoy the following Action Video Footage:

What can future opponents of the Rays and Cardinals learn from this? If you’re going to try to kill a baby water buffalo, then you’d best be quick about it. This is the playoffs, after all.

No, you were not the only one stripped of everything but the most primitive urges by last night’s impossible events. In point of fact, even two seasoned MLB Network hosts, accustomed to Live Action Television and its treacherous proclivities, were left in mute awe, unable to do anything more than scamper and flop about like addled sand crabs. Click and witness:

The final absurdity — the Evan Longoria scream-off homer — proved too much for the fraying social contracts that weakened into gossamer over the course of the evening. But once Mr. Longoria ferried us from the realm of the “merely” unthinkable into a state of affairs nameless in all but the most atavistic of hunter-gatherer grunts (it is known as “oook tob noot blargh Kurt Stillwell blomph!”), the constructs and assumptions about us were reduced to embers. Messrs. Reynolds and Plesac did what any of us would do when faced with such an everything nothingness: they scurried. And then they murdered.

And now, thanks to regeneration through violence, they are ready for postseason. Are you?

After the operatic goings-on of baseball’s Night of Long Knives, I have the feeling that all of us could use a piping-hot plate of whimsy. Fortunately, funnyman Rod Barajas is here to help.

It has long been said that nothing soothes the fussy infant quite like a Rod Barajas. This is why Rod Barajas is available at boutique toy stores and corner pharmacies everywhere. And that’s to say nothing of the 15-pack of shrink-wrapped Rod Barajases on endcap display at every Costco the world over. Why is the Rod Barajas so popular among sleep-deprived parents? We already told you: nothing soothes a fussy infant quite like a Rod Barajas. Click and be amazed:

Next time the Rod Barajas will change Dee Gordon’s poopy.

3 am breastfeeding: Mike Scioscia’s Tragic Illness)

If there’s one thing the good, round folks of the Upper Midwest love more than consonants and slowly dying, it’s encased meats, dontchaknow. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Twins of Minnesota have lent their corporate imprimatur to at least one package — and probably many more — of lovingly prepared offal. And this brings us to your Daguerreotype of the Evening:

Luminous food critic Gael Greene has written of the Twins Big Dog’s “mellow notes of animal pecker and delightful sodium-nitrate finish.” Nom, nom, nom!

As you may have noticed, Arizona’s license plates read, “Arizona: Home to Sadness.” This is objectively true, of course, but last night Arizona’s Major League Baseball Franchise, which is represented by poisonous snakes, provided the state’s beleaguered denizens with a board-certified base-and-ball miracle.

Prior to last night, a Law of the Universe, theretofore believed to be immutable, was that if the home team surrenders five runs in top of the 10th, then a loss is a fait accompli. Those plucky Snakes, however, declared that if coming back from five down in extra innings is a crime — much like loving you — then lock them up and place the key somewhere safely out of the prisoner’s reach. Yes, thanks mostly to a Ryan Roberts amble-off grand slam, Arizona, metaphorically, murdered the Dodgers with a sharpened cargo hook.

And that brings us to the most stirring image of any such game: the WPA chart. Behold:

In certain circles, such a rarely spotted WPA chart is known as “The Leftward-Facing Raygun,” but the learned discerner may also note a stirring resemblance to the Objective Pipe. Regardless of how this Rorschach strikes you, though, you should know that the Arizona Diamondbacks are here for those with nowhere left to turn.

(A hearty please and thank you to Hannah’s Tweet repository)

It has been said that Dick Allen, patron Mahatma of these pages, has a head that contains multitudes. Besides his brain, skull and mind, Dick Allen’s head is rumored to contain a working ordnance factory, a family of ocelots, the spectral presence of Lionel Barrymore, and a dimly lit scriptorium where monastic scribes are busy copying the seminal documents of Western history. As you can imagine, all of this requires of Mr. Allen a rather sprawling melon. Thanks to The Painted Baseball, we may lay reverent eyes upon the real thing. Gentlepersons, your Daguerreotype of the Evening …

Dick Allen’s head — both large and important, neither small nor unimportant.

The astute and championship gentleman has at his disposal a broad menu of hairstyles appropriate for the merchant and bodice-ripper of distinction and breeding. Among these are the Tousled Authority, the Hesitating Delacroix, the Dead Christian, and, natch, the Hair-Fellow-Well-Met.

One will note, however, that Mr. Jayson Werth’s latest coif does not appear within our Manifest of Acceptables. Bear solemn witness …

Pictured abovely is a look known derisively throughout history as the “Señor Buttcheeks,” and it is to our national shame and injury that Mr. Werth has dragged it howling from the vaults. This, Mr. Werth, is why Oleg Cassini doesn’t come around much anymore.

(Giggly hair-pull: Nats Enquirer)

The conclave of beauty and discernment that is the NotGraphs readership will no doubt recall Brian Cashman’s fondness for the invoking and toking of something called “The Objective Pipe.”

Yes, the Objective Pipe — it is a thing and we are a people of things. And so in celebration of Mr. Cashman’s loosed Id and in commemoration of this thing which has become such a cultural touchstone that it is worthy of measured consideration on the part of all living artists, I present to you a painting of the Objective Pipe.

My preferred medium, as beholders of restaurant-quality artstuffs are no doubt aware, is my kid’s coloring-book app on the iPad. And as is the case with all my work, the tableau that follows is one-half impressionism, one-half abstraction and a bonus one-half of stupefaction.

Now, please and thank you, gaze upon my toil like Cameron Frye agape before a sprawling Seurat. And by all means, click to absorb as the artist intended …

Lo: Brian Cashman’s Objective Pipe being smoked in its natural habitat.

You no doubt noticed that this work of art contained multitudes. So indubitably does it contain multitudes that there is now a NotGraphs category called “Things That Contain Multitudes,” a phylum to which this post now belongs.

And now I shall finsh this carafe of absinthe and then make palliative love to Anaïs Nin.