What follows is a day or three old, but I’ve been stranded in the wilds of Nebraska for the last week, so a little slack, please.

Anyhow, Yankees GM Brian Cashman, who has sorta-kinda lost his mind in the most wonderful of ways this season, recently had this to say about maligned evil-doer A.J. Burnett …

“I encourage everybody to just break it down,” Cashman said. “Break it down. Compare him to other people. Look at his start-by-start. Look at his run support. If you smoke the objective pipe, I think the coverage on him would be a little smoother, more accurate.”

“Smoke the objective pipe.” Give this the weighty regard it merits: Brian Cashman asked the thronged New York media to “smoke the objective pipe.” If this doesn’t become a thing worthy of commemoration by t-shirt, then all the faith I’ve placed in CafePress as cultural barometer nonpareil has been in vain.

When is a foul ball something more than a foul ball? When it’s off the thunderstick of “America Brawn” Mike Laga, and it is propelled, with certainty but not vengeance, out of Busch Stadium and into the undeserving firmament.

The Mike Laga Foul Ball from JoeSportsFan.com on Vimeo.

When this happens, you stand, applaud, weep, tremble, genuflect, sign over your first born, and hope that King Laga I shows mercy upon you.

(Laga Love: Joe Sports Fan)

A.J. Burnett has millions, yet his discontent is so strong that it has its own soul and prehensile tail. The Daily News has not yet reported that he wakes up at 3 a.m. each night to sneak downstairs and weep in the dark, but one assumes they will and he does.

“City to Burnett: Drop Dead.”

So what does a man look like when the dual burdens of Job and Frodo are heaped upon him, when all of New York blames him for the presumed failures to come and the rent, which is too damn high?

He looks like this. Always.

(Yo, image: Getty)

In which the Royal We insert Dick Allen’s name into various works representative of the Western Canon, thus adding to those various works the patina of blessedness.

In today’s episode, Mr. Dick Allen wanders — but wanders with purpose — into Arthur Rimbaud’s aria of the debauched, “Evening Prayer” …

I spent my life sitting, like an angel in a barber’s chair,
Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs,
My neck and gut both bent, while in the air
A weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.

Like steaming dung within an old dovecote
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.

And then, when I have swallowed down my Dreams
In thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turn
To satisfy a need I can’t ignore,

And like the Lord of Hyssop and Myrrh
I piss into the skies, a soaring stream
That consecrates Dick Allen’s shoes.

This has been the latest episode of Inserting Dick Allen’s Name Into Works of Literature.

It’s time for another installment of “Shorter Baseball Columnists,” in which we read mainstream baseball columnists and marginalized bloggers like Murray Chass so you don’t have to! Let us begin!

Shorter Fay Vincent: I noticed an awkwardly worded sentence in the Times. Sportswriting is dead.

Shorter Dan Shaughnessy: A very wealthy guy showed up at a Sox game.

Shorter T.J. Simers: Don Mattingly and James Loney have a positive outlook on things. I don’t like that at all.

Shorter Kevin Kernan: Regarding the Yankees, it’s quite possibly time to start panicking.

Shorter Jim Souhan: It’s too bad the Twins have money.

Shorter Murray Chass: I like bunts.

The “Shorter” approach to Internetty commentary traces back, as best as one can tell, to Daniel Davies.

I was but a young lad when Hall of Famer Jim Palmer began doing print ads for Jockey underwear — ads that presented Palmer to the world as the thinking man’s beefcake. Survey them, and you’ll find in his gaze not the slightest hint of embarrassment. He’s not exactly reveling in the moment, but he exudes the sense that there’s nothing at all untoward about going through one’s day clothed in nothing more than decorative grippers. As it turns out, he was right.

I would like to think that what follows is the exemplar of the genre. Please quaff deeply …

His pallor is a bit on the “nuclear fallout” side — a nod, I am quite sure, to the mounting Cold War tensions of the day. The place he went to tan, no doubt, had “parlor” in its name. He is lifting weights but not heavy weights. After all, one must remain lithe and pliable if one is going to make love to America. One must also remain quick and agile in case America’s husband comes home at the wrong hour.

The chest hair is ample enough to suggest the thumping masculinity just beneath, but it is sparse enough not to suggest a lower-evolved sort. Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull or Riunite on ice? Jim Palmer serves the latter. The body wave atop him? Thank you, Wella Balsam shampoo and asbestos-lined styling dryer with attachments.

And what’s he looking at? Perhaps a second paramour has arrived. “What are you doing here?” Jim Palmer asks. “As long as you’re here, please join us. Would you like some Riunite?”

The massage oils are imported. Sometimes, he warms them in a fondue pot.

While Keith Comstock’s major-league career is a bit on the undistinguished side, his Las Vegas Stars card — which is absolutely your Daguerreotype of the Evening — is a many-splendored thing. First comes the power, and then comes the glory …

While I suspect that the baseball-to-the-rascal-basket situation — a situation known in some circles as “the nobleman’s pickle” — is a staged pratfall, there’s still much to appreciate about this work of high, higher and highest art. Even so, the romantic in me wants to believe that Mr. Comstock legitimately took one to the pills courtesy of an offstage teammate given to madcappery in all its forms!

For a moment — just a moment — I forgot that all of us will die.

(Well-meaning groin shot: A gentleman named Steve)

Over yonder at MiLB.com, they’re hosting a voting-enabled hootenanny to determine the best human-person name in minor-league baseball. I find that I support this exercise, with some qualifications. To wit, I expect — nay, demand! — great things for the likes of Jetsy Extrano (pictured above!), Dusty Harvard, Dock Doyle, Mark Hamburger, and Cameron Greathouse, who’s always using his fortunate station in life to lord over the chimney-sweep with the lazy eye.

Jetsy Extrano!

The earliest cave etchings teach us that the protective backstop netting is there to prevent fans from being ritually abused by the wayward cowhide. While this ancient practice is perfectly adequate for most mortal tossers, its shortcomings have been exposed by Aroldis Chapman and his weapons-grade left arm …

I’m no science-face, but clearly the netting at Wrigley needs extra polymer sauce when Mr. Chapman is on the bump. One does not simply walk into Mordor, just as one does not separate the people from Aroldis Chapman with anything less than a web of battleship chains.

(Errant fastball: HBT)

Once again, we were so flooded with nominations that the Executive Royal Council of Elder Governors Men was forced to make some difficult decisions.

Now, Whigs and Bull Mooses, it is time to vote. Which player should be nicknamed “Liván Hernández”? Make with the democracy below …