So this is Tim Lincecum as captured by something called the “Phantom Flex,” which I imagine is like a Polaroid with attitude:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2PBLcp9tWM&feature=player_embedded

That was quite pleasing to the rods and cones. Also, I know that biology textbooks — even the ones in Texas — say that we all have the same number of muscles, but, no, there’s no way I have as many muscles as Tim Lincecum. Also, Tim Lincecum’s disembodied hips could beat me in a footrace. Also, his cap, his soothing narration, his physical toil — at once grotesque yet very beautiful to me — and the industrial efficiency of the soundtrack all suggest that Red Bull can make me a better man.

(A Red Bull toast: BBTF)

If you’re the Rays marketing department — and, let’s be honest, there is a certain resemblance — then what are you to do about the approaching (and awkward and ill-timed) hoofbeats of Manny Ramirez Bobblehead Night? Like anyone else with nowhere left to turn, you send up the Fuld Signal:

That, brothers and sisters in arms, is a Super Sam Fuld Cape, and it will be presented to the first 10,000 fans age 14 and under who negotiate the turnstiles on May 29 to cheer on the Sons of Greg Vaughn.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with a Manny Ramirez Bobblehead, banal and outmoded though it may be. But it’s certainly no Super Sam Fuld Cape. I mean, a cape! Heroes wear capes! And so do oversexed barons! Capes!

And so the Legend of Sam Fuld grows and walks among us. My hope is that all of this soon leads the Franklin Mint to give us two things the people want and need: The Sam Fuld Numbered Commemorative Plate and The Sam Fuld Boer War Chess Set.

We love you, Sam Fuld. We love you so much.

I don’t play fantasy baseball in the traditional sense (I’m a Diamond Mind loyalist, and for that righteous cause I would lay down the lives of a number of acquaintances), but if I did …

I would spend a romantic evening or three at FantasyTeamNames.net, which is a series of related pages that have been fired through the Internet. There you can submit your fantasy team name to the teeming masses, which I refer to as “teeming” because they so often teem, and find out what they think of your squad’s name and, by extension, the value of your existence.

There’s also an Internet computer link that will reveal to you the highest-rated fantasy team names of all-time. Among the ones that give me chuckle and make me forget for a fugitive moment or two that we are all bound headlong for the abyss are: “Honey Nut Ichiros,” and, of course, “Black Sabathia.”

But then I remembered that all of us are going to die one day.

To hear the old guard tell it, our devotion to the numbers is slavish, stultifying, boundless and without bound, injurious to the Republic. You know whom I’m talking about. I’m talking about stout-hearts like blogger Murray Chass, who enjoys using his blog to blog about how bloggers are large and unrelenting meanies and are also unlike him. And there’s Dan Shaughnessy, the valet to human misery who hates each thing in the world more than anyone else hates any one thing in the world. I speak of them and their ilk.

But I come not to condemn. No, it is with some regret that I must say this: I am here to validate their suspicions and antipathies. Yes, I am here to confirm that what follows, as they have long suspected, is precisely what plays out in the mind of a devoted stathead when he or she takes in a game of base and ball:

It is in the interest of peace — a Glasnost of the press box, if you will — that I disclose this dark secret. It is our affliction, and we must own it.

And, I should add, the scene you see above, contrary to appearances, does not take place on a proscenium stage …

No, in the gnarled penumbras of our minds, all things come together in primordial affray to form one large mother’s basement — a mother’s basement buttressed by argument and brag, forged and soldered by our magma-hot Cheetos breath.

It is there that this lederhosen’d numbers dance, which we think is baseball, unfurls before us.

Are we to be pitied? Forgiven? Banished?

I know, I know. I too am skeptical of 11-minute YouTube videos. Such a span falls inconveniently between the 30-second yuks that MTV and Judge Learned Hand have told us we crave and the more sprawling run times necessary to enjoy hot popped maize and a tumbler of Jameson. But I urge you — with the primal, red-faced desperation that I normally reserve for trying to get retailers to honor manufacturer and store coupons — to watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIe9FkZv4Uw&feature=related

Much like a color television with wheels, this is a thing that is not new but is new to me. So if you’ve already seen it, then I look forward to your telling me so in the comments section.

I have some observations about what we have just fathomed. As much as I would like to, I’ll not ape Eno Sarris and number my thoughts. Rather, I shall use bullet points, which, according to a recent internal memorandum, are preferred by the gentleman with a bright future in sales. Also, I do not have 10 things to say. Forthwith …

I imagine this is not unlike the Dodger Stadium mound of the 1960s. This is also not unlike what happens when Jon Rauch faces Dustin Pedroia.

Barry Bonds is occasionally very serious about making this happen.

In this situation, I would opt for protective headgear — most probably the “Great Gazoo” helmet favored by Francisco Cervelli. Alternatively, I would not agree to do this.

Respect to Trampo-Pitcher for ceding the platoon advantage in each plate appearance.

And Bernie Williams and his awesome Cardinal Richelieu beard agree with me about the helmet. My inner coward, for which validation is nourishment, is validated.

Perhaps the guy with the most discerning batting eye in the annals of time was not the best choice for this necessary experiment? From the darkened clubhouse tunnel, Vlad Guerrero watches on in envy, longing.

That’s clearly a balk at the 7:41 mark. Fortunately for the moundsman, he is a stranger to baserunners.

And could this end any other way? Ichiro is invoked, and said invocations lead to a righteous humbling of the big cheater and his jumping machine.

A lingering embrace — one that goes on an instant too long — for NotGraphs reader John Murn, who passed this along in exchange for nothing more than the currency of glory.

At a site called Nic Cage As Everyone, which I found by using Altavista and Prodigy, we have this:

And there you are.

In honor of NotGraphs prose hero W.J. Slattery and as sorta-kinda suggested by Notgraphs reader and thinking-man’s pugilist Reillocity, I’m giving the Slattery-style treatment to yesterday’s Red Sox-Indians tilt. Long may you run, W.J. Slattery. Long may you run.

CLEVE’S-LAND OF THE OHIO – The Blood-Colored Leggings of Boston Town entered this docket in the Land o’ Cleve with expectations as heavy as President Taft, that flatulent Yalie, but, lo, they have buckled and sunk under Job’s burdens like the U.S.S. Maine.

It shouldn’t have been such a tight scratch, but the Injuns charged at them, hammer and tongs, and dropped the anointed champeens to zero and five plus another, which be this one.

Mr. Carmona, the fizzing Cleve’s-Land tosser, betokened the approaching misery by setting down a trinity of swingers in the first frame. Among the Red bats-men, only Mr. Scutaro brought his barking-iron and his dash-fire to this row. He smote the ball favorably and recorded a deuce of safeties on the day, but his messmates left him stranded each and every times both.

Across the way, Mr. Lester tossed with the honest flint of a Christian and a Virginian (tho’ he is not the lattermost, and recent fates make this scribe doubt he’s the formermost), but, thanks to the Boston bats soft as kidney pie, his efforts in the end were but ragamuffin’s gullyfluff in an urchin’s trouser pocket.

The real konk on the smeller came in the eighth turn, when Mr. Cabrera, of the A. not the O., plopped down an Irish hoist, plated Mr. Everett — that discommoding rusty-guts — and made the tally nothings to the ones. It stood. It stood because as warm and rightwise a patriot as Andrew Jackson could not have tamed these Indians on this day.

Wiseacres without wit, money or manners will observe that the season is not yet weaning age, but that’s merely the tune the old cow died of. Be it what it would, the Leggings have a buckskin’s toil in front of and aweather them. God’s blessing, they’ll return to the hearth on the morrow. There, they can fill the bellows with New English air, have some hochmagundy with the wives, enjoy a plate of butchered beef’s haslet, pull up their sit-upons, shut their mewling bone boxes, and get to business.

As for the Royal Rooters, their cogitations are too abundant to chronicle. If the catarrh or the Pock doesn’t get them, then the home-town nine surely will.

The lovely and talented Heidi Watney learns, in the hardest of ways, that here in the Midwest we do atherosclerotic food pairings almost as well as we do unemployment and the vague suspicion that nothing matters …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qDjOamp9P0&feature=player_embedded

This is the angina-pains city, and this is what we do.

(Gut-bump: HBT)

In the vital interests of your fleeting amusement, I’ve done the Lord’s work of going through “The Onion” archives to find the 25 greatest Onion baseball articles in the history of ever.

It is of course possible that you will disagree with my authoritative decisions, but you should know that my opinions are actually facts with large muscles. So instead blame the divining powers of the The Onion’s search function or the immutable laws of this, our grim human existence.

After the jump, the rankings, which I assembled for you at great personal hazard …

Read the rest of this entry »

No, I can’t prove this is The Great Ejector behind the plate in the video below, but — really — what other man in blue would break into applause at the sight of a fallen lawbreaker? Yes, we can assume the hitter had it coming because otherwise Joe West would’ve done what he does and ejected the offending pitcher. In this righteous instance, though, it wouldn’t surprise me if Joe West deputized the pitcher and told him to take care of things or he’d see to it that things got taken care of. He’s clapping because the young man on the mound just cut his teeth in the ways of the (Joe) West.