The Mariners’ David Aardsma is more than just a quality reliever and the guy whose aardvark-like surname bumped Hank Aaron from alphabetical pole position in The Baseball Encyclopedia. He’s also pretty good at the whole convalescence thing:

Still under orders to put no weight on his surgically repaired left hip, the Seattle Mariners closer is none-the-less taking on two rehab sessions a day, and will start throwing in another three weeks.

From his chair.

“I’ll focus on the arm motion, just throw without using my legs,” Aardsma said. “Then by the time I can throw standing up, my arm will have a little more strength, and will have stayed loose.”

Big hairy deal. One time I checked the mail while hung over.

Anyhow, the piece notes that Aardsma was on an exercise bike within an hour of waking up from surgery, so none of this should be especially surprising. Fittingly — untrue fact forthcoming! — this will be the chair from which he throws:

Western Civilization seems to be circling the drain these days, so baseball might as well get in on the act. To that end, we have “Cleat Chasers,” the latest offering from the ubiquitous sub-genre of reality programming (curtsy: Hardball Talk). The executive summary:

“It’s a reality show about girls who stop at nothing to score with athletes while they are away from their wives and girlfriends during baseball spring training,” a source close to casting told RadarOnline.com exclusively. “It’s about girls that have gone pro in the sport of ‘cleat chasing.'”

Objectification en masse and calculated erosion of the family unit? I’ll take two!

Item!: A highly placed source tells the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team that the “Cleat Chasers” pilot will feature Snooki giving Ichiro a “Happy Clancy” in the men’s room of a Del Taco in Tucson!*

(* – Patently untrue, and the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has no idea what a “Happy Clancy” is or whether such a sordid indulgence even exists.)

Lucky-best breaking news from the fair isle of Taiwan! The La New Bears are being renamed the Lamigo Monkeys!

Sure, I had never heard of the La New Bears until 15 minutes ago, but a baseball team named the Monkeys? Color me impressed. And if you find that revenge-minded silverback pictured on the flag above to be a bit disconcerting, please know that on the Lamigo Monkeys Facebook page (of which I am now a fan … please join me) we have a rendering that should satisfy you …

The big ears and smile are for the kids; the pompadour, natch, is for the ladies. Most of all, though: Go Monkeys!

Anyhow, I can now cross “Monkeys” off my non-exhaustive list of team nicknames I’d love to see used by actual franchises. A sampling:

– Hamburgers
– Cowards
– World Champions
– Commodore Vic-20s
– Security Guards
– Monster Lobsters
– Kevin

What am I missing? Go Monkeys!

It’s been a good week for Adrian Beltre, what with the reigning AL champs sending all that guaranteed cheddar his way.

There’s also a lot to like about Beltre. He’s an acrobat at the hot corner, that “home run swing from one knee” thing (pictured above, gloriously) is objectively awesome, and one must admire the flinty resolve of a man who rose again from the unspeakable horrors of a torn testicle (shudder).

Also adding to Beltre’s appeal is what appears to be a bizarre and preternatural loathing of having his head touched. Dig it. Dug it? So Beltre’s part Brooks Robinson, part Howard Hughes.

Conventional wisdom says Beltre chose not to exercise his player option with the Red Sox because of the allure of the market and the promise of millions. Video evidence, however, suggests it was because Victor Martinez wouldn’t leave his precious dome the hell alone.

So this is purty cool: the fledgling Chicago Baseball Museum is hosting a party on February 3 to celebrate the 100th birthday of the great Buck O’Neil, who passed away in 2006. The details can be found in the link above, but, really, they had me at “Doug Glanville, guest speaker” and “cocktails.”

I can say little about O’Neil’s grace, dignity and historical import that hasn’t already been said much better by Joe Posnanski in his wonderful book, but I’d be pretty pleased if my son grew up to be a fraction of the man Buck O’Neil was (hope is long lost for yours truly).

O’Neil was born in Florida and spent his playing career in Kansas City; however, he spent time as a scout with the Cubs, and Chicago was in many ways the nerve center of Negro League baseball. So it’s fitting in some way that Chi-town play host to an event celebrating the man who’s mostly responsible for the revived interest in the Negro Leagues.

Also, since I live in Chicago, all NotGraphs readers who attend the Buck O’Neil gala are welcome to stay in my home and drink my beer.*

(* – Although my love for all of you is both boundless and without bound, this is absolutely not true. Hope to see you there, though.)

It’s hazardous work we do. I mean, go spelunking through the Google news feed using “baseball” as your search term and you can turn up some unfortunate stuff. Mostly, I attribute this to the fact that the baseball bat — otherwise a totem of childhood innocence — can double as a murder weapon or sex toy. So every now and then you run across a tale of felonious assault, or, on those occasions when I find myself deep into an image search for “baseball bat,” (disclosure: this has happened exactly once) you can stumble upon photos that afterward make you want to boil your computer. Such is life.

Anyhow, this is the sort of thing that led me to this wondrous find, which has nothing to do with baseball save for this:

She was fearful for him and followed. She reported that she saw him “levitate” for about 10 feet across the room. She feared he was going to go over the balcony, so she shoved a table across the door.

He picked up a knife and she defended herself with a curtain rod, she said. Then she grabbed a baseball bat. He began chanting “Red, green, go” over and over and “flying” around the room, she said.

He was flailing his arms and hit her, the report states. She struck him with the bat, she said. He began speaking in a language she didn’t understand.

By the way, the headline, which, in the full light of the story, is as understated as an English butler, is: “Man’s Behavior Turns Strange.” Yes, it seems it did.

I’m fond of using the “Apropos of Nothing” category. Sometimes I damn well earn it.

So Ty Cobb’s great-grandson, who’s named Ty Cobb, plays hoops for Occidental College in Los Angeles. That’s cool. Young Cobb was also a heavily recruited left-handed pitcher in high school, but, well, let’s say he doesn’t share Great-Gramps’s enthusiasm for the most sacred of human endeavors:

“My heart wasn’t in it,” said Cobb, who is averaging 3.1 points and 2.9 rebounds in 13.6 minutes off the bench for Occidental. “In fact, I almost quit baseball several times. Basketball has been my favorite since I was really young. It’s always been what I wanted to play. It’s my true love.”

Given what we know about the original Ty Cobb’s competitive zeal and dedication to craft, don’t be surprised if he rises from the grave, kicks down the gates of the Rose Hill Cemetery and zombie-shuffles his way to So Cal, all to hand-deliver a vigorous spanking to the spawn of the spawn of his spawn. Or maybe the original Ty Cobb is merely smiling on approvingly, proud of his great-grandkid’s sense of individuality and quiet defiance. Probably the latter.

Then there’s this from Ty Cobb v2.0:

“It’s kind of a double-edged sword,” Occidental’s Cobb said of his name (he doesn’t share a middle name with his great grandfather). “Sometimes it’s cool. But sometimes I get a lot of unfair comments. Some people will say that Ty Cobb was a bad guy and he was a racist. I always have to explain to them that’s not true.”

Yeah, that’s got to get old. I don’t know whether Cobb was racist relative to the low standards of the times (after all, if, like me, you’re a board-certified white person of a certain age, then your great-grandpappy was probably on the racially insensitive side), but that has nothing to do with Occidental’s Cobb.

On this point, the lessons of Avenue Q are as penetrating as ever …

I got to thinking: how much damage could I do to a major-league offense? I don’t mean some idealized version of my “wildest dreams” self. I mean me as I exist within the disappointing constraints of reality. Thanks to the way-cool lineup analysis tool over at Baseball Musings, I can take a stab at this.

The operating assumption … I didn’t play baseball past the ninth grade. I had a pretty good line-drive stroke, but because there was no loft to my swing I didn’t have a lot of power. I drew a lot of walks (never mind that this was mostly because I was scared of the ball and preferred to stand in the demilitarized fringe of the batter’s box with lumber on shoulder) and could run the bases well enough. Take those modest skills and throw in the fact that I soon turn 39 and put me up against major-league pitching, and you have a hitter that challenges the boundaries of incompetence. How bad? I don’t really know, but I’m assuming at the plate I’d be half as good as the worst hitting pitcher in baseball. Last season, that was Hiroki Kuroda who “hit” .036/.070/.036. So I’ll give me a batting line of .018/.035/.018. That’s something like one seeing-eye Texas League-er or instance of charitable score-keeping per month. Let the free-agent bidding commence!

On that point … Even in the universe of the hypothetical I can’t fathom playing a defensive position. Doing so at anything above the rec-softball level would yield an outcome too horrible to contemplate. I am a DH. Also, I live in Chicago and don’t feel like relocating, so I’ll be DHing for the White Sox and necessarily taking Adam Dunn’s job. I’ll be sure to run hard out of the box so people like me.

Anyhow, here’s what happens … I took those Bill James projections of ours and plugged them into the lineup tool. The Sox’s lineup plus me at DH, using the worst possible batting order (an arrangement that always entails my batting leadoff), scores … 3.54 runs per game. That’s not good!

And at what cost? Give Dunn his job back and escort me — bloodied and shamed — off the premises, and the Sox, using the best possible lineup, score … 5.26 runs per game. The difference? Over the course of a full season, the Dunn lineup would outscore the Perry lineup by, oh, roughly 280 runs.

Conclusion: I suck!

The holidays compelled me and mine to travel by plane, and traveling by plane always means I drink deeply of SkyMall, the first and last word in consumerist porn. Although SkyMall is always rich with absurdities, nothing I ever find will top what you see above. And what you see above is a miracle called the Brobdingnagian Sports Chair.

The person you see sitting in the Brobdingnagian Sports Chair is, lest you think your eyes deceive, a grown damn man. The chair, you may surmise, is stupidly large. Why? The Skymall write-up says (yes, I actually tore out out the ad and kept it — also to be found in this issue: a robot tarantula and a plastic zombie designed to look like it’s punching its way out of a shallow grave underneath your garden!):

“… The portable chair that elevates your stature at any sporting event … Measuring 5 1/2′ tall, the chair is certain to provide stadium seating at any venue, and its 9′ sq. seat affords ample room for full-body gesticulations … The lofty seat elevates the feet well above the ground, where they’re free to dangle and sway instead of merely floundering in dirt or sand … Step stool not included.”

I have no words. Nonetheless … “full-body gesticulations”? Mostly, I feel sorry for the poor bastards seated behind this guy. And if he’s at a Little League game, then I most assuredly feel sorry for his kid. There’s no surer way to embarrass your spawn than to show up at one of his games with a sprawling throne that looks like it was designed for a minotaur with a glandular disorder.

None of this, however, is to say that the Brobdingnagian Sports Chair isn’t awesome. Because it obviously is.

If I’d been around these parts two years ago when Dock Ellis passed, then I would’ve posted this back then. Since I wasn’t, I’m posting it now. And what follows, friends, is baseball greatness captured by cinematic greatness …

Most resonant line: “What happened to yesterday?”

Damn, Dock, what did happen to yesterday? Actually, guys and things like Dock Ellis happened to yesterday, which is partly why everyone loves and is haunted by the yesterday of his or her choosing.

Oh, and the hair-curlers thing you no doubt observed and momentarily cherished is not some sort of directorial flourish …

Bowie Kuhn, who didn’t seem to like anything, predictably didn’t like Ellis’s curlers look, which, it would seem, was just a rolling pin, bathrobe and terry-cloth slippers away from something greater … Anyhow, Kuhn decreed from on well-groomed high that Ellis cut it out and affect a more baseball-y appearance. And then Dock: “They didn’t put out any orders about Joe Pepitone when he wore a hairpiece down to his shoulders.”