When we last saw Mark Reynolds, he was being complacent and inspiring an internet meme.

With one poorly/perfectly timed mouthful of sunflower seeds, hundreds of photoshops were born:

As it turns out, we may have been a bit premature in our judgments of Mr. Reynolds’s character. You see, recent .gifographic evidence via Orioles-Nation.com definitively shows him in a state of non-complacency:

In the ninth inning of Wednesday’s thrilling game against the Red Sox, Nolan Reimold hit a two out double to tie the game at three and Mark Reynolds went absolutely bonkers.

It appears that a mea culpa is in order. Mr. Reynolds, on behalf of everyone who drew conclusions about your character based on a single photograph, I apologize. BUT, on behalf of everyone who participated in perpetuating this meme by photoshopping that image of you into other photographs to humorous effect, I do not apologize. Those photoshops were hilarious.

Bouncing high five to Jordan Tuwiner of Orioles Nation for the master .giffery.

Every time we leave our homes, we face risks. If you are like me and you frequently bring your toaster into the bathroom in order to toast bagels while in the tub, you also incur significant risks while inside your home. But there is nothing better than a perfectly toasted bagel, so the reward justifies the risk.

Similarly, the convenience of being able to travel long distances in short periods of time justifies the risk associated with using any given mode of transportation. As a matter of fact, many people prefer to not even think of the risks when they, say, get in a car or mount their bike so as not to cause themselves unnecessary anxiety. Some, though, take comfort in the fact that the one-year odds of dying in a plane crash, for instance, are somewhere between 1 in 600,000 and 1 in 2,000,000 depending on the source you use.

So what is my point? On Wednesday night, the Tampa Bay Rays and the St. Louis Cardinals completed Wild Card comebacks for which the joint probability was 1 in 250,000, according to the brilliant actuarial minds over at Beyond the Box Score. We watched the whole thing unfold right before our eyes.

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Everyone should have a leitmotif. Like healthcare, food, clothes, and shelter, this should be considered a basic human right. Unfortunately, though, the vast majority of us are not lucky enough to have our presence announced musically (lest we take the task upon ourselves and risk looking mentally unstable by humming the same tune every time we enter a room).

A list of people who are among the privileged few to have leitmotifs:

1. Characters in films, television shows, and plays.

2. Professional athletes.*

*It should be noted that I consider professional wrestlers both of these things.

Indeed, there is perhaps no athlete to whom the leitmotif is more important than the closer in baseball. It has been scientifically proven that the last three outs of a baseball game are the hardest ones to get and it has also been scientifically proven that having a bitchin’ theme song is more valuable to a pitcher than any 100 MPH fastball when attempting to record these outs.*

*It should be noted that science has proven neither of these things.

Eric Freeman of the AV Club recent wrote a nice piece entitled “Prelude to a save: A closer’s guide to choosing the right entrance song,” which I missed when it was originally posted the week before last but was alerted to yesterday by this short post from the fantastic Grant Brisbee. Freeman provides the following rubric to assist closers in choosing the perfect entrance song:

-Pump up the crowd.

-Establish a brand.

-Leave the metal womb.

-Sound isn’t the whole story.

-Don’t pander.

-Know your source.

Naturally, this article got me thinking about heretofore unused songs that would make good leitmotifs. Below I have listed five such songs along with skillfully embedded youtube clips and the current closer for whom I believe the song represents the best fit.

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Breaking news, baseball fans: Marlins closer Leo Núñez is not who he says he is. In fact, it has recently been reported that Leo Núñez is not Leo Núñez at all:

MIAMI—
The Marlins on Wednesday placed closer Leo Nunez on the restricted list so he could return to his native Dominican Republic to clear up a few things. Namely, his name.

A league source initially said Nunez was not missing the Marlins’ final six games as a result of improper conduct. Later, the source confirmed Nunez’s premature departure was the result of an immigration issue.

The Associated Press citing two people with knowledge of the case reported Nunez’s real name is Juan Carlos Oviedo and is 29, a year older than his listed age. The report also said the Marlins had been aware of the discrepancy for months.

A club spokesman would not comment beyond acknowledging Nunez was moved to the restricted list and that he’d returned to the Dominican to take care of a personal matter.

Who or where the real Leo Núñez is remains unknown, but it appears fairly certain that he is not “Leo Núñez, Marlins closer.”  Regarding the identity “Leo Núñez, Marlins closer,” as one possibility we have Juan Carlos Oviedo, as noted above. Bo-RING. Thank goodness an “industry observer” has proposed a far more intriguing alternate possibility:

One industry observer said he didn’t believe this incident would impact Nunez moving forward, saying: “At this point in his career it doesn’t seem like a big deal. In reality, what is the big deal unless it turns out he is Fidel Castro in disguise.”

Mr. “Industry Observer” says this as if it is patently absurd. But let’s think about this rationally for a moment.

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I was all prepared to launch into a tenuously humorous explanation of the genesis of Peter Gammons’s latest mistweet. I was going to speculate that this tweet was actually intended to be received by Theo Epstein. Then, I was going to fabricate the text conversation between Epstein and Gammo. It would have looked something like this:

Theo (617-XXX-XXXX): Hey Pete

Peter (857-XXX-XXXX): Theo. What’s up buddy?

Theo (617-XXX-XXXX): Nothin much. I just need ur help wit sumthing.

Peter (857-XXX-XXXX): No problem.

Theo (617-XXX-XXXX): So Marie is sayin she wants 2 go on a cruise after the season is ovr. I was wonderin which company u think is the best cuz I kno u n Gloria have been on a few.

Peter (857-XXX-XXXX): Do you want to know what I really think?

Theo (617-XXX-XXXX): Hell yea!!!

Peter (857-XXX-XXXX): Come November there will be lots of rich people willing to take you on their yachts

But then it dawned on me that Gammons’s tweet looked very familiar. I had definitely seen it somewhere before. But where?

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This past weekend, I had the great honor of sitting down with two-time Academy Award nominated actor and star of the upcoming film “Moneyball,” Brad Pitt. In the film, Pitt plays Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, who used unconventional methods for evaluating baseball talent to construct a playoff team on a very limited budget. Incidentally, at approximately $47 million, the cost of making “Moneyball” was, in fact, higher than the payroll of the 2002 Athletics. So that’s something.

We talked about everything from his career, to sabermetrics, to his family life. 

Eric Augenbraun: Thanks so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule, Mr. Pitt. Before we start, I just want to say I’ve seen all of your movies and I’m a big fan of your work. 2005 sticks out in my mind as the year of two great snubs: Johan Santana losing the AL Cy Young Award to Bartolo Colon and you losing the MTV Movie Award for your performance in “Troy.”

Brad Pitt: Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you. To be completely honest, I had forgotten I was nominated for anything for my role in that.

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In which I shamelessly stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before me by inserting Dick Allen’s name into various works representative of the Western Canon, thus adding to those various works the patina of blessedness.

Today’s episode: Dick Allen awakes one morning from uneasy dreams and finds himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

Hardly was he well inside his room when the door was hastily pushed shut, bolted, and locked. The sudden noise in his rear startled him so much that his little legs gave beneath him. It was his sister who had shown such haste. She had been standing ready waiting and had made a light spring forward, Dick Allen had not even heard her coming, and she cried “At last!” to her parents as she turned the key in the lock.

“And what now?” said Dick Allen to himself, looking around in the darkness. Soon he made the discovery that he was now unable to stir a limb. This did not surprise him, rather it seemed unnatural that he should ever actually have been able to move on these feeble little legs. Otherwise he felt relatively comfortable. True, his whole body was aching, but it seemed that the pain was gradually growing less and would finally pass away. The rotting apple in his back and the inflamed area around it, all covered with soft dust, already hardly troubled him. He thought of his family with tenderness and love. The decision that he must disappear was one that he held to even more strongly than his sister, if that were possible. In this state of vacant and peaceful meditation he remained until the tower clock struck three in the morning. The first broadening of light in the world outside the window entered his consciousness once more. Then his head sank to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath.

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

Our appreciation of baseball history is inextricably linked to statistics. While some may attempt to deny the centrality of the quantifiable in baseball, these people would be lying if they said that they don’t remember players like Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron for their respective statistical achievements. Indeed, the fundamental reason we remember players like Cy Young and forget players like Cy Morgan is the former’s statistical achievements and the latter’s lack thereof. True, some statistics are more useful than others for discerning how productive a player truly is, but generally speaking, “traditional statistics” do a decent job of highlighting the players that are worth remembering. And the great thing is that all of this information is only a quick internet search away.

Unfortunately, though, not all professional baseball players throughout history have the benefit of a lasting, easily accessible record of their on-field accomplishments. In particular, I am speaking of the Negro Leagues. We know they were great assemblages of talent, and to some, the exclusion of black players from the Major Leagues acted as a sort of “performance enhancing drug” to the game’s “Great White Legends.” But the woefully inadequate statistical record of Negro League play means that for the last century or so, we have been deprived of a richer understanding of it and the history of baseball in general. Although we may each know at most a handful of Negro Leaguers, for the most part we don’t really know what they did (let alone what they did relative to their contemporaries).

I am happy to say that someone is finally here to fill this historical lacuna. Today, the fine folks at Seamheads.com have launched their Negro Leagues Database, which begins the arduous task of compiling the long-lost statistical records and biographical information of Negro Leaguers — rescuing them from the dustbin of history to which they have hitherto been relegated.

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It’s becoming increasingly evident that Peter Gammons’s “pocket tweets” are not actually pocket tweets at all. Unless Gammons’s pocket lint is able to form sentences like “You’re really helping me” and “I was worried it was the pancakes,” the more likely explanation is that he is unable to distinguish his phone’s texting interface from its Twitter client. Thus, rather than being sent discreetly to his intended interlocutor, these messages are broadcast to his nearly 100,000 followers.

Indeed, one of the great joys of Twitter is being there when one of these gems is set free into the internets. Gammons’s latest mistweet (presented for your consumption in LOLGammo form above) is like a puzzle and a joke all tied into one. The statement “Buy her a washing machine” raises a few questions:

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Without divulging too much about my personal political sympathies, I will admit to being an admirer of Noam Chomsky. In addition to being a man of letters with an impressive oeuvre spanning a wide range of topics, he is a native Philadelphian — something with which I can identify.

This fact recently prompted me to wonder whether Noam Chomsky is a baseball fan and, if so, whether he is a fan of the Phillies, which would be just another reason to add to the already long list of reasons that he is a cool dude. Well, as it turns out, Noam Chomsky’s brain is too big for him to be beholden to any one team. Thanks to the power of Twitter, I was pointed to this transcription of an exchange from his 1993 appearance on the talk show Pozner and Donahue (my efforts to locate video of the show were unsuccessful) in which he discusses the cognitive dissonance that is inherent to being a sports fan:

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