Back in July, Navin alerted NotGraphs readers to an exciting new baseball meme that was sweeping the web.

This image of Orioles third baseman Mark Reynolds snacking on sunflower seeds as David Ortiz rounded the bases after hitting a home run spawned numerous quite funny photoshops over at the Orioles Hangout message board.

Well, last night we got our first evidence that the “Complacent Reynolds” is beginning to take hold among other Major League third basemen.

Behold:

That is Astros third baseman Jimmy Paredes striking the pose as Brewers catcher George Kottaras — who, by the way, became the first player to hit for the cycle this season — trots home after his solo shot.

In the coming weeks we shall see if this is simply a coincidence, or if the “Complacent Reynolds” is, in fact, on its way to becoming the baseball version of “planking.”

NotGraphs calls on readers to be on the lookout for other players taking part in this fad and to address any photographic evidence to our hot hotline — not+tips (at) fangraphs (dot) com.

Tonight, as I was watching my beloved Phillies take on the Marlins at Sun Life Stadium I noticed something awry with MLB.com’s normally excellent Gameday application.

I call the attention of the NotGraphs jury to the below screencap:

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In my last post, I gave you my early picks in each league for the extremely uncoveted Least Valuable Player award. Today we take a look at my Top 4 picks in each league for the equally uncoveted Sigh Young Award, honoring those courageous men who put their elbows, shoulders, and faces on the line every day for your entertainment.

Let’s jump right in.

AL Sigh Young:

1. Brad Penny 

While Brad Penny’s inability to get strikeouts (3.74 K/9) doesn’t do him any favors against Major League hitters, it has apparently been a blessing in his dealings with members of the opposite sex. If she is in showbusiness and she is attractive, Brad Penny has probably been with her at some point.

I don’t understand it. He’s Brad freakin’ Penny. Which is to say: they can’t be with him because of his pitching abilities and they can’t be with him because of his looks (unless he has cornered to market on women who are into guys that look like ogres). There must be some piece of this puzzle that is missing. Fangraphs has a stat called E-F, which measures the difference between a pitcher’s ERA and FIP — a shorthand way of determining whether a pitcher has been lucky or unlucky. I would like to propose a new stat: E-D, or, ERA minus desirability of the pitcher’s significant other (on a 1-10 scale with 1 being most desirable and 10 being least desirable). Brad Penny currently has a 4.07 E-D. Brad Penny is getting extremely lucky. This run is almost certainly unsustainable.

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It’s that time of year again. As we get ready to turn the calendar over to September, another glorious season of baseball enters its final stretch. Indeed, if the baseball season were equivalent to rounding the bases, we’d presently be about one fifth of the way between third base and home. (I’ll leave it to the boundless imaginations of NotGraphs readers to determine, if the baseball season was a romantic interlude, what stage of hot-and-heaviness it would be in.)

It is the time of year that baseball scribes from around the country begin to pen their obligatory MVP and Cy Young ballot articles. It is the time of the year that we realize that the ballots of most baseball scribes make absolutely no logical sense. It is the time of year when a (particularly ossified) cadre of scribes become intellectual contortionists as they attempt to justify their decisions not to vote for the clearly most deserving player. What a special time of year!

Rather than wade pointlessly into the MVP discussion (that’s the job of my robot colleagues over at FanGraphs), I will use this space to join in the NotGraphs tradition of celebrating mediocrity with absolutely no concern for objective reality or standardized criteria.

Here are my Least Valuable Player picks to this point in the season:

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It’s becoming increasingly clear that Lenny Dykstra quite simply does not have (and possibly never has had) control over his actions. He is a degenerate sociopath with a history of compulsive behavior. In other words, he lacks any shred of a moral compass.

As I noted back in June when the news broke that in addition to his outstanding federal bankruptcy fraud charges Dykstra would face 25 new charges in Los Angeles, including grand theft auto, identity theft, and possession of a controlled substance, despite my childhood admiration of him, Nails’s slew of legal troubles has not been hard for me to take. Quoth I:

…Dykstra’s long, sad descent into ignominy has not shattered my world in any way. I know what sociopathy and degeneracy are now, and while I understand that we are presumed innocent until proven guilty in this country, I recognize that both labels could aptly be applied to Lenny. But for anyone who, like me, became a fan in 1993 and looked up to Dykstra and has been affected by this news, try to look on the bright side. Yes, he’s being charged on 23 felony counts, but think of all the things he isn’t being charged with: assault with a deadly weapon; murder; child molestation; torture; planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression; crimes against humanity; and so much more.

Well, today we can scratch off another despicable offense from the list of things he hasn’t been charged with. The Chicago Tribune reports on the latest sleazy charge:

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With his Aruba team facing elimination down 20-0 in the fourth inning of their Little League World Series game against Taiwan, 11-year-old Vaughn Bergen danced like he hadn’t a care in the world. And frankly, why should he have a care in the world? He’s 11 years old. He’s playing in the Little League World Series. When he leaves Williamsport, he will return home to FRIGGIN’ ARUBA (not a rich country by any stretch, I should note, but seated relatively comfortably between countries like Portugal and Cyprus in the GDP per c
apita power rankings).

Bergen’s father, Luigi (also a coach for the Aruban team), credits his son’s dance moves for the team’s late surge to cut Taiwain’s lead to just 17:

“The dancing thing got everyone smiling, and they started hitting the ball in that last inning,” Luigi Bergen said.

And they kept hitting. In Monday’s consolation game, Aruba beat South Dakota, 5-0. Vaughn knocked in the first run in that one.

“I was mad because we were not going to make it to the final,” Vaughn said when asked why he started dancing in the middle of Saturday’s game.

“My dad told me to enjoy myself, and I did.”

My only advice to young Bergen would be to continue to reap the benefits of his adorability while he can, because as soon as he hits puberty, all that this behavior will get him is a 7-minute on-air scolding from Bobby Valentine about how he’s an immature clubhouse cancer. 

For most of the season, 35-year-old Phillies journeyman bench bat Ross Gload has been nursing a bum hip which has severely limited his ability to play the game of baseball competently. He has walked in 2.4 percent of his plate appearances while striking out in 22.6 percent of them. Of his 19 hits, four of them have gone for extra bases (none of those four extra base hits were triples or homers). He currently sports a .238/.256./.288 slash line in 84 plate appearances. All of this he has done with a .311 BABIP. Yes, compared to his career norms, he has actually been a bit lucky on balls in play.

The solution would appear simple: put the aging, injured, and ineffective player out to pasture. It is something the Phillies could have (and should have) done over the last four months with precisely zero negative consequences. And yet, there he still is, on their major league roster. It is something that has puzzled me every time I’m watching a game and see him preparing to make one of his likely unsuccessful pinch hitting appearances. “Holy shit!” I exclaim. “Ross Gload is still payed paid (ed. note: derp) to play baseball for my favorite team. How can this be?”

Just yesterday, after watching Gload go 0 for 4 in a rare start at first base in place of Ryan Howard, I realized that the answer to my question has been staring me in the face all along:

Just look at those eyes! How can one possibly DFA a man who is so clearly anguished by a past of abuse and rejection? His face would not be out of place in one of those Sarah McLachlan “save the animals” commercials. If he were smart, Gload would use his sad eyes for coercive purposes. I can only conclude that Phillies General Manager Ruben Amaro, Jr. has on numerous occasions attempted to cut Gload loose, only to face a crisis of conscience upon looking him in the eyes. Here’s how I imagine the conversation going:

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1. Why do baseball players spit so much? I understand that players who dip need to spit lest they ingest tobacco juice and vomit all over the place. And I understand that this was likely the origin of the spitting pandemic in baseball. Players who didn’t dip wanted to fit in with their teammates nevertheless. But why do players who don’t dip continue to spit all of the time? Do they not even realize it? Is it at this point a Pavlovian response to standing on a baseball field? Is it one of those things, like kneeling for prayer, the meaning and origins of which are entirely lost on those who keep the practice alive? It must be, because if the people who spit profusely for no functional reason whatsoever thought carefully about how little sense this behavior made, they would probably stop doing it.

2. Why do fielders get the benefit of the doubt at second base but not runners? By this I mean: often when turning double plays, the shortstop or second baseman may never actually touch second base with control of the baseball. Almost always, though, the runner is called out. Why aren’t baserunners granted the same amount of leeway when, say, legging out a triple? Could you imagine if baserunners just had to come within a “few inches” of touching second base? It would be madness. Why not make the bases bigger as a compromise?

3. Why do TV networks assume that former players are any better positioned to be analysts of the game than someone who, you know, studies the game? The answer is simple: they don’t. Networks hire former players to be analysts because viewers recognize the former players and thus feel more comfortable watching and listening to them. The networks don’t give a shit whether what is being passed of as “analysis” is actually anything of the sort. The real problem is that in having this sort of faux legitimacy as analysts conferred on them by networks, former players actually begin to believe that simply by virtue of being a former player, their opinion that Jacoby Ellsbury is a stronger AL MVP candidate than Jose Bautista, for example, is valid. And thus, the idea that former players’ status as former players means any nonsense that comes out of their mouths should be accepted as analysis becomes widely agreed among former players and fans alike. This is not to say that there aren’t aspects of the game former players are better positioned to comment on, but far too often they are expected to comment on exactly the things they aren’t qualified to comment on.

NotGraphs readers who are also fans of science (or charlatans who pretend to be fans of science but have just seen that one episode of the Fox program House) are likely familiar with the heuristic known as Occam’s Razor. If you are unfamiliar with Occam’s Razor, it essentially states that when presented with two or more competing hypotheses, we should tend to the one that requires making the fewest new assumptions.

But I am not here today to talk about Occam’s Razor. I am here to introduce to you an exciting new heuristic that can help us better understand and even predict human behavior. Well, the behavior of one human.

It is called Bud’s Razor and I have defined it as such:

Given any issue on which he must make a decision, the wrongest decision is the one Bud Selig is most likely to make.

While this has been in the testing phase for the better part of a decade, the recent three game suspension handed down to Shane Victorino and only Shane Victorino for a brawl that saw Ramon Ramirez peg him with a pitch and charge the plate and saw Eli Whiteside (feebly attempt to) tackle Placido Polanco — which I accurately predicted using Bud’s Razor — has confirmed its usefulness.

Not quite convinced? Let us look at some test cases.

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It is with a heavy heart that I must report, based on the reporting of others, that Marlins utility man and former Braves All-Star Omar Infante has sustained a devastating injury. To wit:

MIAMI — Florida Marlins second baseman Omar Infante has broken his right middle finger diving for a grounder against the St. Louis Cardinals.

Infante appeared in pain but stayed in the game Thursday night after his unsuccessful attempt to field the grounder by Skip Schumaker. The ball deflected off Infante’s glove and rolled into right field for a two-run double in the third inning.

This injury will severely limit Mr. Infante’s ability to make obscene gestures and play baseball for a yet undisclosed period of time. As of now, we can only hold our breaths and hope for the best.

Many may believe that this injury can be understood only as a freak occurrence that can simply be chalked up bad luck. I reject that. Every calamity must happen for a reason, after all, and (as NotGraphs’ foremost expert on the supernatural) I believe that Omar Infante is yet another player to fall victim to the infamous “Curse of Old Hoss.”

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