Jack McKeon hasn’t been the boss for a day and the man is already making power moves. In the first official act of his second term as the manager of the Marlins, McKeon benched Hanley Ramirez for last night’s game against the Angels. Benching Hanley Ramirez is, after all, the way for a Marlins manager to declare his arrival, sort of like the new President and First Lady refurnishing the White House.

Fox Sports has the report:

When asked if there was a particular reason the star shortstop was not in the lineup, McKeon reportedly said, “Yeah, because I didn’t put him in there.”

But team sources told The Post McKeon made the move after Ramirez arrived late for a 3:30pm local time team meeting.

In eighth grade, I had a Spanish teacher named Mr. Ehling. He was a young guy and it was his first year as a teacher. He seemed smart, earnest, and certainly more than capable of conveying the subject matter to thirteen-year-olds, but he had a fatal flaw: he was a nice guy. I think he sincerely believed that he could be friends with every student in the class. Somewhat relatedly, he was a total pushover. Middle and high school students can sense pushovers like a shark does blood in the water, and they strike just as quick.

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BleacherReport.com is much maligned in certain quarters of the sports fan internets. In my opinion, the ridicule heaped upon this humble web endeavor has reached truly absurd proportions. If not necessarily a source for quality sports analysis and discussion, BR is absolutely a source for quality art.

With only minimal effort (and alterations), I have uncovered some of the more beautiful sports-related poetry you will ever read.

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In the ninth inning of Sunday’s AAA Norfolk Tides-Durham Bulls game, Tides manager Gary Allenson was overcome with the insatiable urge to travel. Thanks to modern technology, the whole episode is available online for repeat viewings.

Allenson’s journey was precipitated by a deep flyball off the bat of Tyler Henson, which cleared the centerfield wall, but not the fence above and a bit behind it. By the ground rules, this is an automatic double. Mr. Allenson was believing none of it, and went to see for himself.

Over at IndyWeek.com, Adam Sobsey’s excellent recap (which I encourage you to read) of the night’s events has the money quote:

“My point with the umpire, when they changed it to being a ground-rule double, was: How do you know that’s the ball [that Henson hit]?” Allenson said. “… That’s why I climbed the wall: maybe I could find a ball out there, too. Maybe there are five balls out there. Maybe I’ll find a ball that’s a little wet and I’ll rub it up and it’ll be dry.”

Some observations:

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Like my NotGraphs comrade Carson, I am a Peter Gammons pocket tweet enthusiast. I am also a firm believer in using images to convey emotion at key junctures in baseball games. Which made me think: Why not combine Peter Gammons tweets with images (of Peter Gammons) that can be used to convey emotions at key junctures in baseball games? It’s perfect! After all, there is a large untapped market for image macros on the web.

So, with that, I am proud to unveil to the world a select sampling of LOLGammos. I encourage you all to make a meme of it. Meaning: create two, three, many LOLGammos!

Old Favorites:

1.

Emotion: sadness/disappointment

Example of proper in-game deployment: Your team is down one run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. The bases are loaded and your best hitter at the plate. He works a full count and…strikes out looking.

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I idolized Lenny Dykstra. My first memories as a Phillies fan are from following their surprising, heavily mulleted, flash-in-a-pan 1993 season and the subsequent run to the World Series. As an impressionable six-year-old, I was drawn to Dykstra’s gritty (yes, I said it), seemingly fearless style of play. All of the things that induce snarkgasms from us statistically inclined fans when they are said or written by “old school” baseball commentators are the things I most admired in Dykstra — his leadership, his hustle, his heart, his “intangibles”. And, of course, it didn’t hurt that he was also the best player on the team. My naive six-year-old mind could not yet comprehend things like sociopathy, degeneracy, and performance enhancing drugs (apparently even fully functional adult minds couldn’t yet comprehend this).

So as a little leaguer in my very first coaches pitch YMCA league, I wore Dykstra’s number four. I begged to be put in centerfield. I dove for flyballs with reckless abandon. I slid hard into home. I chewed large wads of Bazooka and spit profusely. All because Lenny did it, and if Lenny did it, then it must have been right.

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What you see above is Cliff Lee’s “Players Choice Signature Series T-Shirt,” designed with input from the man himself, and you too can own one for just $24.99. According to the MLB shop, the design was “inspired by Lee’s love of hunting.” In the humble opinion of this blogger, however, your money is better spent elsewhere, as this article of clothing is an abject failure on each of two important fronts for evaluating such matters: form and function.

Form:

I am aware that beauty is believed to be fundamentally subjective, but this shirt tests the limits of that understanding. It is as close to an objectively hideous shirt as can possibly be produced. This shirt is so ugly, it looks at Pete Rose’s ugly jacket and feels self-conscious. This shirt is so ugly, it wouldn’t even sell at a thrift store in Brooklyn. This shirt is so ugly, it will be shipped in bulk to an impoverished country (along with the “Texas Rangers 2010 WS Champs” merchandise)…and it will be returned to the sender along with a note reading “We tried. Sorry…” In an epoch of human history when our fashion choices represent a very basic facet of how we define ourselves as individuals, there is simply no rational person who would want to be defined by whatever it is this shirt says. Okay, I exaggerate. Let me just put it this way: Cliff Lee is a master of FIPpery and xFIPpery. Sartorial aesthetics? Not so much.

But all is not lost, you see. An ugly shirt is not necessarily a useless shirt. Indeed, Bartolo Colon is hardly George Clooney, but the Yankees have found a use for him. This brings us to…

Function:

By the most rudimentary definition of a “shirt” — an article of clothing that covers the upper body — this one performs its function adequately. Because it is camouflaged, though, it is clear that this shirt aspires to be more than just any shirt. Say, for instance, you were to wear this shirt into combat (one possible use for camouflage, not that I endorse combat of any kind) to blend in with your surroundings. You would almost certainly be killed. The large red Liberty Bell right on your chest would both expose your position to the enemy and would provide him with a nice big target at which to aim. Even if you assume that the enemy possesses just middling marksmanship skills (on the comprehensive Ankiel–Zaytsev continuum), you can rightly expect to go home with a few more holes in your chest than you set out with.

Form and Function:

And finally, there is the nexus of form and function. Consider: you are in the woods hunting deer or some other medium-sized game. Consider also: you are stranded in those woods, having not had a substantial meal in a week, and the lives of you and your family depend on a successful hunt. You don the above shirt to attempt to gain a competitive advantage over your prey. Well, my friend, you’ve just made a deadly mistake. The deer have spotted your shirt and fled in horror at its sheer ugliness. You and your family starve. It is a great tragedy. At your funeral your mother says “He was a great son, but he always did have questionable taste in T-shirts”.

Conclusion:

This shirt is ugly and it will likely get you killed.

It’s a well-known adage of our time that NotGraphs contributors “are always hired in pairs.” Yesterday, we introduced the readership to Mr. Patrick Dubuque. Today, we present the debut of Mr. Eric Augenbraun. Readers of SB Nation’s The Good Phight will know Mr. Augenbraun as a contributor to that site under the handle FuquaManuel. Additionally, provided the UPenn website isn’t totally lying, it appears as though Mr. Augenbraun has done some serious reading and writing on race and labor in the US. He has not yet been — but will probably someday be — called “The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.” Welcome, Mr. Eric Augenbraun.

Greetings NotGraphs readers! I’m Eric, the new guy. I’m happy to join the team.

Upon signing on as a contributor to this fine web establishment, I immediately dug up my old baseball card collection, as I know my new NotGraphs colleagues have a special passion for old baseball cards. Sifting through the shoebox full of them, there were mustaches and spectacles aplenty, but nothing that truly grabbed me.

Until I encountered this:

I did a double-take. So many questions: I’ve had Malcolm X’s baseball card all this time and I didn’t even know it? Why did they make a Malcolm X baseball card? Why is there a picture of Delino DeShields on my Malcolm X baseball card? The reverse tells the tale:

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