“You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You’ve got to throw the ball over the damn plate and give the other man his chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game of them all.”
––Earl Weaver

“When rain interrupted matters for an hour and a quarter in the third, with the Cardinals ahead, 4-0, the bleacherites set up a chant of ‘Rain! Rain! Rain!’ hoping for a postponement. This didn’t work, so in the fourth and fifth, with the score now 6-1, the Tigers tried their own methods – long pauses for spike-digging and hand-blowing by the batters, managerial conferences, and inexplicable trips to the dugout, all conducted while they glanced upward for signs of the final and reprieving deluge.”
––Roger Angell, The Summer Game

Angell’s passage describes Game 3 of the 1968 World Series, where the precipitation had drastically altered the dominant strategies of both teams. The Cardinals, in a hurry to complete five innings, saw their odds for winning paradoxically increased with every out they gave away, while the Tigers, while in the field, had every reason to run the score up to a million to one and make fools of themselves in the process, as long as they failed to record an out.

1968 wasn’t the only year to see raindrops ruin a playoff game. The Braves led the Cardinals 1-0 in the first game of the 1982 NLCS, and were three outs from an official game, when the umpire called the game. They started over the next day, and the Braves ended up being swept. It wasn’t until 2008 that baseball finally decided to resume postseason games at the point of their postponement. Regular season games, however, are still bound by Rule 3.10 and the five inning rule, even those that have playoff implications.

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It’s November 26, and that means that the holiday season is upon us. Black Friday has passed, Cyber Monday is already in its twilight, and Sign a Former Rockies Starter Wednesday is just around the corner, which means that those of you who haven’t arranged your seasonal festivities had best put your lives in order. The helpful staff at NotGraphs, naturally, are here to help you with your baseball-oriented commercial/spiritual/socially-required Christmas shopping. Today, our focus lies in that outdated, impersonal, yet time-consuming art, the Christmas card.

Christmas cards contain the sole function of sharing unwanted information about yourself to people you would rather avoid communicating with directly. And despite the fact that said task is now completely fulfilled by Facebook, you may find yourself in need of an expensive piece of cardstock to convey the emotions you wish to appear to have. This can be a daunting task! Empathizing with other people is always a rigorous and demanding affair, even with people you know well and care something about. Fortunately, baseball is recognized for its ability to being people together and give them a common bond without providing any regrettably personal or intimate contact with your fellow man.

In this spirit, then, the marriage of personalized greeting card with the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball is long overdue. Simply click on these virtual samples below to read the heartfelt messages inside!

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It’s Thanksgiving Day here in Americaworld, a day to pause, reflect, and listen to people complain about the football game everyone else is enjoying. Here in Seattle, being thankful is a particularly simple task, considering that Mariners GM Jack Zduriencek gave the city the gift of Figginslessness this year. Yesterday, the sun even broke through the clouds for the first time in weeks, proving that nature herself can be a little heavy-handed at times.

It would be all to easy to heap additional scorn onto our diminutive disappointment. Instead, I’m going to do the opposite. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want to thank Chone Figgins.

I want to thank his bleary, myopic, failure-soaked eyes, eyes that looked past us and saw only the visualization of future success.

I want to thank his crumbling, bloodstained contract. He earned and will continue to earn nine million dollars per year, the equivalent of two or two and a half wins. He fell somewhat short of these benchmarks, to put it charitably. His ineptitude became the symbol for a franchise that seemed to do almost everything right and have it come out wrong.

The Mariners have not been three wins a season from contending. The issues have been manifold: Ichiro’s inevitable decline, the bloated corpse of Ken Griffey, Jr., Franklin Gutierrez’s extended episode of House. It was a bleakness that was different than the usual Mariners bleakness, because there was never any real target for blame: it wasn’t a spendthrift owner or a helplessly unqualified general manager to point fingers at. The moves looked good on paper. But we always had Chone Figgins.

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(Or: Great Moments in Reclining)

The game of baseball has taken unwarranted criticism over the centuries for being somewhat lethargic. To the untrained eye, the many pauses and activities that occur during said pauses, such as scratching, spitting, and the sewing of loose buttons, gives the viewer the impression that nothing is happening during these intervals. Hardly helping matters is the fact the authors of many of the great baseball confessionals, such as The Long Season, Ball Four, and The Bullpen Gospels, spend most of their books planted on their backsides. This, coupled with the endomorphism of Bob Hamelin, give the layman the false impression that baseball players are lazy, indolent creatures stuffed with sunflower oil, tryptophan and NyQuil.

Now stare at the visage of Dave Chalk. Here we see a man who is in all ways at rest, but it is a far different form of rest than the slanderers claim. His hat lies askew, hair cascades tremulously southward, his hand dangles lifelessly. But not his eyes. Dave Chalk is resting, but he is not relaxing. Knowing that the action of baseball is in the instant, the swing of the bat and the flash of the glove, Dave Chalk stores every iota of his energy, conserves the maximum of his talent and grace and purpose for that one moment. His eyes are the key: they take in everything, but they do not register worry or fatigue. Dave Chalk is simply waiting to be Dave Chalk, and he is content to be nothing in the meantime.

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The other morning, either by accident or out of a need to distract myself from the numerous laments of my daily life, I chanced upon Carson’s Wednesday edition of the Daily Notes.

Sipping my generic instant coffee, I allowed myself to be regaled by pastel-colored tales of hope and vigor, of prospects whose stories have not yet played out, and will all end well. I had achieved a healthy sense of emotional detachment, an almost zenlike prospecting trance, when my eyes fell upon a single name in the final leaderboard.

I am not accusing M. Cistulli of fabricating these statistics, although it’s of course impossible for them to be true. For this is a list of people who have theoretically done something well, and yet it includes Horacio Ramirez. Based on these premises and the deductive reasoning that renders logic possible, Socrates must be immortal.

Perhaps you smile at my vehemence, dear reader, but my heart is steadfast. Horacio Ramirez is not a man; he is a malediction. He is a negation of goodness. He may not be the only specter who haunts me, but it is his eyes that glow brightest when the lights go dark.

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The history of mankind is defined by conflict. All conflict is, in its distilled form, RBI Baseball.

Long before it became recognized on the fuzzy television screens of the late 1980s, RBI Baseball burned within the heart of every man and woman. It is the struggle to progress, to succeed, to vanquish. When Homer described the bronze armor of the Trojan heroes clattering in the dust, he was (without his knowledge) echoing the shrill whistle of the umpire calling the out, following the death rattle of the lazy fly ball. When Pushkin stood back-to-back with death on the frozen, miserable tundra, he too felt it. We all feel it.

How blessed are we, then, to have the actual RBI Baseball with which to express our will, rather than straining to conceive it through unbidden words and the swirling cloud of troubled dreams.

Of course, the power to wage total war upon the pride and identity of another soul is not to be taken lightly. As Clauswitz opined on the deadliness of the bayonet and Walzer with napalm, our generation has struggled to establish jus in bello – the law of war – the principles by which our struggle remains humane and honorable even in these desperate times.

The realists, of course, scoff at such niceties. When victory is at stake, they claim, any restraint is a show of weakness. But to descend down this path of logic is the way to madness: a world of mustard gas and atomic weaponry and slapping at the glove of the fielder during tag plays. No matter what our aims, no matter how desirable our goals, our restraint is what separates us from the beasts. So, too, should it be with RBI Baseball. Especially with RBI Baseball.

Though the world and various national governments have remained silent on this issue, the People have crafted their own set of rules regarding the honorable play of RBI Baseball. However, regional customs still exist; if you have any questions, the best practice would be to consult your local chamber of commerce.

RBI Baseball Code of Conduct

Article I: The NES Itself

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The moment I climbed off the school bus, I knew. The field of dry dusty green that usually stretched out before us was stained with a rainbow of colors, clumped together messily like blotches of oil paint. There were boys: fidgeting boys, boys chasing each other, playing tag among the admonitions of their mothers, boys punching each other in the shoulders, boys flashing yellow caps or maroon stirrups. The field looked as though it had been occupied by gypsies. It was that lowest point in any season: picture day. Picture day. A day to commemorate the playing of baseball by canceling our baseball practice and forcing us to care if the bills of our mesh-backed caps were curved correctly.

I picked my way through the chaos to my own team, the navy hue of the Normandy Park Royals, and collected my crisp new uniform. A second baseman by trade, I was pleased to discover a nine adorning my jersey, the same as worn by the soon-to-be great Gregg Jefferies. I hoped that some of his magic could be carried through that number to my own performance, if only a little.

After that came the waiting, as the photographers sent secret signals to the coaches around us. To stave off boredom, we tried a game of pickle with two extra mitts as bases; this worked well until an errant throw clocked a grade-schooler in the back of the neck. After that, and a few angry words, we were forced to sit and pick at the grass in silence.

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Today we mark the passing of time, as well as the latest edition of the Ironic Jersey Omnibus, where we examine the jersey as the highest and most subtle form of personal expression. For our latest installment we head west along I-10 on a musty Greyhound bus to the sunny climes of Los Angeles.

I admit: I’ve dragged my feet in moving on to the erstwhile Brooklyn Superbas. This is, I assure you, an entirely personal failing. After all, baseball writers, much like substitute teachers, survive by wielding an essential and almost entirely fictional sense of authority. It’s in this spirit, then, that I am forced to confess that I don’t really know the Los Angeles Dodgers, in the biblical or even the cramming-for-midterm sense.

I know of them, of course. I know that they play in the National League, where the pitching is easy, the fish are jumping, and the cotton, if cotton in this case represents the likelihood of an announcer overpraising the double switch, is high. And I’m not the only writer to lose their way amongst the palms; Roger Angell once complained that the fans needed Vin Scully’s voice broadcast throughout the stadium to tell the fans what they were looking at. It’s a place where the fans are said to arrive in the sixth inning and leave in the fourth. It’s all too easy, I think, to confuse the languid weather of L.A. with the temperament of its paying audience.

You may or may not know how we do things: usually I extract some half-forgotten names of yore, mine the pathos of the franchise’s most recent struggles, make a few pithy comments, hit publish, and go off to bathe in handwashed one-dollar bills. This is still possible! Between 1972 and 2012, with the exception of 2005 and 2006 (when Frank McCourt, in an attempt at nostalgia, stripped the names from the backs of his players), Dodgers lore is filled with the busted prospects and transient former heroes we’ve all come to love.

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Today might seem to be an odd choice for a Feast Day, what with it being Ethan Hawke’s birthday as well as the day that irrevocably alters the fate of the free world and other outlying areas. It is for this very reason, however, that the Mysterious and Capricious Fates have chosen this day to overshadow the life and work of one Oliver Martinez Perez.

Life: If all of baseball is a stage, then Oliver Perez has played many parts. For different people at different times and in different towns, he has served as the anointed, the prince regent, the schizophrenic millionaire, the tremulous Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, the disgraced World War One general, Robert Patrick melting silently in the lava at the end of Terminator 2, the drunken ronin who trips and falls on his own sword. Finally, at the age of 28, Perez disappeared in the middle of his own play, stage left, dropped from the tale like a forgotten character in a James Fenimore Cooper novel. The horizon, the sunset, and the inevitable rattlesnake bite were all assumed.

Two years later, Oliver Perez signed a contract to a major league roster for a sum that was nominally higher than the league minimum. Several days after that, you read these words about him.

Spiritual Exercise: Cease, for a brief moment, in computing all the terrifying permutations of the potential loss of your presidential candidate of choice. Instead, consider the long, wayward journey of Oliver Perez, and the psychological tendency of mankind to exaggerate the importance of the near future. While two wealthy men broker with the nation for authority, consider how little the world around you is altered: the universe cools down imperceptibly. The goddamned maple tree down the street is still shedding its horrible little leafy excrement all over your lawn. The sky is still dark by the time you get off work. Oliver Perez gets out lefties. And so it goes.

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“Let’s start with pins,” Adam Smith says.

“You want pins? The little metal things? Cost a couple of cents each? Sure. But let’s say you can’t go to the store. Let’s say there is no store, so you’ve got to make them yourself. Let’s say you have all the metal you need. How many pins could you make in a day? One? Five or ten, once you got good at it? But they’d be awful. You’d make really awful pins. You don’t even know how bad you are at pin-making, because you’ve never tried, but trust me, you’re even worse.

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