We have, as you may be aware, reached the latter weeks of June.  It’s a time when a young man’s fancy lightly turns back away from love.  Youths of all ages escape from their brick-lined educational prisons, and celebrate their freedom by devoting themselves to console video games and working at fast food restaurants.  Finally, it’s that magical time of year when hitting coaches are lined up at the guillotine, sacrificed in the name of organizational change and statistical deviation.

Three men have already been led into the abattoir this season.    John Mallee lost his post with the Florida Marlins, replaced by a man in Eduardo Perez who has no coaching experience on any level.  Former corporate mouthpiece Edwin Rodriguez described him thusly: “…he doesn’t have much experience at teaching, as a coach, but he played in the big leagues for 13 years, so I think that’s good enough.”  Logan Morrison was so enraged by the move that he devoted more than 140 characters to his wrath.  Fortunately, as we can all agree, the move solved all of the Marlins’ problems instantly.

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(Full disclosure: purchased at a Goodwill for $1.49.)

For years in the late 80s, Classic sold trivia games that “played like the real-life game of baseball”, especially the part of the game when the pitcher spins a spinner and then asks the batter a trivia question.  This led to some exciting showdowns, such as the moment when Dennis Eckersley asked Kirk Gibson a question that happened to be about Gibson’s own childhood, culminating  in that famous limp around the basepaths. It is not impossible that this event led laid the foundation for the second golden era of the televised game show, running from 1999-2008.

Classic cleverly designed their board game by doubling the trivia cards as actual baseball cards, thus rendering them instantly collectible.  The format of my particular game set, series 3, bears early cards of such luminosities as Chipper Jones, Frank Thomas, Adam Hyzdu, Alex Fernandez, and Nolan Ryan’s son Reid.  The card borders, a rich lemon with random navy tiger stripes, make 1991 Fleer look reserved by comparison.  Each card also leaves a helpful 3/8” autograph box on the bottom of the back of the card, because if you’re lucky enough to get an autograph from your favorite baseball player, that’s exactly where you’d want to look at it.

But enough talk!  You don’t come to NotGraphs to read.  You come to NotGraphs to play outdated trivia games with faceless internet writers.  So put on your imagination cap and play some trivia, using whatever spinner you happen to have near the computer.  Try your hand at the actual questions on the backs of these cards.  Answers and scores after the bump.

“Rookie” level questions (1 point):

(11) What is a no-hitter?

(68) How many balls are there in a 3-2 count?

(9) What are the foul lines made out of?

(62) Who is the “longman”?

“Double” level questions (2 points):

(91) I hold the All-Star game record for most sacrifice flies.  Who am I?

(89) I hold the All-Star game record for runs allowed in an inning.  Who am I?

(60) I was called “Buster” by my Yankee teammates.  Who am I?

“Triple” level questions (3 points):

(79) I caught Nolan Ryan’s 2nd no-hitter.  Who am I?

(86) I set a Baltimore opening day RBI record in 1990.  Who am I?

(45) I am the only ML pitcher to win games in 4 different Canadian stadiums.  Who am I?

“Home Run” level questions (11 points each):

(64) I am the Mariners all-time saves leader.  Who am I?

(69) Who became the 200th Toronto Blue Jay?

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Names, as I read once somewhere, are powerful things.  Without them, it’d be impossible to google yourself.

Ego-surfing is a basic American right, up there with drive-thrus and Words With Friends.  We deserve to know, at any moment, where each of us stands in the social order.  And yet many men, even among the celebrities who hit balls with sticks and throw balls past people with sticks, have had their identities stripped from them.  The men listed below are exceptional.  They beat the odds and became professional baseball players, only to become afterthoughts, exceeded not only in fame but in the very vocation they spent a lifetime training for.  It’s a tragedy when stories have been silenced by other, better stories.  Please take a few moments to mourn these forgotten semi-heroes through the power of hastily-wrought prose:

Randy Johnson, 3B

Search for “Randy Johnson Braves” on Google and the first site you’ll see is not poor Randall Glenn Johnson of Escondido, California, but an article about how the Braves let the other Randy Johnson get away, failing to sign him in 1982 as a fourth-round pick out of high school.  How unwanted can you make a man feel?  Randall was actually a pretty solid part-timer for the Braves in the early 80s, earning 2.3 WAR in three seasons before heading off to Japan.  Even his mustache is a strong, yet ultimately inferior, performance.

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Heaven and earth are enduring. The reason why heaven and earth can be enduring is that they do not give themselves to life. Hence they are able to be long-lived.

Therefore the sage puts his person last and it comes first,
Treats it as extraneous to himself and it is preserved.

Is it not because he is without thought of self that he is able to accomplish his private ends?

-Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter VII

Modern baseball is made of concrete and paper, glinting with pride and sweat. Earl Weaver is our Ayn Rand, the eternal opportunist: champion of a world where the individual and the society combine, and selfishness mingles with virtue. The victors rise to their rightful place, while the bones of Mark Prior and Dickie Thon gleam in the arid dust.

Gone are the days when the nameless uncarved block is but freedom from desire. We’re ruled by ambition rather than sacrifice, and the bunt earns -0.02 WPA.

And yet if justice truly existed in this world, selflessness would be rewarded. The colors and sounds in the video below would represent something that has actually happens, rather than the flickering of lights against the cave wall.

Happily, I can report that beauty does lie in incongruity and that two men in fact did find the Way. The first of these took place during the All-Star game of 1938. I will leave the story to the great John Lardner:

That seventh frame was most distressing to every loyal American Leaguer. McCormick greeted old Mose with a single. Lippy Leo Durocher laid down a pretty bunt in the direction of James Emory Foxx, the Mauler of Margate, Md., who had shifted from first base to third to make room Louis Gehrig.

Foxx charged in, fielded the ball, and threw it straight at Bob Feller, who was warming up in the American League bullpen, miles away. Nobody knows what Foxx has got against Feller, but he almost beaned him. While joe DiMaggio chased the ball, McCormick scored from first. And when DiMaggio let fly with unerring aim for the National League dugout, Durocher came prancing home.

Astros relief pitcher Brian Williams accomplished something similar to this feat on April 27, 1993, but because John Lardner did not write about it, I will consider this description sufficient.

Perhaps someone will once again find the Way. One can envision Durocher running, his eyes closed, at peace amid the cries and chaos. As Lao Tzu nearly said, the bunt home run is very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice, yet no one in the world can understand it or put it into practice. I know, it doesn’t sound right. But think about it for a while.

You may already be aware of this, dear reader, but alphabet discrimination exists.  People with surnames near the beginning of the alphabet own a slight but noticeable advantage over their late-alphabet colleagues.  They appear earlier in directories, leading to more phone calls.  They receive more applause at awards ceremonies and graduations, because people tend to get tired of clapping by the time the T’s roll around.  They even are more likely to receive tenure and Nobel Prizes, according to a study by Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv, because authors of collaborated work in certain fields tend to be recognized in alphabetical order.

The alphabet is important in baseball, too.  David Aardsma, despite the success he’s found in an eight-year career, is still best known for supplanting Hank Aaron as the first player listed in the alphabetical list of players.  This fact is the second sentence in his Wikipedia article. People are still upset by this.

But is there alphabet discrimination in baseball?  I collected the performances of every hitter in baseball history (this is an activity which sounds far more impressive than it actually is), organized them by surname, and averaged them by their hitting ability, as represented by FanGraph’s own fRC+.  The stunning and aesthetically pleasing result:

(Note: Each player’s career wRC+ is counted once, no matter how many seasons they played.  Since a superior player is more likely to last multiple seasons than an inferior player, the graph doesn’t average out at 100 even if the average player does.)

From this beautiful and concise graph we can draw several conclusions:

• The next player whose last name starts with X will be the greatest player whose last name starts with X… of all time.
• Having a last name beginning with a Q is the kiss of death.  In fact, the letter Q owes its recent success to the performance of Carlos Quentin; without him, the average wRC+ would be 76.
• Other than that, not much.

But why stop there?  Why not examine hitting ability based on something even more arbitrary, such as the length of a player’s last name?

Bringing up the rear there is America’s favorite Saltalamacchia, proud owner of a career .699 OPS.  But what’s surprising is the statistical significance of the data.  For you kids at home with the graphing calculators, the data sports a r-squared of .69, and it jumps to .78 if we boot out a certain busted catching prospect.

The causes of this, if any, lie in obscurity.  Perhaps players lose confidence when the PA announcer botches their name at home games; perhaps scouts are more likely to remember short names when scanning for talent.  Who can say?  The world is full of biases, swirling and eddying around us all.

I’d like to begin by sharing a little story, in light of Dayn’s earlier ruminations on the subject of jerseys. Once I found myself on the streets of Incheon, South Korea, ambling through the busy alleys and marveling at the pernicious weed that is capitalism. It was at this time that I came across a store stocked entirely with baseball jerseys. No knockoffs, these uniforms had stitched lettering and all the amenities one looks for in a piece of cotton. Among the three I chose was branded with the name “Kendall”.

When I returned home that night, I was shocked and dismayed to learn that the Pirates jersey was of the sleeveless variety. This was a risk I had not even thought to assess, and I swore to return to the shop and exchange it. But the store had vanished; it was as if the whole affair was some sort of monkey’s-paw cliché, and I would end up making eighteen wishes, each more damning than the last. After wandering the nameless streets we finally did find the store, decked out completely in basketball regalia. Would they exchange my armless jersey? I asked. No, they said. They did not sell baseball jerseys, they said. They sold basketball jerseys. I could not prove them wrong, and so to this day Jason Kendall’s name hangs in my closet.

I tell this tale not only in a desperate attempt to entertain, but also to raise a vital question: what, in 2011 terms, is my Pirates jersey worth? One must admit that it wields the benefit of insulating one’s shoulders and torso, if not the upper arms. The ethical question of sportswear is, I think, a tired one: we have had enough of people telling us whether it is acceptable for grown men and women to wear jerseys. The fan jersey now rests on the same cultural footing as Bud Light Lime, reality television, and the wave. Like it or not, it’s not going away.

Meanwhile, we live in a conflux where fashion will soon descend upon itself, consuming its own tail like an ouroboros. Everything will be both fashionable and unfashionable at the same time, and taste and irony will meet on the event horizon. We are not there yet. There are still some jerseys that fall between, and evoke neither the glory of success nor the wry wit of failure: the Chris Davis jersey, for example, or a Mets Brad Emaus uniform. But just as in life and The Room, if one sinks low enough (and patronizes thrift stores) one can find true brilliance. What better way to celebrate absurdity than a Mike Piazza Marlins jersey? Or an authentic Jeff Francoeur?

But what of Jason Kendall?  Was he good enough in his prime to merit recognition?  Was he awful enough in his thirties to be funny?  Should the jersey be permanently dirt-stained, to confer the appropriate level of grit and heart?  It’s a question each of you as Americans must decide.  And if you do think it’s worth wearing, I could probably find one to sell you.

What follows represents the first of hopefully many posts in these pages by Mr. Patrick Dubuque. Mr. Patrick (as he’s called by children of the American South) has contributed to various SB Nation sites (including Lookout Landing and Roto Hardball) and Pitchers & Poets — in addition to work that appears at his own site, The Playful Utopia. Perhaps Mr. Dubuque’s most noteworthy quality, however, is his ability to effect the voice of a 19th c. aristocrat with almost no effort — a trait much sought after in these pages.

Sometimes, there’s almost too much going on in a photograph. There’s the popped collar, a rebellious statement made by someone already forced to wear a late-80s Indians jersey. There’s the playfully cascading mullet. There are the eyes, staring either at a mime beyond the camera or, perhaps, the future. Floating above is the omnipresent visage of Chief Wahoo, whose toothy grin renders the most amiable man dour in comparison. Finally, Mr. Nichols appears to be wearing a pair of eyeglasses.

Nichols was a professional, workmanlike pitcher, one who obviously recognized the importance of reducing glare and expanding peripheral vision on the mound. He also understood the aesthetic appeal of accentuating one’s cheekbones. Such a pair of spectacles makes it nearly impossible, in fact, to judge the proportions of the rest of the face: is his nose too large? Are his lips too thick? We cannot compare them to anything, anything except the glasses. We have lost the essence of Rod Nichols behind these panes of glass. He hides in plain sight.

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