This weekend, in what has become a self-compensatory tradition, I went to my local sports cards merchandiser and purchased a large box of baseball cards. Sadly, I learned that this particular box contained special types of baseball cards called “football cards” and “basketball cards”, some bearing titles like “Beam Team” and “X-Cite” and “Sky Pilots”. Needless to say, I gave these cards the attention they deserved, stacking them neatly on the curb outside a Seven-Eleven while waiting at a red light.

Reaching home, I took a seat on the couch, threw on the soundtrack to the 1980s version of Metropolis, and prepared myself for a healthy dose of Opening Day nostalgia. Instead, my cards slapped me in the face with the force of a hundred Bob Hamelins. Among my prize were such Debbie Downers as these:

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Quite some time ago, Robert J. Baumann, Carson X. Cistulli and myself engaged in a podcast entitled NotGraphs Staff Meeting. During said meeting the three of us touched on various subjects, but the topic that I found most interesting was a discussion on the literary craft.

As much as anyone can be terrible at anything, I am terrible at podcasting, my voice sharing at least a few properties with rusted screen doors. So, shamelessly ripping off a tool employed by Eric Nusbaum and Ted Walker at Pitchers & Poets, I asked Robert if he mightn’t like to engage in a kind of low-fi podcast, using actual written words to convey our thoughts and feelings. Herein lies said conversation.

Patrick: So let’s begin. Do you consider yourself a writer?

Robert: I probably don’t consider myself a writer. Part of that is because I’m not over hating myself yet — I don’t have confidence in anything I do. I don’t think of myself as “good enough” to call myself “a writer.” But that’s the more boring part of it.

The other part is maybe a bit more objective, and it stems from the fact that I have known a lot of writers, in different contexts. And the people that I take seriously as writers — whether they’ve had publishing success or not — they’re not people that I have a lot in common with in terms of writerly habits.

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Here is the deal, internet. 99% of the time, your fickle, cheezburger-ridden attention span is a thorn in my side, sometimes causing you to have forgotten something I’ve written while you’re still in the process of reading it. But not today! These are the golden times, the week before the season, where I as a Responsible Internet Journalist Figure can say anything I want about anything, and you will praise me for bold vision and keen insight. This, dear reader, is prediction season.

But you don’t want predictions. You want bold predictions, so bold that if my predictions were a barbecue sauce, they would melt through the meat, through the bone, through your fingers and the plate and the floor and the earth’s very crust itself with its spicy, spicy hubris. And I am nothing if not your faceless, linguistic slave. So partake – delicately, one or perhaps a fraction at a time – these bold predictions for the 2013 season.

(Other NotGraphs Bold Predictions: Jeremy / Bradley)

1. On Tuesday, May 21, the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Aaron Hill will face reliever Rex Brothers of the Colorado Rockies in the eighth inning. On the fifth pitch of that at bat, Hill will be thrown out on a grounder to third base. You will have forgotten this prediction by then. Read the rest of this entry »

Some nights I don’t feel like writing. I sit in the dark listening to the furnace and staring at the pale white of the open Word document, and I wonder if I’m ever going to write again. I always think of Jim Bouton in Ball Four, examining his own arm as if it’s a foreign object, trying to count the pitches left in it. How many words do I have left in me?

I’m guessing Ring Lardner probably felt much the same way.

Lardner died seventy-nine and a half years ago, and published his most famous novel ninety-nine years ago. His work rarely saw a second printing in his lifetime. He was close friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, met Hemingway but didn’t get along, drunkenly danced on a lawn to try to get Joseph Conrad’s attention. Mencken admired him, Woolf praised him. He’s mostly forgotten now, just like Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser and most of pre-war American writers, men and women who lived in too quiet a time.

Fitzgerald bemoaned this fact in his eulogy, “Ring”, in which he writes:

“During those [sports-writing] years, when most men of promise achieve an adult education, if only in the school of war, Ring moved in the company of a few dozen illiterates playing a boy’s game. … A writer can spin on about his adventures after thirty, after forty, after fifty, but the criteria by which these adventures are weighed and valued are irrevocably settled at the age of twenty-five. However deeply Ring might cut into it, his cake had exactly the diameter of Frank Chance’s diamond.”

Perhaps this is what caused the disquiet I felt as I read Lardner’s You Know Me Al on a flight to Arizona to meet my younger, more intelligent and far more focused colleagues. I read the book in two hours, after promising to put it down at the end of every chapter. It’s a comedy, in the sense that Don Quixote is a comedy: one in which we are meant to laugh at the main character, but find the target of the satire too universal, too personal to take any great pleasure out of it.

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Zizzy alongside FanGraphs’ own Matt Klaassen (last known photograph)

You went to a baseball game. After all, it was a fine day, you were visiting for spring training. Why not go to a baseball game, you thought? You couldn’t think of why not. And because of that, Zizzy, The Cincinnati Spring Training Mascot, is going to find you and murder you.

As you entered the ballpark and purchased a souvenir plastic cup of soda for five dollars, Zizzy saw you. Zizzy saw you, and he smiled, because he always smiles. But he was also pleased. After all, it was ninety degrees out, and the refills on the souvenir cups were only a dollar. That’s a good value. Zizzy admires a keen sense of finance.

But then as you reached the concourse you saw George Foster. George Foster was signing autographs for ten dollars under a tent, sitting alone. You saw him and made a joke about George Foster. What was the joke? You don’t remember. Something offhanded, something small. But Zizzy saw you. He was there and he took note of it.

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As spring winds down, it’s time to get you updated on the weaknesses of the spirit as well as those of the flesh. Here’s the latest news:

Jerry Hairston blames his recent slump on a piece of advice from his childhood that has recently taken root and developed into a larger problem. “My little league coaches encouraged me to ‘be the ball’, and it made a lot of sense,” he told reporters after a recent spring training game. “But the other day I started thinking about it, and I realized I really was the ball. I mean, basically we’re part of everything, right? I’m me and the bat and the ball and [Rockies pitcher Jhoulys] Chacin all at the same time. It gets a little confusing.” Hairston has decided to go on the 15-day DL to find himself.

Meanwhile, Red Sox prospect Xander Bogaerts admitted that a brush with the teachings of Heraclitus had interfered with his learning curve at the plate. Having discovered the maxim that change is the only constant in our lives, and that “we never step into the same river twice,” Bogaerts reported difficulty with pitch recognition, having no deductive experience to apply the spin and location of each pitch to. When asked how he planned to deal with the problem, Bogaerts replied, “I’m not sure I can, bro. But luckily, even though every pitch is a new pitch, every Xander Bogaerts will be a new Xander Bogaerts. So let’s hope that dude knows what to do when the time comes.”

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Health can be confusing! Sometimes you feel healthy when you’re actually not, and other times you don’t feel healthy and your body actually is but your brain is betraying you by saying it isn’t. Even though your brain is part of your body, which makes it even more confusing. And that’s not even including the pineal gland, which houses our soul and regulates our sleep patterns. I mean, yikes, right? That’s why I, Dr. Mitch Williams, M.D., am here to answer your questions about healthiness.

Q: I’m a college pitcher, and after my last start my arm was feeling sore. What should I do? Do I just wait, or is there a way to speed up the healing process?

A: Pain is jut your body telling you that it’s disappointed in you. The key to overcoming pain is to repeat the motion that caused the pain, and doing it harder, and more suddenly than you did before. This stretches out the muscle cells and allows life-giving aether to enter the nuclei. This makes them stretchier, which in turn lets you throw harder and more suddenly than you could before. It’s like a cycle of success!

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The world is still trembling, one imagines, at the scientific discovery the present author made on these very pages on June 6, 2011. In said article, the illustration in which I reproduce here because you are assumedly too lazy to click a link, it was established that the offensive performance of a baseball player was correlated with the length of his last name.

The Chinese Baseball Club of China has taken this inefficiency to heart and elevated it to heretofore unheard of letter-to-name ratios. For a recent but specifically unspecific WBC contest, they wielded the following starting lineup:

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If you’re an American resident between the ages of 18-49, it’s statistically probable that you’ve played Apples to Apples, the perfect board game for every unambitious party or evening with extended family members.

It’s somewhat less likely that you have played its evil twin, Cards Against Humanity, which replaces the amiable fun of the original with blasphemy and gall. Cards Against Humanity is a visceral experience, the board game equivalent of a Jackass movie. It should, in the author’s opinion, be experienced at least once, regardless of the reader’s personal idiosyncrasies and hang-ups.

Cards Against Humanity began as a humble Kickstarter project fashioned by a core group of a dozen high school alumni, and funded by a hungry Internet.

But said Internet is never satisfied; it demands more. For this reason I present to you my own shameless rip-off, foolishly spilled out into the public domain for anonymous plagiarism: Athletes to Apples.

The rules are similar to Apples to Apples: one player, the “judge”, flips over a card with the name of a baseball player. The rest of the table looks through their own cards, which contain adjectives, quotations, and pejoratives, to select the one they believe the judge will select via free association. Whoever picks the best card gets a point. Continue playing until about fifteen minutes after you are completely sick of the game, or until the alcohol has rendered you unconscious.

(The exception to this operating procedure is when a judge flips over the “Boog Powell” card, wherein he or she immediately and silently rises, flips over the table, takes all the beer out of the host’s fridge, and leaves.)

You too can make your own cards on Cards Against Humanity’s website, thanks to the Creative Commons License. Do so, and share them! Improve society!

I grew up an only child in a quiet neighborhood filled with evergreens and retired people. With few children my own age nearby, I devoted much of my time and energy into devising means of entertaining myself. There were swamps to explore and forts to build during those rocket summers, swings to be swung. But also, armed with an endless supply of thrift store equipment, I hurled myself at every sport imaginable. I played the part of athlete, broadcaster, general manager, statistician, and commissioner all at once, for both sides.

Not every sport was equally viable for one player. Basketball worked well enough, though football was a near disaster. (On a given play, I would hike the ball to myself, drop back, throw the ball into the air, run under it, make the catch, and then proceed to tackle myself.) I talked my parents into letting me dig one golf hole in the middle of our yard, and then set up a course by arranging eight tees around it in each compass direction. My parents even bought and set up a tetherball pole in the driveway in what I can only imagine was a cruel and well-executed joke.

But my favorite sport of all, as now, was baseball. Of course, my Graig Nettles-signed wood bat was still too heavy as a little kid, so I turned to the svelte yellow cylinder of the wifflebat. I spread out four Frisbees, which I assume my parents gave me to play with on days with exceptionally strong headwinds, and stood at the plate, bat in my right hand and ball in the left.

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