1. The Randy Wolf of Wall Street
2. Quiroz The Great and Powerful
3. American League Hustle
4. Inside Rajai Davis
5. We’re The Shelby Millers
6. 12 Years A Brave
7. Vida Blue Jasmine
8. Austin Jackson Sea of Monsters
9. Jeff Francis Ha
10. Kal Daniels’ Billy Butler

A scroll around the MLB.com site introduced me, for the first time ever, to the 2013 GIBBYS, a set of 22 awards apparently being issued today (!), in categories such as Moment of the Year, Storyline of the Year, Oddity of the Year, and Cut4 Topic of the Year (for “the season’s top-trending moments, as chronicled by Cut4”). (No, I do not know what Cut4 is either.)

GIBBYS, “the ultimate honors of the industry’s awards season,” stands, of course, for the Greatness in BaseBall Yearly awardS. I now present what I’m hoping will be the 23rd GIBBY award, for most tortured attempt to create an award acronym. Here are my five nominees:

1. FOXXs: For Outcomes that are Xtra Xtra good
2. SPAHNs: Season’s Pitching Awards for Heart and also NumberS
3. MAYSs: Most Awards of the Year, given Seasonally
4. LEFTYs: Lifetime Evaluation by the Fans of Total Yearly Statistics
5. CLEMENS: Collective Lies regarding EnhanceMents, Eventually Negating Statistics… award.

Perhaps you have some of your own.

Have you read this piece about the Mariners’ dysfunctional front office?

If not, you should, then come back and read this.

Because whatever’s going on in Seattle is nothing compared to the problems of my fantasy team, where the GM and the owner are constantly butting heads, and the manager is often asleep at the wheel. Like the week that he literally forgot to set a lineup. Who does that? It’s not like the deadline changes every week. It’s always the same day, and one week, he just forgot. And who did he blame it on? Me, the owner. As if I’m supposed to micromanage everything that I do and can’t trust my fingers to go to the website and click some buttons without my brain getting involved. Ridiculous.

And then there’s the trades. We have my brain going one way, my heart going the other, and who’s to know what the right answer should be? My general manager is insisting that we need to dump Mike Moustakas, but the owner says no, we need to show loyalty, we need to keep giving him a chance. Moustakas is one of our guys, he says, and the heartless executives in the GM suite up in my cerebrum can’t just argue the statistics every time they want to make a decision that they know will be unpopular with the rest of me. Clearly no one’s on the same page.

Fact is, my general manager completely misrepresented his skill set when he applied for the job. He said he had a foolproof projection system. He insisted that he knew who was going to thrive and who was going to fail, who the unexpected breakout candidates were going to be… and I believed him. I looked at his spreadsheets and listened to his conviction and I believed he knew what he was doing. Turns out he didn’t. He fooled me. He fooled myself. I fooled him. We fooled oneself. Other pronouns, all in one sentence. Yes, all of them. Turns out my GM is no better than anyone else’s, and I don’t know why I keep him around except that he is connected to the rest of me by nerves and tendons. But that’s not enough anymore.

And the budget’s been a mess. I was promised at least $50 to buy pointless magazines and other pre-season publications, and what happened? The owner said no, at the last minute. “We need groceries instead,” as if that’s an excuse. Why can’t someone else buy my groceries and I can go buy a FanGraphs+ subscription? Oy, what a joke. My team is never going to go anywhere as long as the folks in charge remain in their jobs. I need to replace them before next season if I want a fighting chance.

“Morning, dear.”

“Morning, Paul.”

“What a sunny day. Did you check the mail?”

“I did, honey. Nothing too interesting. Nuclear power bill, new brain chips for the kids, some kind of subscription solicitation from the Chicago No-More-Sun-Times, and, oh, something from the White Sox.”

“The White Sox? What do they want? If they’re asking again about taking over for Robin Ventura, tell them there’s no way I can replace a guy who’s led them to 7 straight Galactic Series victories.”

“No, it looks like a check.”

“A check?”

“Yeah, from that contract back in 2013….”

“Ha, yeah, I remember that….”

“A million dollars!”

“Oh, a million. That’s cute. Want to use it for dinner tonight?”

“Sure– can I take another couple million from your wallet to cover the rest?”

“Yeah, go for it.”

“Ah, inflation.”

“Ah, indeed.”

The Boston Globe has it right:

“Jacoby Ellsbury was never soft, but deal with Yankees proves he was a mercenary.”

It’s pretty crazy that Ellsbury has now become the first free agent to ever sign with a team that offered him a lot of money. A shock to the system given that Prince Fielder signed with the Tigers in 2012 for a bag of baseballs and a daily smile. Or knowing that Manny Ramirez signed with the Red Sox in 2001 for three hot dogs and a pair of shoes.

I am not a fan of Jacoby Ellsbury, for entirely I-made-a-fantasy-baseball-mistake-with-him reasons (I dropped him in a 13-keeper Scoresheet league, in favor of Austin Jackson, right before his 2011 breakout season, because I am bad at fantasy baseball), but that doesn’t mean I think it makes him a bad person to take the $153 million being offered to him and run, run, run into Adrian Beltre and Reid Brignac. The owners are certainly “mercenaries.” It’s a business. This is capitalism. He has every right to be celebrated for being a mercenary, not criticized for it.

Unless, of course, the Boston Globe means the other definition of mercenary, and Ellsbury has been hired for service in a foreign army… in which case, good luck to him! Though I expect, given his history, he may get injured in combat.

Tigers fans seem upset about the Fister deal. But who can they blame? FanGraphs provides the answer, at least in this reader’s browser:

Truth is, that answer may not be so wrong. IF perhaps Dave Dombrowski had a cold… a fever… an illness clouding his judgment… maybe it is indeed the fault of mucus. And maybe Mucinex should be top of the list for general managers’ toolkit this offseason.

Then again, according to WebMD, Mucinex may cause nausea or vomiting. So maybe it’s not the answer.

Sharing space with the lawyers, doctors, and management consultants with quirky artisanal side businesses in this weekend’s New York Times weddings section was Shelby Miller, who married his biggest cheerleader. An actual former cheerleader for the Springfield Cardinals. I skim the weddings section each weekend (seriously) and am always excited when I can send my wife the link to a baseball-related article that she might actually read.

Highlight:

When she wants company for a pedicure or a tanning session, he joins her. “When Amy wants me to be a girlie guy,” he said, “I’m willing to do that for her. It’s fun.”

Surely no one in the locker room will be making fun of him for this. Surely.

2002: Theo Epstein works for the San Diego Padres; Kottaras is selected in the 2002 draft by the Padres.

2006: Theo Epstein, GM of the Red Sox, trades for George Kottaras.

2013: Theo Epstein, President of the Cubs, trades for George Kottaras.

Bad photoshop below.

Courtesy of Baseball Think Factory, I have discovered MLB.com’s online auction site. You or I have junk, we throw it away. A major league baseball team has junk, they try to sell it to the highest bidder. These are prime items here.

A game-used locker nameplate from the ALDS, for A’s third-base coach Mike Gallego.

A game-used baseball from a Henry Urrutia single.

Cubs coach Jamie Quirk’s team-issued pants.

Sign used during AL Wild Card game, Indians vs. Rays, labeling the “Still Photography Workroom.”

Rockies game-used lineup card from a random game in May 2009 (can be yours for just $1.00!).

And, finally, just for Thanksgiving, Brewers pitcher Jim Henderson’s turkey-shaped hand tracing.

Happy bidding!

Sorry for chiming in again so quickly after my last post. Usually I need at least a couple of weeks to recuperate after writing a few hundred words for Internet consumption, but this Jhonny Peralta signing really got to me. I have experience in the area of drug suspensions and attempting to find a new job afterwards. A few years ago I found myself terribly addicted to a complex cocktail of Ambien, Lexapro, and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream every night. My supervisor down at the content mill where I worked noticed that I was, well, a little zonked out most days, and getting a little too big to fit in my cubicle. He obviously couldn’t afford to move the wall out by a few inches — “you get two square feet, Joe, that’s just how it is in the real man’s workin’ world,” he would say, while counting his Bitcoins — so he put me on unpaid leave and told me to clean myself up. I stopped the Ambien and Lexapro cold turkey, switched from Ben & Jerry’s to some diet substitute, and spent the next two weeks awake, manic, and unable to leave the bathroom, because whatever was in that diet ice cream just made me go and go and go without end.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, so I came back to the office, and the content mill had gone out of business, replaced by a team of Tweeting robots trolling for page clicks, and my job was no more. And then — and here’s where the similarities to my situation and Peralta’s really become obvious — a man in a Cardinals hat said he wanted to take me as a prisoner for the next 4 years, and pay me in Cheerios.

Sudden withdrawal from Ambien may cause hallucinations. I think.

I did take steroids once. Cleared up a rash I got, from this one time I sort of volunteered at a homeless shelter. I didn’t realize it was a homeless shelter. And the volunteer coordinator didn’t realize I was homeless. The steroids gave me another rash, somewhere else, of course. I take steroids, I get a rash. Jhonny Peralta takes steroids, he gets $52 million dollars. They say money doesn’t buy happiness, but no one’s ever said they prefer a rash. So I think he wins.

I should check out that Cardinals fan’s Cheerios prison. It doesn’t sound that bad, sort of.