Shrug.

I’ve always gotten Fielder and Kinsler confused anyway. Seven letters in their last names. Both getting paid millions of dollars to play baseball. Okay, one of them can’t grow facial hair and the other one has a neck tattoo, but can anyone really keep the two of them straight? Physically, I mean. If you described each one to a police sketch artist, they’d end up looking like twins. Also, statistically. They both hit like thirty doubles a year. And that’s just the start of their similarities. (And the end.) Their Bill James Similarity Score must be like 950. (Or 50.)

So it’s just two more interchangeable parts being swapped for each other. The fans won’t even notice a difference on the field, and it doesn’t do anything to help fix up the Obamacare website. I don’t have time to worry about Ian Fielder and Prince Kinsler. I’ve been trying to buy health insurance for almost two months.

I found these amusing. Maybe you will too.

It was more difficult to find funny reviews of baseballs. I don’t know why.

(You may first want to read this article.).

Ruben Tejada
One day short of a season
Yes, a bad season

Ruben Tejada
Fell one home run short of one
He shouldn’t complain

Ruben Tejada
Should hope he is still playing
In 2016

Or 2014
His season was terrible
How can he fight this?

Ruben Tejada
At least they called you back up!
You cost them a win

Or a third of one
Depending on which site’s WAR
Can’t we all agree?

Ruben Tejada
If you file a grievance
I think you may win

But really you’ll lose
Because no one will sign you
Not that they ought to

Ruben Tejada
Why did your walk rate collapse?
This is the last poem

Wait — How you say poem?
It’s one syllable, or two?
Whatever, I’m done.

“Hey, Cy, thanks for doing this.”

“Sure, anytime.”

“Let’s start with Braves catcher Brian McCann. Where do you see him ending up?”

“An Irishman, eh?”

“Uh, I guess so. Sure.”

“You don’t think he’ll stay with Milwaukee?”

“The Braves are in Atlanta now, actually.”

“Atlanta, really? Where’s that?”

“Georgia.”

“Hmmm. Awfully far south for a baseball team.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the MVP awards. Where we make virtually every player feel bad just so we can honor two guys for their luck-enhanced statistics. Haven’t we figured out by now that it’s all just statistical noise? Roll the dice and Jacoby Ellsbury can hit 32 home runs, or R.A. Dickey can be unhittable for six months, or Nick Punto can be above-replacement-level. One in a million seasons, I could probably get a hit or two, walk once or twice, and end up with a million-dollar contract instead of this minimum wage job shoveling coal into the boilers here at the local mental health facility. And yet we continue to award the random nature of results instead of what’s really important: the rational understanding that life is meaningless, sports are diversions to help us forget we’re all going to die, and the real most valuable player is the one who best distracts us from dwelling on the truth.

Which makes this year’s most valuable players Alex Rodriguez and Mariano Rivera, because I still have hundreds of articles to read about each of them, and that will prevent me from thinking too hard about the exceptions in the fine print of my life insurance policy.

Breaking news from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s article about Clint Hurdle winning the NL Manager of the Year Award:

“Clint’s passion is infectious,” Pirates owner Bob Nutting said in a statement.

PITTSBURGH– The entire city of Pittsburgh is under lockdown after it was revealed that Pirates manager Clint Hurdle has an infectious case of passion. According to sources, he developed this condition after leaving his post as manager of the Colorado Rockies, where he mostly floundered with indifference for years, occasionally flirting with mild excitement, but never developing the full-blown passion condition. It is not known at this time where Hurdle acquired his passion, although rumor is that Andrew McCutchen may be a carrier.

State law requires all Pittsburgh residents to have received the passion vaccine, which protects against most strains of the illness. The passion vaccine involves living in Pittsburgh for any amount of time.

In the US, approximately 800 to 1,500 people are infected with passion and 120 die from the disease per year. About one of every five survivors lives with permanent disabilities, such as euphoria, inertia, laughter, and psychological problems. Even in cases where treatment has been given, the fatality rate is around 15%.

If you have close contact with Clint Hurdle, see your doctor for prophylactic antibiotics.

*

…but probably not that soon, since he just moved into a new house last summer.

There is a surprising amount of information on the Internet about where Joe Mauer lives. There is this weebly page that appears to have been created by a child. A 2007 video tour of what was then called his “mansion.” An aerial shot of the estate he bought in 2012. And a 2006 Sports Illustrated “Cribs” feature on the house he shared with Justin Morneau, proving that Mauer drinks orange juice and collects bobblehead dolls.

*Yes, let me just leave this image here without further comment on the headline.

I just read through 189 reader comments about the Braves moving from Turner Field to a new stadium in the suburbs. Why did I do this? So I could pick out my favorite one and post it. The winner:

U all R stupid 4 sayin this is a bad idea. Finaly we can go to a game and not worried abut my wife gettin rapped.

Oh, Internet, you have done such a great job of raising the level of literacy in this country.

Son*,

This may be hard for you to understand, but there was once a time when the BBWAA award winners were announced at 2:00 in the afternoon, and you heard about them on the evening news, or read about them in a newspaper the next day, or, in later years, saw the results on the Internet, and there was simply a list of the players who got votes, and a ranking of how many votes they got, and you read the list, and it was sort of exciting to see who won but also which players got one silly vote from a hometown writer, and then you went about the rest of your life, perfectly satisfied with how these award winners were revealed and never even contemplating that there might be a way to milk this nonsense for weeks and make it extra-stupid.

See, son, back then there was no MLB Network, with 24 hours a day that they needed to fill with programming, and there were no shows where they counted down the top 9 players to ever choke on a hot dog, running sixteen times a day, and there was no need to create some sort of fiction where there are three “finalists” for every award. Son, there are no “finalists.” The voting still happens exactly the way it used to happen, where the writers vote for whomever the heck they want to vote for, except now, in order to squeeze an extra hour of programming out of the awarding of awards, they announce the three top vote-getters a week in advance, call them “finalists,” and pretend it means something.

It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just stupid.

Like a lot of things. I mean, on balance I guess things are a lot better for you now than they were for me, when I was your age. You get instant box scores. Your fantasy team statistics are computed automatically, without you having to add up long columns of numbers with your TI-85 graphing calculator. There are more games on TV than you can possibly watch, and for the cost of, I don’t know, a couple months of diapers, you can watch pretty much any game you want all season (which is the deal I’ll be attempting to make with your mother — let me toilet train you a couple of months early, and, if I do, I get to buy MLB.TV in 2015, or 2016, or whenever it is you’ll eventually be toilet trained).

But some things were better in the old days. And not having to read nonsense articles about the fake “finalists” for the MVP award is one of them.

—-

*Born 10/8/13. Yay!

Look at the headline. Then look at the URL.

Oops.

Poor Astrodome.

The referendum had called for creating 350,000 square feet of exhibition space by removing the interior seats and raising the floor to street level. Other changes included creating 400,000 square feet of plaza and green space on the outside of the structure as part of the project, dubbed “The New Dome Experience.”

The New Dome Experience sounds like the name of a prog-rock band.

(Songs on The New Dome Experience’s debut album include “Cage Battin’,” “Spheres of Leather,” and “Another Ad On The Wall (Part II)”)