Five graphs for you. No other information. No hints. Probably easy anyway. Can you guess these graphs?

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Courtesy of Baseball Think Factory, the Denver Post writes about a Rockies fan painting a picture of Todd Helton as a centaur.

This, of course, has prompted me to make a few paintings of my own.

GRIFFIN

HOSMERMAID

TROUT

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The Yankees will finish up their season-long tribute to Mariano Rivera by requiring all fans attending Thursday’s final regular season home game to submit to receiving Mariano Rivera tattoos on their forearms. The tattoos will feature the image of Mariano Rivera jogging out of the Yankees’ bullpen, number 42 on his back, and five world series trophies coming out of his mouth. The tattoo will also feature the names of all 1,172 players Rivera has struck out in his career (with additional space for any new strikeouts between now and the end of the season). In case the tattoo is too big for your arm, the Yankees will provide an extra arm for the rest of the image. These extra arms will be harvested from Mariano Rivera’s arm, since now that he’s retiring, he won’t need his arms anymore.

The tattoos will be inked using an Andy Pettitte commemorative human growth hormone injection needle, which each fan will be invited to take home as a souvenir.

The search for material to write about this week has led me to this New York Times piece from a few days ago, titled “A Drab and Cherished Relic of Shea.” No, it’s not about the home run apple in center field. It’s about a clipboard, given away to spectators at a game in 1977.

Yes, you may wonder, as I did, why you are reading an article about a clipboard.

But it’s a nice piece about being a fan.

Made me think about the Mets-related nonsense in my old bedroom closet in my mom’s house, collecting dust. Old yearbooks and programs, an inflatable bat, a bunch of hats and t-shirts, a few bobblehead dolls, some baseball card sets, towels and canvas bags…. I used to love when the schedule came out every spring and we’d think about which tickets to get, which 6 or 7 games we’d go see, chosen in large part because of the promotional giveaways.

And then you get older and… I don’t want a bobblehead doll. I don’t want a bat or a foam finger. I have a hockey puck on my bookshelf that I got at an Islanders game a couple of decades ago and I keep it only because three laptops ago, it was very good at propping up the back so that air could circulate underneath and the thing wouldn’t shut off whenever it got too warm. I come from a family that never threw things away and now I end up wanting to throw everything away, because stuff just becomes something you have to clean and store and move, and everything you actually need is available streaming on the Internet.

The point of this piece is… unclear, even to me, but I did want to point you to the fine New York Times article. The clipboard in the picture looks really dirty.

On Friday, I’ll be taking the final spot subbing in for Carson and writing the Daily Notes on the main site. Or perhaps Hopeless Joe will be writing them. I haven’t decided yet. What I have decided is that you, loyal NotGraphs readers, who often find yourself over on this side of the home page, might be able to help me put together some awesome Daily Notes. If there’s something you’d like to say about Friday’s games — any of them, all of them, or none of them — send me an e-mail before 9 AM tomorrow. Or anything you’d like to say about the Daily Notes. No guarantee I’ll use it, but I might. So if you’ve ever wanted to be credited over on the main site, here is your chance. And now I need to figure out how I’m going to come up with better NERD scores than Bates did.

From MLB.com:

…which is a perfectly good reason why the Rays are going to win a wild card slot.

Except:

1. You can’t spell Wild Kard without Kuroda, although if you’re trying to spell Wild Kard, you really can’t spell.
2. You can’t spell Wild Card without Wada, as in Tsuyoshi Wada, with a 4.03 ERA in Norfolk, the Orioles’ AAA affiliate.
3. You can’t spell “You Can’t Spell Wild Card” without Yu, as in Darvish.
4. You can’t spell anything without the letters in Marc Rzepcynski’s name, since they’re all in there. And he’s on the Indians, in case you didn’t know.

And, also:

5. You can’t spell “Fail to Win The Wild Card, You Royals Fans” without Falu, as in Irving Falu, who hit .341 last year and hasn’t even gotten a single at bat in the major leagues in 2013. Poor Irving Falu!

Which all combines to tell me nothing.

In celebration of Vladimir Guerrero’s retirement, I offer this video from the YouTube archives, from 1999, celebrating his time as an Expo. There is some terrible hero/Guerrero rhyming going on, but it’s still kind of fun. Song by Mal Thursday and Paul Rocha, sung by Amy Sullivan.

Oh, while I’m at it, here’s a video of bloopers from Todd Helton filming a commercial for Longmont Ford in Colorado. Right now this video has 315 views. It deserves at least 320.

Okay, one more. Vlad knocking Tommy Lasorda over with a flying bat, while Lasorda was coaching third base and Vlad was hitting.

This edition of things your boss probably doesn’t want you to watch at work is sponsored by Retirement. Retirement: sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Hopeless Joe wrote yesterday about the Mets losing their spot on WFAN sports radio, now left to scrounge for whatever lesser station will have them. Assuming they don’t choose to go with Hopeless Joe Radio, here are my top nine stations to replace WFAN:

1. WBAD
2. WPOO
3. WTJS
4. WGEE
5. WIKE
6. WGDP
7. WUGH
8. WPED
9. WAAA

Yesterday, aside from the usual losing the Mets have been doing, they also lost their radio station. The Yankees are set to sign a deal with WFAN, bumping the Mets– who have been with WFAN since it became a network in 1987– to a new station to be determined.

Hopeless Joe Radio would like to make its pitch. I’ll turn the rest of this post over to the Hopeless man himself:

Hey there, Mets. I know how you’re feeling. A 25+ year relationship up in smoke. Just like when my mother moved and didn’t tell me where she was going. (Which hurt, but not as much as when she un-friended me on Facebook.) Where is loyalty these days? You Mets have proven themselves in that department, like paying Bobby Bonilla for half a century, but how does WFAN repay you? By abandoning you for those clowns in the Bronx, with the winning records and other nonsense like that. Wins don’t count! Every smart fan knows it. The Mets have so many more pitcher hits than the Yankees, and everyone knows that’s the most important measure of a team.

But WFAN’s silly decision can ultimately be your gain, Mets, because you would fit just perfectly on Hopeless Joe Radio, and we would be honored to carry your schedule, at least until Syria takes over and bans us from broadcasting sports on the public airwaves. Afternoon games would be a terrific replacement for our usual 1:00-4:00 Dirge Music Jamboree. And our evening call-in show, “Suicide, or Not Today?” has been slowly slipping in the ratings, mostly because we lose our most loyal viewers on a nightly basis. Seriously, why didn’t our program director realize that a call-in show about suicide was destined to fail? I would fire him, but I fear he would do something drastic, especially since over the years he’s now heard thousands of people’s ideas of how to do it.

We would love to add a pre-game show to replace our long-running “Name Those Symptoms” game show, which has sadly run its course, having covered every disease in the medical school curriculum. And a nightly post-game report would save us from having to turn to plan B and offer Anthony Weiner his own nightly show once he recovers from his mayoral primary defeat. I mean, on the one hand, he would help us make some headway into social media– we haven’t really been able to build up much of a Twitter following, and we hear he’s an expert at that– but on the other hand, he would likely thrive in a more visual medium than radio.

Mets coverage can easily be incorporated into our morning show, “Ernest and Gertrude live from the Hospice,” and we’d love to do a weekend block of Mets-related programming for kids, integrated with our usual kids shows, “Life Will Only Get Worse,” “Your Parents are Dying,” and our annual seasonal offering, “Santa’s Not Real.”

Really, the Mets would fit right into our lineup, since you usually lose, no one likes you anymore, and being a Mets fan is almost literally like being a Bernie Madoff fan. And since we run nightly interviews with people who lost their money in Madoff’s investment accounts, it couldn’t possibly be a better match.

Mr. Met is already our mascot, except our version has blood dripping from his ears. Give us a call and I’m sure we can work out a deal. We’re around all day, except between 11 and 2, which is when the entire station will be live on the air for a group electroshock therapy session. Wish us luck.