In case you were watching any of the other 28 teams in action last night, you may have missed Nyjer Morgan apparently having the night of his goddamn life last night. First, he hits a walk-off double for the Brewers against the Mets. That’s pretty awesome, and he shows it in the celebration. Then he has this incredible post-game interview with FSN Wisconsin:

As if that wasn’t enough crazy (again, the good kind) for you, check out his post-postgame radio interview with Bob Uecker’s right hand man, Cory Provus.

It really isn’t any wonder that “Tony Plush” — Nyjer Morgan’s alter ego and “name on the field” — has become such a hit in Milwaukee. Combine his antics with his performance (1.2 WAR in 74 PA!) and you have the most legendary platoon player Wisconsin has ever seen.

Spencer Hall of the ever-fantastic Every Day Should Be Saturday (recommended even for non-college football fans) and SBNation today presented a fantastic piece on 1887 sports cards. Never one to be left out, baseball represented two of the (in the author’s humblest opinion) finer entries. Below is Dell Darling, “champion base ball catcher.”

We’ll let Hall take it from here:

Darling set what was then a record by surviving 14 assaults by batters, who, if they did not flinch upon contact with a pitched ball, were then allowed to swing freely at the “catcher” until their arms grew tired and the wood of the bat itself grew soft. The 1887 matchup between Champion Base Ball Batter James O’Neil and Dell Darling was described by the Providence, Rhode Island police department as “sportive, thoroughly entertaining, and most certainly manslaughter of the first degree.” Be not confused! Dell Darling in this picture is not pleading for his life, but is most certainly taunting the batter with his trademark phrase, “A butter’s whore is bread’s mistress, and your mother is the entire sand-wich!” Being a catcher was stupid in 1887, and still is.

The rest of the piece is highly recommended as well.

R.A. Dickey pitched a fantastic game against the Braves on Sunday night, leading the Mets to a 6-4 victory with eight solid innings. Doing as they tend to do, MLB.com went the puntastic route with their game wrap headline. But this was no ordinary pun. No, this was the ultipun. Those with weak constitutions probably shouldn’t continue with this post.

(Click to embiggen)

Clearly, no explanation is necessary here. The result is pure devastation, to which Dickey’s growling mug only adds. Hide the women and children, folks, the ultipun is afoot.

The MLB is trying to just pass this off as just another item of Philadelphia baseball merchandise, part of their Stars and Stripes collection. But, if we look closely — OK, really not that closely — we can see the message they’re truly trying to send:

Phil Lies. If you know somebody named Phil, they’re probably lying to you right now. He might say that he’s not. But that’s just one of those old-fashioned Phil lies.

During yesterday’s fantastic Greinke vs. Reineke Brewers-Reds matchup yesterday (with Roenicke managing, no less), somebody without a weird amount of Ns, Ks and Es in their name stood out. That was Edgar Renteria, Reds veteran and occasional shortstop, who is caught on film here emitting pure veteran presence:

That was a weak ground ball off the bat of Brewers “shortstop” Yuniesky Betancourt, who actually managed to hustle his way into second and then score on an ensuing Nyjer Morgan single. The picture really doesn’t do justice to this play — check out the video, too.

Hard to argue with one Mr. Aron Bender’s bestowing of the title “Balk of the Year” on this little gem:

That’s Mike Pelfrey pitching for the Mets in Saturday’s game against the Phillies, with Dom Brown batting. The balk moved runners to second and third, but luckily for Pelfrey, he got Brown to ground out to end the inning. If Brown singles in one or two runs there, I’m sure Pelfrey hears about it the next day from Mike Francesa. Instead, it’s just a harmless (albeit hilarious) balk.

This is slightly late, naturally, with the first round of MLB’s interleague play having concluded this past weekend. My Milwaukee Brewers were not involved, but we were still treated to some excellent rivalries that elude us during boring old intraleague play, including but not limited to: Seattle vs. San Diego! Minnesota vs. Arizona! and Detroit vs. Pittsburgh!

Ah, the memories. But I digress. One thing that caught my eye on MLB.com as interleague play raged onward was this largely hidden logo used for interleague play:

Via SportsLogos.net, click to embiggen.

The imagery is clear: two eagles, one representing each league, fighting over a baseball, much as the teams and leagues fight for superiority on the field. Personally, I think it’s a solid logo, although I think it would be improved by using more lifelike eagles as opposed to the semi-cartoony look employed here.

What do you guys think. Is it a good logo? Should it be featured more?

It’s hard to imagine Hollis Mason, the first Nite Owl in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Hugo Award winning graphic novel Watchmen, being much of a fan of sabermetrics. He quit the hooded justice industry in order to become a mechanic, and he always did have a soft spot for the traditional values of Montana, where his grandfather learned the values he instilled into the young Mason.

Although the second Nite Owl, Daniel Dreiberg, exhibits a fair amount of similarities to his predecessor, he is less of a fighter and more of a thinker. Nite Owl II relies more on technology and gadgets than on toughness and physical prowess compared to the rest of his masked colleagues. His love for ornithology (the study of birds) is obvious given his bird-themed alter ego — not only is his costume designed to look like an owl, but so is Archimedes, his ship, named for Merlin’s pet owl in The Sword and the Stone.

To that end, Dreiberg contributed a piece called “Blood From The Shoulder of Pallas” to the Journal of the American Ornithological Society. In it, he discusses how scrutinizing over the details of birds can make us miss the beauty of it all.

Is it possible, I wonder, to study a bird so closely, to observe and catalogue its peculiarities in such minute detail, that it becomes invisible? Is it possible that while fastidiously calibrating the span of its wings or the length of its tarsus, we somehow lose sight of its poetry? That in our pedestrian descriptions of a marbled or vermiculated plumage we forfeit a glimpse of living canvases, cascades of carefully toned browns and golds that would shame Kandinsky, misty explosions of color to rival Monet? I believe that we do. I believe that in approaching our subject with the sensibilities of statisticians and dissectionists, we distance ourselves increasingly from the marvelous and spell-binding planet of imagination whose gravity drew us to our studies in the first place.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the second inning of Monday’s Brewers-Dodgers game, Carlos Gomez made a fantastic play in center field to rob Juan Uribe of a home run. You should really watch it, as it was pretty dang awesome.

More important, though, was Ryan Braun’s celebration of the play, pictured below.

(Click to embiggen, of course)

Again, this picture is but another reason to watch the video linked above, as images cannot truly capture the magnificence and grace of Braun’s celebration of that thing that other guy did. But the image is pretty good by itself, too.

Today, Mat Kovach presented some fantastic research over at the Hardball Times: using Retrosheet data. he found just how every single game in the Retrosheet database ended. Check out the link for the whole results, but there were a few shockers in the data set.

Kovach highlights perhaps the most ridiculous: a catcher’s interference play which ended the Reds-Dodgers tilt on August 1st, 1971, in which Johnny Bench stepped in front of the plate to attempt to tag a stealing Manny Mota, interfering with the hitter.

Other interesting ones: 22 walk-off stolen bases (and one game ending for the losing team on a stolen base), 13 walk-off balks, 427 walk-off walks, 50 walk-off hit-by-pitches, and 64 game-ending pickoffs (including 16 which ended up winning it for the batting team!).

Pretty wild stuff. Make sure you read through the comments section, as the numbers in the original article include some games that were called due to rain, and the comments section cleans some of that out.