Loyal reader Kris, in efforts to spare this blog from the Lethal Guillotine Of Fatal Death, has argued on these very electrified pages that NotGraphs should say yes — heck yes! — to a corporate sponsor, sort of a “Hallmark Presents Valerie Bertinelli in I Just Made a Movie For Hallmark: A Movie For Hallmark, Starring Valerie Bertinelli” type of thing, but with less Bertinelli. Well, OK.

But here’s the question: If NotGraphs were to accept a sponsor, what would that sponsor be? Before you answer, “ExtenZe Natural Male Enhancement,” please note that we here at NotGraphs prefer unnatural male enhancement, e.g., slamming our genitals on frozen polyester until serious swelling occurs.

In any event, let us begin by suggesting new names for née NotGraphs and then working backward, logically if not profoundly, to possible backers.

NutGraphs: Given our tendency to slam the aforementioned privates on the aforementioned polymers, it makes sense that the American Urological Association might penetrate the lucrative realm of stick-and-ball humor by entering an intimate corporate coupling. Pro: a longer-lasting supply of double-entendre comedy. Con: the Association might not want to cuddle.
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Advertising, as a form of either clever marketing or blatant mind control that robs individuals of their decision-making sovereignty while consigning them to a groupthink circle jerk to which radically independent hipsters apply the delightfully clever and not at all hivemind-y epithet “sheeple,” has been around for a very, very long time. Examples: The Lascaux Cave paintings were part of an ad campaign for Grak’s Real Pit BBQ. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa served as an ad poster for Luigi’s La Bomba Lip Gloss. And Wagner’s Ring Cycle was a lengthy jingle for Günter’s Chainrings Und Sprockets.

Indeed, the history of advertising is a long illustration of coercion disguised as art – or, at the very least, persuasion concealed in an interesting-to-look-at form. It has always been this way, including that time when Warhol marketed soup. Two weeks back, however, advertising took on an entirely new dimension – specifically, a dimension measuring 20 yards by 53.3 yards – when, in the midst of the Ravens-49ers preseason game, a Toyota Red Zone logo appeared onscreen in what is typically just “the Red Zone,” sans any sort of corporate sponsorship that makes viewers want to gouge out their eyeballs and serve them between a pair of poppyseed buns to Roger Goodell.

This got me thinking: I am kind of hungry! While eating I had a second, non-food thought: What if advertisers were to employ a similar strategy on big league baseball fields? One possible plan: Whenever a player makes an exceptional play, be it offensive or defensive, the advertiser’s message appears in the area of play where the player made that play, no exceptions.

What follows is a list of proposed player-advertiser relationships.
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After Eden and beyond Hedonism II, people are supposed to wear their laundry. Generally speaking, clothing-optional is not an option. What is an option, at least if you aren’t Prisoner #30976, is the kind of clothing with which you adorn your form, be it a rhinestone caftan or a CSI: Miami nightshirt, with David Caruso’s sunglasses featured prominently in the area of the sternum.

With regard to baseball, perhaps no figure has celebrated this vestiary freedom with greater panache than former White Sox owner Bill Veeck. Indeed, 38 years ago last Friday, it was Veeck who perpetrated either a) the greatest sartorial misdeed in the annals of modern sports or b) the finest display of stylistic self-rule in the history of all history. On that afternoon in Chicago, in the first game of doubleheader at Comiskey Park, the White Sox took the field in uniforms that gave them the distinct appearance of misbehaving English schoolboys.

Now, in honor of that historic day, Major League Baseball is introducing 10 new uniforms, each an heir to the liberties that the Sox so bravely modeled. It is expected that each team will wear at least one of the uniforms during every homestand in September, and then again at Halloween.

The uniform: a flag-colored Speedo of the type that Mark Spitz wore in the 1972 Summer Olympics, matched with a Molly Hatchet concert T-shirt (Fredericksburg Fairgrounds, May 30, 1983) and a Nehru jacket made of heavy merino tweed. The hat is a traditional Tam o’ Shanter stained with day-old haggis.
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Yes, it’s true. We’re less than 48 seconds away from the InstaGraphs Boston Meetup. For all of the original details, which are still details, read the post that you are currently reading, which is the post that I am currently writing.

Sometimes, we nerds like to go out on the town. One of those towns is the former Incan capital city of Vilcabamba, but because that city was destroyed during the Spanish conquest of Peru in 1572, and also because a trip to Peru would take a lot longer than 48 seconds, we cannot logically schedule an InstaGraphs meetup there.

Sorry, Vilcabamba. Better luck next minute!

Not surprisingly, this year’s Saber SpeedSocializing Seminar will take place within a minute’s time. So, just as we did last minute, we’re going to set up shop at the corner of Shawmut and Berkeley and pass out demitasses full of espresso.

It promises to be a good time, or at least a quick time, and also a caffeinating time. Since the beginning of this posting, other SpeedSocializing luminaries have pledged their brief attendance, but since I a) won’t see all of them due to their tremendous socializing pace and b) am running out of time, you’ll just have to take my word on that. Espresso, baseball and rapidly socializing baseball nerds. It’s a combination just crazy enough to work, and work pretty quickly. Join us, won’t you?

You have approximately 10 seconds.

KANSAS CITY—You see it on the highlights, even if you don’t quite hear it: Player A, afflicted by a long-term power drought, at last hits a home run, yet upon returning to the dugout he is greeted with what experts call “the silent treatment.”

For the baseballing Royals of the city of Kansas City, the tradition has presented a challenge. As of this writing the Royals rank “dead-ass last,” as those same experts call it, in team home runs, but with a playoff berth in sight, the players are expecting a team-wide surge of adrenalin to quickly increase their power numbers and create an immediate need for well-crafted expressions of noiselessness.

The problem, players say, is one of silent-treatment inexperience.

“First, we’re just not trained in the silent treatment,” third baseman Mike Moustakas shouted above the sounds of a poetry slam on Tuesday. “Even in Spring Training, we don’t do a lot of drills. Sure, we do this one drill called ‘Stunned Silence,’ where Ned (manager Ned Yost) tells us he’s pregnant, but beyond that, we’re always joking and laughing and talking about the weather, which is typically warm and dry. We’ll say things like, ‘The weather is warm and dry, which is typical.’
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It is important to note, for the sake of both historical accuracy and literary theme, that when Mark Twain wrote, “There is no such thing as a new idea,” he was stealing from the biblical Solomon, who, despite enjoying the ministrations of 700 wives and 300 concubines, had conceived a similar and ultimately Ecclesiastical maxim, namely, that there is nothing new under the sun.

Of course, the proof of Twain’s assertion is less in his choice of words than in his decision to use them. That he thought it was nothing new; that he said it was something old. Among writers, the search for new ideas is a truth as old as time, if not somehow older. When facing writer’s block or “thinker’s void,” we must often turn to other sources for inspiration or “plagiarism.”

It is in the spirit of all these things – literature, theft, things being under the sun – that I present this post, inspired by C. Cistulli’s award-craving series, eBay’s Five Most Marvelous and Currently Available Ballcaps.

To repeat: eBay’s 5 Most Marvelous and Currently Unavailable Ballcaps:

Anderson Felons New Era Hat (Missing Link)

Style: Fitted (7 3/8), probably
Time Left: Pretty much all you want, as the cap remains unavailable
Cost: The time it takes to read this post, or this part of this post

The Felons, according to Baseball Indirect Reference, were an Anderson-based Dependent League team that belonged, first, to the Anderson-Area Correctional Institute and then, after that, the Anderson-Area Correctional Institute And Good-Times FunDrinkery. I have it on good, if not great, authority that anyone who wears this hat is automatically confused by the goals of the institution – fun? good times? retribution via killer hangover? – and ultimately confined to the institution, just in time for happy hour.

***
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TELEVISIONLAND — In a move that some industry experts have called “shocking, but then again, not really shocking at all, because when you think about it, it makes all the sense in the world, given that the world apparently contains just two cities in which major league baseball teams exist,” Big TV announced today that it has reached a multilateral agreement to broadcast Yankees-Red Sox games for “all eternity … and then some!”

“With this unprecedented agreement,” said one Big TV executive, “we have ensured that Yankees-Red Sox games – in their past, present and future incarnations – will be transmitted in perpetuity, without the spatiotemporal parameters that afflict otherwise similar broadcasts in the earthly realm.

“Indeed, thanks to this partnership,” she added, “Yankees-Red Sox games will never know the worldly transience of an Astros-Royals contest on cable channel 738, or the mundane boundaries of a Cubs-Dbacks game at Chase Field. To paraphrase a poet, we will slip the surly airwaves of Earth!”

Key to the blockbuster deal, insiders say, was the cooperation of God.
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Jose Altuve is awesome.

That is all.

“Good afternoon. First, I want to thank you all for coming to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. I know you have a choice of museums when you visit Cooperstown, so thank you for choosing this one. Frankly, I don’t know how you could pass up the 18th-century Dutch-style plow at the nearby Farmers’ Museum, but pass it up you did! As an aside, I will tell you that I once got ‘18th-century plowed’ by drinking a liter of elixir d’absynthe to treat a serious case of dropsy. I mean I got drunk, 1700s-style. I did not get – what’s the word? – ‘copulated.’

“In any case, I also want to say that I am truly humbled by this honor. I want to say it because everybody says it. Then again, I don’t know why people say it. I mean, humbled? If anything, I should be de-humbled. I’d be humbled if my two-week-old kitten were to beat me in Greco-Roman wrestling. I’d be humbled if you pointed at my crotch and laughed, as if to say, ‘What cruel twist of fate is this that should visit upon a red-blooded American male such a tragic deficiency?’

“But humbled by getting inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame? Screw that noise. Seriously, you should see my new vanity plate: “CPRSTWN.” I guess the plate’s only downside is that it can be misconstrued. For example, after pulling up behind me at a stoplight, Ronde Barber came to my window and asked if I could revive his brother’s career.
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If you’ve spent any length of time on the Internet, you’ve likely noticed three conspicuous things – actually, four, if you count No. 1 as two:

1) Breasts
2) One weird trick
3) The slide show

It will shock exactly none of you, provided that all of you attended the London School of Economics, that the motive behind this trio of ’Net essentials is something I like to call “money.” The way it works is this: Click on a breast, someone makes money. Click on the second breast, someone makes twice as much money.

Got that? The theme here is money.

One weird trick to making money, it turns out, is to produce what we in the Internet industry call a “slide show.” A slide show works like this: You find a slide, and then you “show” it. After that, you drive your Lambo to the bank.

And so, in the spirit of driving my Lambo to the bank, I give you this slide show. Please bear in mind that the slides used in this show have not given their expressed written consent, so, when I drive to the bank, I will probably take the back way.

Also, I will probably drive the blue Lambo, not the red one.
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