Last night, in the immediate aftermath of a major league baseball game, a major league baseball player joined Woodward and/or Bernstein to talk about his game-winning hit. Standing on the field as the crowd left the stadium, the player leaned toward the mic and said, “I was just looking…”

Nodding, Woodward and/or Bernstein glanced at the camera and then at the player. “Go ahead,” he and/or they intoned. “Tell me and/or us what you were looking for. And please, consider your responsibility to both the social contract and your own conscience. Be honest.”

The player nodded, as if to concur with the need for candor, and went on. “I was just looking for a pitch…”

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As the star writer here at NotGraphs, I am known for certain things.

Prime among them is my star writing.

To wit: The Big Dipper is big. In addition, it dips.

Also: Orion is very Orion-y. It is more Orion-y than Taurus, that’s for sure. 

Also too: Betelgeuse is really sort of annoying. First of all, it’s way too loud. Like Chris Russo loud. And frankly, I don’t much care for Geena Davis.

Also in addition to too: Beta Virginis, a star in the constellation Virgo, has a surface gravity of 4.25 cgs, “c” being the basic unit of measurement for “carloads” and “gs” for “Garry Shandlings.”

What I am not known for – yet! – is a rigorous devotion to advanced statistics.

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If you’ve watched the MLB Network for more than 12 consecutive minutes, you’ve seen the commercial for the revolutionary Speed Hitter. Now, inspired by the ad-driven success of said Speed Hitter, another enterprising go-getter has tapped the entrepreneurial spirit that makes America what it is – i.e., not Antarctica, which ranks first in per capita frostbite but dead last in entrepreneurship – by inventing an inventive invention that will “wipe out” – ha! – the competition.

{Opening scene of commercial: Beset with exasperation, a young man is sitting on an American Standard flush toilet. His pants, not to mention his boxers, are around his ankles. On closer inspection, we see that he is reading a comprehensive treatise, complete with graphs and illustrations, on the scourge of constipation.}

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Starting at first base tonight for the Texas Rangers: a wheel of Parmesan cheese.

You might or mightn’t have noticed, as you might or mightn’t have spent the past few weeks in a crowded Peruvian jail, that the baseball squad known as the Texas Rangers has experienced something of a medical catastrophe this season, with precisely 32,000 of its ballplayers – to be fair, just 30,000 have been starters – landing on the disabled list, in the ICU and/or in a Tommie Copper commercial.

Earlier today, in response to this graphic demonstration of human frailty, Texas manager Ron Washington opened a pack of Camels and considered his options for tonight’s lineup against the Angels, all the while pondering the Buddhist precept that “life is suffering” even as he blew a series of distinct but ultimately ephemeral smoke rings. Upon snubbing the final ashy butt he decided on the following lineup, primarily for its ability to withstand the daily threats – pulled hammies, strained obliques, scarlet fever outbreaks, meteorite strikes and spontaneous combustions – that turn players into casualties of the human condition and proxies for the impermanence that turns us all, ultimately, into role players, pinch-hitters, DFA’s.

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The place: a pine forest in Upstate New York

The time: the second hour of a day in spring

As gentle as an angel’s breath, or as placid as a cherub’s fart, a breeze comes to tease the hardwoods, tickling the needles and nudging the cones as it goes. The wind, it shushes, the hush cut through with a warbler’s trill and the trill cut through with what seems a louder fart. And yet the forest knows, as only old growth knows, that this is not an ethereal toot but, rather, the creaking of a tree – a creaking, alas, that mimics the sound of Don Zimmer’s knees the last time he came for a hike.

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John Paschal: Hey, everybody! I will be here at 2:30 Eastern, or, unfortunately, “Private Time Central,” to answer all your baseball questions. So fill up the queue and I will see you then!

2:30 Almost finished, you guys. Remember: Private Time.

2:35

2:36

2:37

2:38!

2:39 OK, folks. Fire away!

2:40 Comment From Diamond Dan The Baseball Man
What, in your opinion, is the precise correlation between O-Swing% and O-Contact% with regard to a batter’s position in the batter’s box, specifically his distance from home plate?

2:41 Hang on juuuust a sec, you guys. I forgot to record Judge Judy.

2:41 Sue me!

2:44 All righty, then … your questions!

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There are points on every man’s path where he must stop and proclaim, “I am here! I have reached this point on my personal path, if you will pardon the alliteration!”

And this, my fellow countrymen and you few random Canadians, is one such proclamation at one such point on one such path. In brief, today’s post – i.e., the post you are now reading, perhaps aloud to your most perspicacious pupils – is the twenty-fifth post that I, proser, have produced for the weblog known as NotGraphs.

Again, pardon the alliteration.

It is at such junctions, too, that a man must pause to reflect on his accomplishment, to gaze back upon his origins and all the capital-A Adversities he overcame, Adversities being an all-night strip club to which the aforementioned proser suffered an unfortunate dependence for a period of six foggy yet disturbing years.

What follows is what you have wanted, and awaited, for lo these many sentences: a personal and compelling account of my rise to this arbitrary numerical milestone.

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Once again, a series of on-field shenanigans – bat flips! finger pointings! voice raisings! fights! – have put us in mind of those principles and prohibitions known throughout the galaxy as Baseball’s Tacit Commandments, or, in layman’s terms, its “Unwritten Rules.” To wit: A’s infielder Jed Lowrie bunts while his team is up by seven, and Bo Porter’s head explodes so spectacularly that Michael Bay turns the ka-blooey into the whole of a three-hour film. Bryce Harper fails to run out a tapper, and Matt Williams is so managerially butt-hurt that he yanks his young star from the contest while tarring and/or feathering his very good name.

Now batting: Brycetar Harperfeather. For real!

Lastly but not leastly, Carlos Gomez admires his 400-foot piece of Expressionist art, an arc of deeply personal grandeur, and what happens? Well, what happens is that a hockey game breaks out. All of which shenanigania should convince the logical conclusion-maker of one logical conclusion: Write down the rules!

Before we take pen to paper or chisel to stone, however, let us examine the ways by which these Tacit Commandments managed to avoid writing systems in the first place … the ways, indeed, by which they evaded pictographs, hieroglyphs and morphemes, forerunners of the symbols I am using to convey this very message.

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As a completely rational and acutely astute baseball fan, you are no doubt aware (and a bit frightened) of the psychiatric disorder known as Puig Derangement Syndrome, or PDS. Afflicting bitter white men between the ages of 65 and Jurassic, PDS is characterized by an extreme psychological response to Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig and often manifests in these symptoms: throwing a Budweiser against the wall and immediately referencing DiMaggio whenever Puig misses a cutoff man; writing a barely decipherable screed on Grrrrrr.com whenever Puig is thrown out while trying to stretch a single into what is otherwise a hustle double; phoning a peer and sneering, “You watchin’ this?” whenever Puig celebrates a home run by “doin’ all that celebratin’;” and snarling something about the “right way” and “that ain’t how we do things here” whenever Puig rides in a nice car to a local restaurant.

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So, word out of baseball land is that the Astros, like the Indians, Red Sox and Cardinals, have created a private online database that allows members of the baseball operations department to view player videos, prepare scouting reports, look up player histories and learn what really happened to Jimmy Hoffa.

Spoiler Alert: He couldn’t hit the curve.

But while the Indians, with DiamondView, have coined a database name that celebrates the generic, the Red Sox (with Carmine, named for the red in their uniforms), the Cardinals (with Red Bird Dog, named, I guess, for the color of their bird dog) and the Astros (with Ground Control, named for the black-ops government agents who play stickball with the aliens at Area 51) have all created database names that reflect the singular character of the team or its moniker.

Certain to follow, then, are these database names. Am I correct?

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