The North Shore Navigators are a baseball team from Lynn, MA playing in the Futures Collegiate Baseball League. They use wooden bats. Cistulli knows a lot about them, I’d guess. Other facts about the Navigators can be found on their Wikipedia page, but those facts are trivial compared to the content of this here web page. Because what Wikipedia can’t tell you about the Navigators, is that they are in love. The relevant screenshot, below:

You’ll notice the players who’ve moved on to professional baseball are listed as Coming Soon! Evident in this picture is that this might apply to one Navigator “sooner!” than the others.

Take in the following three images while listening to the Twin Peaks Soundtrack. 

And understand The Love of the Navigators.

If the Population Reference Bureau is right, 108 billion people have lived lives on earth, and of those, about 296 million were born on April 24th. I reached that figure by dividing 108 billion by 365.25 and then rounding up. Math! Point is: Birthdays aren’t so special if scarcity is the only criterion for specialness.

However, of those 296 million people, only one of them is named Francis Arthur “Pug” Griffin. He was born in 1896 on April 24th. Pug Griffin is a special name, if only because no name better combines mythical majesty with unhelpful genetic skull mutations. Personally, those are my top two criteria for specialness.

To honor Pug Griffin NotGraphs will do as NotGraphs does, and  surround him with Pug Griffins. Or Pug Gryphons. Whatever.

This has been Pug Griffin Surrounded by Pug Griffins. Happy Birthday, Pug Griffin.

The ever-intrepid NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has procured a revealing psychological evaluation of Derek Jeter shortly after he received a pair of absolutely hideous, ungodly cowboy boots from the Houston Astros on Wednesday. The boots in question, if you dare risk the integrity of your soul, are shown below:

The psychological evaluation in our possession was reportedly administered by the team psychologist when Jeter was found weeping in a pile of CC Sabathia’s dirty laundry after the game.

A source close to the situation claims to have overheard Jeter muttering that he felt like a “dirty, dirty man,” and witnessed the shortstop begging GM Brian Cashman to allow the soothing presence his mother in the clubhouse for the remainder of the season.

Given that yesterday was the day that baseball began on this continent, it may come as no surprise to the reader that I dreamt of baseball last night. Sweet, sweet baseball. Honey-glazed baseball. Baseball, beer-battered and dipped in cocktail sauce. Baked-Alaska baseball, burning for me. Food metaphor. Baseball.

My subconscious, apart from being hungry, was aware of the outfield situation in Boston, at least in part*. The situation being that Grady Sizemore played his way into the opening day position most of us assumed would go to Jackie Bradley, Jr. While my conscious self produces little sympathy for JBJ, given that he still does baseball as the thing that earns him money, it seems my sub-conscious swung perhaps too far in the other direction last night, producing a scene closely resembling this here rapidly repeating GIF:

The slightly less crisp but emotion-laden version that occurred in my sleeping brain lasted about as long one run of the above GIF, yet felt like it lasted much longer. Perhaps three or four consecutive loops of the above GIF. The dream then morphed abruptly into me trying to tie someone else’s shoelaces at Fenway Park. Because my subconscious doesn’t bother with where games are played.

*It/I did not know that Shane Victorino got injured, and that JBJ was called up for yesterday’s game.

UPDATE: Yeah, too soon.

Aroldis Chapman is not super-seriously hurt and will likely return to the field this season–perhaps as soon as May. This is great! Baseball and all human people are better off with him being not seriously hurt. This news also allows guilt-free enjoyment of the following low-quality GIF: Noted deadpan master Steven Wright striking Chapman in the face with a one-liner.

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Readers! It’s time for you to provide the creative spark where I cannot. That’s right: a caption contest—aka shameless wit-farming. Your job is to provide humorous captions for this  Vine video published on MLB’s official Vine profile. Feel free to submit a caption or simply +1 the ones you like. The winner will be lauded for millennia, tattooed on the hearts of billions, and, most importantly, mentioned in the next post I publish.

The Video:

Mike Trout just can’t stand losing. Last week when Target revealed their completely reasonable and not at all absurd/deplorable/alien-like standards for the human body, Trout took note. Six days and thousands of reps on the awkward crotch compression workout machine thing later… well just take a look for yourself:

Mike Trout is now not only the best baseball player ever for his age, he’s also just as beautiful as a photoshop-mangled Target underwear model. What CAN’T he do?! #thinspiration!

It is a characteristic of NotGraphs that we are uncomfortably aware of other people, largely because we’re horrified whenever we are at all aware of ourselves. As such, I have determined it my duty to be uncomfortably aware of the current frequenters of this laundromat–the one I am literally within as I write this–and rate them for their potential as members of the sabermetrics community.

The methodology is simple: I will sit here in this chair in this laundromat in this squalid New England town and ferociously judge every person doing their laundry for their potential as enthusiasts of statistical analysis in baseball. They will be judged on a scale from TURD to KACHOW! Witness the laundromat in which I sat for two hours, except turn the beautiful fall foliage into barren frost-bitten twigs and turn one of those cars into my derelict Pontiac Sunfire SE:

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I spent this morning learning how to make GIFs, which officially ushers in the decay phase of my writing career.

In this GIF–which I alone brought into existence–Ben Revere makes an athletic dive but just misses the ball:

And here, in this GIF that I made by the singular strength of my will, Phillies prospect Mario Hollands makes a routine infield fly look harder than finishing Infinite Jest:

The proximity in time (back-to-back) of these two plays(depicted by hand-hewn GIFs) leads one to wonder what lesson lies behind these normally irrelevant spring training events. The lesson, if there is one, may be best described by the also normally irrelevant Yorman Bazardo, who observed*, “No matter how hard you try, someone else will succeed where you failed–someone with far less talent and poise.”

*Note: Did not actually say/observe this.

I noticed something today, with my eyes and brain. Take a look at this picture and tell me if you see/think what I saw/thought:

Actual don’t tell me. Just keep reading. Here’s what happened in my brain, the brain filling your brain with words and pictures that are unrelated to the work you should be doing:
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