The problem with being underemployed isn’t that I have to borrow money to pay rent, or buy store-brand Cheerios (Tasteeos! Heyo!), or the shame of seeing your peers thrive in their lucrative jobs with cars that don’t make loud popping sounds and roommates that bring their children to term. It’s that I can’t afford MLB.tv.

Raising $129.99 (because only Premium can be streamed on my roommate’s HDTV (through my roommate’s Roku)) can’t be that hard. As I sit on my roommate’s sectional using my girlfriend’s laptop, here are some ideas for how I can raise enough money to pay the bills get MLB.tv. These ideas, unlike everything else around me, are my own. For shame:

Sell My Body
Not for sex! Jeez! I’m not a manwhore. I’m not a sex-person. I’m not a coital-event-horizon. And I love my kidneys. They’re mine! NO TOUCHY! (Emperor’s New Groove reference!) But here’s what I will sell: my feces. That’s right! My precious, pungent stool is a prime specimen for transplantation into someone else’s butt to heal their GI woes. Fecal transplants are real. And my prospective recipient/baseball-enabler wouldn’t even need to bother about it being “safe” or “sterile” (it’s poop), they can just come on over and we’ll do it in my kitchen. 

Yard Work (W)
I’m a scientist, barely, and I know what work is: W=Fd. I’ll be generating tons of Newton-meters, or joules, in someone’s yard by moving things around. See that rake? I’ll put it over there, by the fern. Boom: joules. I’ll kick a rock until it rolls over. Boom: joules. I’ll move a barcalounger to a sunny spot on the front porch. Boom: joules. I’ll pick up a copy of Cosmo. Boom: joules. I’ll learn a sex tip. Boom: joules.

Make a Kickstarter with Tiered Donation Rewards as Follows:
$1: I send you a GIF of me blowing you a kiss.
$5: I send you a picture of me holding your name on a sign while being chased by an angry Albert Belle.
$25: You can come over and I’ll make you tacos and perform an uncomfortably intimate foot-washing ritual. While you eat tacos.
$50: I send you a pair of PINK-style sweatpants, except they’re blue and orange and say “I’m with Colon” on the butt with an arrow pointing downwards. They only make sense when you’re riding Bartolo Colon like a mechanical bull. Otherwise they’re kinda embarrassing.
$129.99: You get to watch Albert Belle ride Cistulli like a mechanical bull. While I make you tacos.

The horrifyingly unregulated NotGraphs Genetics Lab has done it again, for the first time. You, the reader, asked (maybe) for someone as frightening as Clark the Crack Cub, as prolific as Jeff Sullivan, as tyrannical as Dayn Perry, and as handsome as Cistulli isn’t.

You pleaded: “Engineer us a leader, oh NGGL! May he strike terror in our hearts! May he give courage to our loins! May he sport the wisps of countless ghostly hairs! And can his name be a pun?! OMG CAN HIS NAME BE A PUN!?!?!”
We answered: “Quiet, rabble. It is done.”

HOMER UN

(And his genetic antecedents, Homer and Kim Jong Un):

Kitchenware and baseball players. They’re the same! The same exact thing. This morning I fried bacon on Brian McCann’s hot head (get it? because he did that angry thing!)! I’m just joshing, you guys. *snort* They’re not the exact same, but because humans are capable of abstracting the properties of objects and object-groups we can write silly internet stuff about how “this is like that” and “this other thing is like that other thing!” How fun is it to make those connections? HOW FUN IS IT. *throat noise* 

Ovens=Pitchers
Ovens are like Pitchers! You need your oven to both “handle the heat” and “bring the heat.” Just like a human baseball pitcher person! Plus you’re always entrusting your oven with the most important stuff, like cake. And if they suck you can always just give up on the first one and use your microwave oven. (That’s a relief pitcher!) Not that anyone microwaves cake. Whatever!

Catchers are Frying Pans!
Because they take a beating! They’re getting flamed from below and sizzled from above. You need them for every meal, even if it’s just to melt some butter to pour over noodles that you’ll eat alone while watching House of Cards. And just like the Teflon surface of your pans, catchers tend to break down sooner than other appliances/players/parallels!

1st Basemen are like Strainers
The job of a 1st baseman is to catch stuff, primarily. But because they’re Prince Fielder sometimes, it means they definitely don’t catch everything. WHICH IS JUST LIKE A STRAINER!

2nd Base is a French Press
I think of second base as the low-capacity, slightly fancier, but less reliable version of a shortstop (or do I? am I lying to you about my opinions so I can write a thing? yesmaybe!). Since you’ll soon see that I think of shortstops as drip coffee makers, this should make sense later, sort of. Here’s a picture of my stupid broken french press that I taped up so I could keep using it to appease my addiction:

SS (SURPRISE!*) is a Drip Coffee Maker
They’re the energy of the defense, always coming through in the biggest way, making the biggest plays and creating large, brown stains. POW! They’re an American staple, and even though some people have a Mr. Coffee (Asdrubal Cabrera) and others have something fancier (Andrelton Simmons) we all rely on our daily dose of shortstop. Or coffee. Or whatever.

*not a surpise

I’m equating thirdbasemen with blenders in this one
Because they come in a wide range. One version is horrible and breaks and spills your smoothie all over your counter and the other is a nice food processer. Like one is Miguel Cabrera and one is Adrian Beltre in his prime. get it ok good.

LF and RF are Spatulas
RF is the flippy turny spatula that grabs food and skillfully manipulates it with their powerful throwing arms and LF is the spatula that scrapes up crap from the side of bowls because they didn’t have the range to catch the cake dough before it bounced into the corner and the runner scored from first.

CF is a Fridge
The fridge is the keystone of the defense. It tracks down leftovers and perishables and covers the field that spatulas cannot. You might see a fridge make a spectacular diving play to make the final out, or it might simply hold your milk til you drink it. Sometimes a potential home run hit by, say, a strainer, will be caught at the wall by a fridge, and thrown back to the oven. My ability to separate kitchenware from baseball players is completely eroded.

Despite what I’d call a “thorough sacking” by barbarian forces, Dick Allen–pictured here as Imperator of Rome–gleefully signals a home run, presumably his own:

One only has so many ideas, is why Dick Allen is pictured here as Imperator Caesar. Related: I have had no new ideas since last week when I presented this post, which equates travel distance from Rome ca. 200 AD with the chance of each baseball team making the playoffs in 2014. It was received kindly; thank you, and will return this season so we can keep track of how far or close our beloved teams are or are not to that doomed paragon of the ancient world, Rome/The Playoffs(??). Until then, continue to be leisured and gentlemanly, even in the face of barbarian hordes, plague rats, backstabbing countrymen, et al.

Below is a map of the Roman Empire upon which are pasted the logos of all 30 Major League Baseball teams. Where they are located on the map corresponds to cities of the Roman Empire. Each city’s distance from Rome in travel days is roughly equivalent to the chance each team has of making the playoffs in 2014. The image is entirely embiggenable and is really only understood in an embiggened state.

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A few weeks ago I had you vote for a pseudometric I should create. It’s purpose would be to measure something purposeless. You, the doe-eyed reader, eagerly clicked your favorite meaningless metrics into existence, creating a three-way tie between MOIST, xBEPHYRGROTHHx and 2COOL. Last week I presented MOIST and this week I present xBEPHYRGROTHHx. I must warn you, gentle reader, that this gets weird. But you could have guessed that, since the initial idea for xBEPHYRGROTHHx is as follows:

Answers the question, “Which Major Leaguers would make a pleasing sacrifice to the Demon Lord xBEPHYRGROTHHx?” Players are credited for their potential to scream, writhe, and beg while chained to the Sacrificial Dais of OOberDROOOG, as well as for the volume, viscosity and arterial spurtability of the ballplayer’s blood.

If that’s what you’re into!!! BECAUSE I AM.
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Greg:

Greg with a miniature head:

… and trapezius implants.

…and clear, shameful evidence of amateur photoshopping. 

I made MOIST this week. It has nothing to do with rain, tears, or panties, but everything to do with sweat. Sweat! It’s the stuff that our skin cries, the stuff that stains our t-shirts and burns our eyes as we run on the treadmill (or actually go running in outside places). MOIST, as it was initially proposed, “measures which teams and players sweat the most.” MOIST as it is now falls woefully short of that goal, which you probably could’ve guessed it would. How am I supposed to really figure out who sweats the most without watching hundreds of games to scout for brow-wipes, pit stains, and groin-adjustments? Answer: I’m not. But I tried something, and the results of that attempt are what follows. I’ll begin by detailing the factors I thought might make MOIST somewhat of something.

Heat Index

What’s the hottest you’ve ever felt? For me it’s every time I look in the mirror. But also the one time when I was ten and ran around outside on a hot, humid Minnesota summer day and then spun around six- or seven-thousand times on a tire swing. I perspired a lot. And then I felt super sick and dehydrated and almost threw up all over the carpet of Crystal Evangelical Free Church. Moving on: a decent measure of heat is Heat Index, whose formula is really long but uses only temperature and relative humidity as inputs. Let’s say that MOIST is measuring the sweatiest person on the sweatiest possible day of the year at their home ballpark. I looked up the average high temperature and humidity for every MLB location and calculated the Heat Index for July 15th, which is the hottest day of the year on average. Domes/roofed parks were assumed to be 70 degrees, 50% humidity, which is probably off a little bit but it takes them off the MOIST leaderboards, as it should. This is the obvious one.
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The present author–a man in deep need of competitive stimulation–has been vigilantly tracking the results of an online poll he posted on these very pages just last week. Such is the state of his life right now. What he has found has been nothing short of pure, jubilant sex. You continue to get a sense of the author’s life. But really: tracking the results of the online poll has revealed a tight, sensitive race moaning with intrigue, betrayal, and lead changes. Mainly lead changes. Sexy lead changes.

RECAP: Last Thursday I generated some ideas for useless metrics by thinking of a word, writing that word in ALL CAPS, then writing out what that WORD might mean were it to measure some aspect of Major League Baseball. I then asked you to vote for your favorite pseudometric, keeping in mind that after this metric is created it can never be undone and will forever change the landscape of statistics (if the landscape of statistics was a Saharan dune and this metric was a dying breeze, shifting three to five grains of sand). I didn’t really say all that but you get the picture. I’m not great at brevity. Just go back and read the post.
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Happy New Year! Am I late on that? I don’t care! It’s still January and I still accidentally write 2013 on everything I have to date, ladies included. With time continuing to degrade our bodies year-by-year, I think it’s high time we think about the important stuff again. Stuff like: what can I measure for no reason? Specifically, what useless, trivial, unimportant but highly distracting thing can I measure? Answer: Shit tons. You can measure anything! Except for the impact God is having on the men in your Bible study.

Last summer I created a measure called COOL meant to parody NERD. I prefer COOL to NERD because it makes me laugh harder. I also love myself the most. I once again have the itch to do some measuring. I could maybe satisfy this itch by delving into something meaningful–something illuminating that adds to our sabermetric body of knowledge. But I know, duh, that nothing is meaningful, really, and I’d be wasting my time thinking so. Instead, the closest I can find to meaningful activity is one that will make me laugh, hopefully others, too, if only because I laugh harder when others are laughing. So I must measure something meaningless, or at the very least, something that resembles something meaningful but disintegrates at even the slightest scrutiny. A la COOL.

I generated some ideas for metrics by first thinking of a word in my brain (Brodmann area 47/46, perhaps), any word, and then coming up with what that word might measure were it a metric. You will find these proto-metrics, these seeds of weeds, below. And below them you will have the opportunity to exercise the privilege of voting. I will delicately craft a perfectly destitute metric out of the highest vote-getter.
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