Instructional Figures
I present these Instructional Figures without comment, in the trust that anyone wishing for baseballing betterment may profit thereby.
Author Archive
Balls Against Humanity
Sadly, the offseason is winding down, and soon enough it’ll be back to the drudgery of actual baseball. But before that happens, let’s take a minute to review the action of the last few months, with the help of Balls Against Humanity — the new game with the stupid name, that promises fun for your whole family! (Provided you have a family of perverts.)
Rules: Balls Against Humanity is exactly the same as the conveniently copyright-free game Cards Against Humanity — only, it’s all about baseball. So, just choose the card from your “hand” that best fits each prompt!
Commence!
The Yankees spent $155 million to bring ___ over from Japan.
Livan Hernandez and the Strike Zone He Made
As our own brilliant and enviably popular Jeff Sullivan demonstrated recently, Livan Hernandez — who announced his retirement on Wednesday — survived in baseball for 17 years by making his own strike zone. Here, in tribute to a unique if not arousingly dynamic pitcher, is the only known photograph of Mr. Hernandez with the strike zone he made.
The work has been described by critics as “luminous…haunting in its unsettled polyvalence…intimately charts the artist’s fractured subjectivity under the hegemony of late capitalism.” It is under consideration for acquisition by the National Folk Art Museum.
Predicting K-Rod’s Post-Cactus Comeback
The already questionable Milwaukee bullpen was thrown into disarray earlier this week by the news that Francisco Rodriguez had sustained a serious injury. K-Rod has received the preliminary diagnosis of a third-degree PCSI (Plantar Cactaceous Spinaceous Implantation), and while the veteran righty will be soliciting a second opinion next week from Dr. James Andrews, he is by all accounts already preparing himself for a procedure that will sideline him indeterminately.
Introducing the Handsomeboard
Here at NotGraphs, we are no strangers to quantifying the absurdly subjective. And yet we never rest upon what we’ve already accomplished, no matter how extraordinary. Indeed, the cry of “Excelsior!” is an oft-uttered one around the NotGraphs offices, even as oft as “CISTULLI!!” and “Wait, we have offices?” So we have spent the winter sifting through vast reams of data, in an audacious effort to best isolate what it is that the baseball fan truly cares about. And here, with pleasure and some understandable anxiety, we present the result.
Derek Jeter, Angel
– Joe Namath
On Monday in Tampa, footballing legend Joe Namath imputed nothing less than a supernatural lack of frailty to Derek Jeter. We numbers-minded people at NotGraphs were startled, to say the least, by Namath’s assertion. After all, a cursory search reveals that Jeter has been scored with no fewer than 243 errors over the course of his major league career, not to mention the Southern Atlantic League-record 56 errors he committed at age 19. In hopes of resolving this paradox, we contacted Mr. Namath by phone1 with the intention of showing him some video evidence of Jeter’s miscues. Unfortunately, we were only able to locate three such videos on YouTube, and Namath was quick to refute each one. Excerpts from our conversation follow:
Namath: “Yeah, I was there. What you don’t see is that Ross smeared some kind of foreign substance on the ball before he hit it. I mean whatever the stuff was he really lathered it up good. The thing would have been damn near impossible to catch. Typical Sox garbage.” [Namath did not elaborate on how Cody Ross managed to doctor the ball from the batter’s box.]
Lest We Forget: Jim Fregosi Was Handsome
Boyishly so,
and then dreamily so;
ruggedly so,
and craggily so, to the last;
indeed, reader, not unlike America.
Inserting Baseball Players in Place of Their Similarly Named but Comically Unrelated Counterparts: 1. Skip James
“Skip” James was a difficult, haunted man who was torn—like many Southerners, black and white—between the Devil’s music and God’s word. He sounded like someone possessed, a one-man Southern Gothic drama…In a way, James’ story is the truest story of the blues: He led an open wound of a life, and all he got for it was minor-league, post-mortem stardom.
