Confused.

I’m no pro at baby-rearing: I’ve just been babysitting my four-month-old nephew for a week-plus. But, that week coincided with opening weekend, and so an interesting parallel was born. The teams that were supposed to contend – they are not unlike crying babies. There are only four basic approaches to mellowing out a crying baby, this semi-expert says.

Feed the Baby
In this case, feed the baby with information about why the team will right ship. Talk about sample sizes and fluke in-game occurrences. Empty the bottle of its contents: reason based on precedent. Point out that we’re only about 2.5% of the way into the season, and what that might look like in another sport – half-way through the first game in an NFL season, for example. Keep feeding until the baby is sated, and then burp them so they don’t get indigestion.

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Eccentricity!

It looks like Tim Byrdak is looking for entrance music when he trots out of the bullpen, and he’s willing to let readers decide for him. First, we’ll have to decide what we’re voting for, or it’s likely that TedQuarter’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” lark will win. And do we want that? Well, maybe we do.

But let’s talk it over first.

Some suggestions, for your perusal:

The LOOGY Clap by Lazy Mary
Ghetto Ways by Scissors for Lefty
I Just Can’t Live that Fast Anymore by Lefty Frizell
Half a Man, Lefty & Pancho by Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson
Sling Shot Part Two by Lefties Soul Connection

Or we could do something not-so-lefty, and just plain badass:

I Don’t Want To Be A Player No More, Big Pun
This Modern Love, Bloc Party
Mistress Mabel, The Fratellis
Hurricane, Jamie LIdell
Daft Punk Is Playing At My House, LCD Soundsystem
*The Sweat Descends, Les Savy Fav
Fire On the Bayou, The Funky Meters
Electric Feel, MGMT
Wanna Be Startin Somethin, Michael Jackson
Young Folks, Peter Bjorn and John
Coming in Hot, Peter Tosh
Simon Says, Pharoahe Monch
*Loud Pipes, Ratatat
2 More Dead, RJD2
*Hash Pipe, Weezer

*Mine if I as a player. I can’t decide.

H/T: Ted Berg

Will McDonald at the Royals Review did it again. His paragraph to Eric Hosmer written in the style of The Golden Bough is brilliant. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s a great excerpt:

A near universal fear existed that Hosmer’s prodigious fly balls would knock out the sun, depriving the world of Spring. In some parts of Eastern Bavaria, each winter Hosmer’s name was forbidden to be spoken aloud until St. Dentlin’s Day in mid-March.

Imitation is flattery, so pardon us for stealing the idea. Here, for you, is a poem about Will Venable, in the style of Walt Whitman. I dunno, maybe it will make sense. It’s just a natural extension of my man crush on the power/speed lefty stuck in a lefty-killing ballpark. Of course, it’s 99% stolen. Mad libs!

With All Thy Tools

WITH all thy tools, mighty Venable,
(Standing strong, serenely confident, overlooking the field,)
Power, discipline, speed, vouchsafed to thee—With these, and like of these, vouchsafed to thee,
What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem never solving;)
The gift of Perfect Athleticism fit for thee—What of that gift of gifts thou lackest?
That missing ability to make contact? that swing, hit, fly fit for thee?
Not that swinging, swinging, swinging – strike three.

You scared of Emilio Bonifacio? You should be.

The “Deal With It” meme has been circling for some time now. Apparently, it may have its’ origins in High School Musical according to this detailed discussion of the meme. Let’s not let that spoil the fun.

Florida Marlins fans may be well acquainted with the flaws in Emilio Bonifacio’s game. You know what? He cares not, as he’s the likely fore-runner for the starting third base spot now that prospect Matt Dominguez was sent down. Cue the gif.

You know what, though? We may have found the high-water mark for this meme, the moment at which the wave will break and recede, leaving all manner of broken links in its path as it returns. Well, it’s either the Bonifacio gif, or this one.

H/T: Erik Manning (Bonifacio), CajoleJuice (Nosewash)

There must be something in the water in Kansas City.

What is it about the players in royal blue that inspires such melodious intent? First we had a triptych to Jeff Francoeur that drew inspiration from the righteous tunes coming from Barry Manilow and Sara McLaughlin, and now Will McDonald at Royals Review has added Bruce Chen and Mike & The Mechanics to the musical lineup.

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The yearly cycle for a bad team should be familiar to most.

There’s the uplifting dawn that is spring with it’s bird-chirping optimism. There’s the disillusionment of summer, when, as if wilting in the strong noon-time sun, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. And then there’s the softly-falling sadness of the offseason, when even jaded fans pine for the good old days – because flawed baseball is still baseball.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrMqn6xC-Bw

But be careful, this is nearly blue in its indecency. NSFW but not really, you know what I mean?

Scouts might say he’s got long levers and a big load.

H/T: Albert Lyu and Carson Cistulli

Headlines are a funny thing. They are designed to get your attention, or the attention of a search engine somewhere, while summing up the contents in a pithy way. Often they contain internet memes or SEO-optimization key words. Sometimes, like today, they contain both. /header #MLB #baseball

Over the years we’ve had some fun with the “Free Person X” internet meme, which most probably spawned from Free Mumia, but has since gone a little crzazlebeans, if you know what I mean, and baseball has taken the saying under it’s wing. Whether it’s Kila Ka’aihue that must be #freed from the clutches of the incompetent Royals, or Brandon Allen that must fight the good fight against the spaced invaders that wish to take his playing time, we’ve used that sentence construction to encourage young men to go against what’s wrong. Having been guilty of capriciously throwing the phrase around just last week, this is no finger-wagging piece, though.

Instead, call this piece the anthropological wanderings inspired by the title and subject of a serious piece by Larry Behrendt at It’s About the Money Stupid. In his latest, Larry examines the fate of young Lainer Bueno. The Venezuelan shortstop may not have a future in baseball, but attribute that mostly to a fateful combination of a lack of major-league talent (228/.336/.239 in Venezuelan Summer League) and the possibly unfortunate positive test for clenbuterol. The combination has him a free agent, and Larry thinks it’s an injustice.

Read the whole thing, do it. Afterwards, you may feel that our entry point to this article was all wrong today. Behrendt’s piece is a serious uncovering of the holes in MLB’s drug testing policy as it relates to Venezuelans and clenbuterol in particular. It looks like there’s a real reason the league may want to look at the fact that, according to “Scorecasting” by Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim, Venezuelan baseball players are about 4 times more likely to test positive for drugs than their American counterparts. It may not just be about skeezy agents in Latin America. The beef may be the real meat to the story.

But the title, and even the article, can make a mind wander to other “Free” movements in baseball. The parallels may seem stretched, and its continued use may even seem to cheapen the phrase. On the other hand, injustice exists. And whether the injustice at hand is an unequal appropriation of playing time, an unfair exclusion from the sport, or an incarceration surrounded by real questions, it doesn’t deserve to continue. And if it takes a hashtag, a slogan, a link and a few re-tweets to uncover and document that injustice, that’s about the least we can do.

Scratch that, it’s the very least we can do.

The beacon that draws us north.

It’s the beginning of March, and that means the players report to warmer locales while the nerds head north. It all makes sense when you look at the lineup that MIT Sloan Business School puts together for their annual Sports Analytics Conference.

This year, FanGraphs will be in full force at the event, as Daves Cameron and Appelman will be attending, and your intrepid NotG reporter will be covering the event’s nerd-angles and nerd-crevices. If you doubt the credentials of the event, just check this list. The invited speakers and panelists this year include:

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One way or another.

Borrowing from an excellent thinkpiece by Dave Gershman over at Beyond the Boxscore, I thought it might be fun to imagine a more European approach to the Major League Baseball. In the Premiership, and various other soccer leagues around the world, the bottom teams are relegated to the minor leagues, while the best minor leagues teams ascend to the majors. Gives the bottom of the ‘table,’ or standings, a little juice at the end of the season.

Of course, that would create all sorts of problems with baseball, where the minor league teams are all assigned to major league teams. That sort of relationship would be hard to navigate. For example, Gershman starts by wondering if the Pirates deserve Anthony Rendon – and if they deserve to be in the major leagues at all by extension. But if the Pirates were relegated, they would have been replaced by a minor league team associated with the Royals. Then we’d we be stuck with twice the amount of Royals-based teams in the major leagues – however you feel about the Royals, you probably don’t want that.

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