Jeff Sullivan wrote a great post — as he is wont to do — about putting Hiroyuki Nakajima in context. He mentioned Nakajima’s bat flip. Carson Cistulli posted it. It was grand.

But then I saw video of Norihiro Nakamura, he of the .051 ISO and the 41 plate appearances for the Dodgers in 2005. Doing this.

Where Nakajima had a sort of panache, maybe with an easy grace, Nakamura is an explosion, a cannonball, a rocket going off. Could just be some sort of coincidence? Many men have bat flips, after all.

Unless…

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We took sabermetrics to the streets this week, and tried it out with concerts. But the ‘readily available’ or ‘replacement-level’ concert is woefully hard to define. Beer? Not so much. Go to your local bodega and look at the beer aisle and you have easy candidates for replacement-level beer. And so baseball’s WAR framework can easily be applied to suds.

Beers. Above. Replacement.

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A simple request this weekend begat a nerdgasm: Maury Brown asked for favorite concert on twitter, and just a little listicle tickling jarred something loose.

It wasn’t so much the particulars of the list. I’ve liked a lot of bands, and in my case, it was as easy as picking the best of each genre. Phish played from before midnight till dawn of 2001 in the swamps in Florida, that was pretty amazing. One of the hipster halloween shows — Flaming Lips in London or Fischerspooner in New York — had to be there, although since I was a perfect Kenny G in New York, I suppose that’s the pick. Arthur Lee and Love got the ‘orchestral arrangement’ pick. Amon Tobin’s ISAM got the electronica pick, even if Goldie at The End in London was epic. Burning Spear with 500 people on the beach in Negril got the reggae bid. The Meters at the Fillmore for funk. Goldfinger and Reel Big Fish together in some category or another, even if Less Than Jake’s spiderman dude makes for a lot of fun. Ratatat at Terminal Five has to register.

When I got to the hip hop entry, the saber side of me began to percolate.

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Nice photographer baseball cards. But where are the stats?! DPI maybe, aperture, average pieces per year, maybe a weighted number of museum shows indexed to the number of museums showing that year?

A baseball card or ten to Patrick Newman for the link.

Before you see this, the newest animation from the Next Media team that gave us such classics as Raging Panda Pablo Sandoval and Derek Jeter Mauled by Tiger, a word of warning: Sex. As in, this video is full of sexy time. You’ll see inappropriate outfits, inappropriate touching of equipment, and just a strange story of courtship and copulation involving Billy Beane, Hiroyuki Nakajima, and Brad Pitt.

Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.

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Through him I sheltered from the pain
on a sagging couch
My seat was nearest to the game
as he let those butterflies loose
And while they talked of free agents and prospects,
he transfigured the team into champions.

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Listen, we all have our own ways of showing pleasure. But it is worth a moment’s pause and reflection to realize that if you couldn’t see the clothes these men were wearing, you’d have no chance figuring out which one was the guy that just made $36 million dollars. Then again, you probably wouldn’t want to see these guys without their clothes, so that’s another thing you might realize.

Thanks to Patrick Newman for the picture, which came from Sanspo.

Fireman Ed called it quits. He’s no longer… the Jets’ superfan? As much as any man in his position can ‘quit’ his unofficial role, he’s doing so, at least that’s what he’s saying. Maybe he’ll provide inspiration…

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Good luck. This one’s tough.

[You have to connect the dots on one of the pictures. And don’t blame me, it’s not my fault. Well, blame me for the stupid post, but not the conditions that created it.]

I was a white boy in Jamaica first, and then a Jamaican in Germany. Then I was a Euro in the south.

Even as a nerd in prep school, I was out of place. I flew to Boston with a Colorado Rockies starter jacket for some reason, and very little experience with snow. That jacket, cinched tightly to reveal one eye most days that first winter, was often the object of scorn. Labelled a Jamaican on some paperwork somewhere, I again found myself as a white person at social events full of minorities.

And I was bad at sports. I arrived at Milton Academy a full five-foot-three, 100 pounds. I grew three inches every summer, but left school six-foot-two, hitting a buck fifty soaking wet. My motor cortex thought my limbs were shorter than they were, and so I was uncoordinated and small most years. That resulted in some ridicule, but it also created a problem for me, since I somehow had to satisfy the sports requirement every season. I resisted the wrestling team’s advances to be their super lightweight. Then a couple small bones broke and made me seem brittle. So I turned to other sports. Intramural (hack) skiing. Hack ultimate. Hack squash. I coached the field hockey team. I tried soccer until my ankles begged for mercy.

The only sport I kept trying all four years was baseball.

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