I realize he’s not really in fashion these days, but I still have a soft spot for Ernest Hemingway. His short stories are tremendous, and I love For Whom the Bell Tolls. That probably puts me in the minority.

Of course, his most famous work is also one of his shortest, The Old Man and the Sea, a novel in which a Cuban fisherman hooks a beautiful marlin, and struggles to get it to shore before the sharks rob him of his prize catch. While it’s not, in my opinion, his best work, it does have the weight of a Nobel Prize for Literature behind it, and famously includes some warm words about Joe DiMaggio.

What people do not know is that the first draft was actually much more focused on baseball. One of my former graduate school compatriots has become one of the leading authorities on Hemingway, and she assures me that I did not just make this up this morning before having any caffeine:

“He always thought of the baseball as ‘la pelota’ which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger ballplayers, those who used iPads as ways to review video in between at bats, bought when the home runs had brought much money, spoke of her as ‘el pelota’ which is masculine and not grammatically correct in Spanish. He had learned as, like, a freshman in high school. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought. Then he swung mightily at an Addison Reed slider down and in, and clubbed it well over the wall in right field to win the game and bring joy to the multitudes of Cleveland.  He could die now, alone and happy, in the rain.”

Weirdly prescient:

That question, the question in the title, is what everyone is wondering these days who doesn’t have anything important to do. “We haven’t seen him around these pages for a whole week, and that’s not like him. Is he drunk?” No, but I understand why you’d think that.

“Is he too poor to pay for Internet anymore?” Another likely answer, but not the correct one.

“Has he been fired?” Regrettably, no.

“Is he dead?” Possibly; I can’t verify this one way or the other.

Of course, the reason I can’t verify that is because Carson, or at least his graceless corpse, currently is residing in Paris, France, which is the greatest of the Parises, narrowly eking out a victory over Paris, Texas, Paris Hilton, Plaster of Paris, and Paris of Troy. There, he is allegedly staying with his inexplicably lovely wife and is immersing himself in the French tongue (that sounds dirtier than I meant it). And this has apparently also been the week for his new surroundings to acclimate themselves to him.

While there, in addition to reviving the thoroughly stupid FranceGraphs, Cistulli will serve as an ambassador of sorts, bringing the goodwill of American baseball and sportswriting to the City of Lights, as you can read in the letter below:

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In the course of my work for another Internet writing outfit, sometimes I get strange emails. This usually happens when one of the assignment editors there mistakes me for someone else and asks me to do something for which I am not even a little qualified. For instance, I essentially stopped paying attention to football six years ago when my son was born. I got dumber then, and had only room in my brain for one sport with all the parenting I had to learn how to do. As such, I have vague ideas of who some of the players are, especially if they’re old, and I know the Vikings will break my heart at some point, but otherwise I’m pretty useless.

So yesterday, I received the following email from one of said editors:

“Dear contributor Mike Bates,

You have been assigned to write a Article on [redacted] called Heath Miller injury: Steelers expect tight end back at practice for the purpose of Demand.  It will be published at Early morning on 2013-09-17.

Take note of the following:

https://twitter.com/EdBouchette/status/380000346493304832

Please reply to this message if you have any questions or are unavailable to post this. As always, thanks for your contributions.

Thanks,
Assignment Desk Editor”

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Some idjit named “Mike Bates” was riling up the masses over on SBNation this morning, comparing stathead culture warrior Brian Kenny to a British colonialist barreling through Africa and the Middle East, telling the locals how to dress and organize themselves, redrawing boundaries of nations to suit his whim, and not giving a damn about the consequences. And all because Kenny insists that the win be murdered in a well, along with all whose sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped them conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given them enough clairvoyance to find the rebels’ hidden fortress.

Frankly, the whole thing seemed ludicrous and offensive and this Bates fellow should be summarily fired (from a cannon).

In conclusion, here is Sabermetric Colonialist Brian Kenny in a pith helmet and with a silly mustache and a monocle:

 Ridiculous! He barely even looks British.

The above image comes to us from the pages of a friendly rival organization, who make it their business to spoil everyone’s fun and tell us exactly what the odds are of your favorite team making the playoffs (the answer, I’m sorry to say, isn’t good for most of us). Today, on the other hand, they provide us with an amusing game wherein we get to imagine a scenario where the Diamondbacks, Padres, Rockies, and Giants all have a zero percent chance of making the postseason, but still have a 0.1 percent chance of winning the World Series.

Here’s what I’ve sketched out: Read the rest of this entry »

I have, perhaps, an unhealthy love for Ben Revere, who until today seemed like the very picture of perfection as a Major League Baseball player. A lovable speedster who was constantly hustling and who had an infectious smile, I was smitten immediately. Even the trade that sent him from my beloved Twins to the Phillies failed to dampen my enthusiasm for him.

And then he tweeted this yesterday:

“@iknowjado: I miss my bro @BenRevere9” miss you too no homo

— Ben Revere (@BenRevere9) September 5, 2013

It has since been deleted.

At first, I was aghast that such a beautiful creature could tweet something so callously homophobic. I was all set to type a scathing response, explaining how I felt betrayed by yet another ballplayer I allowed to let me down. I was going to criticize him for his bad joke and me for my investment in Ben Revere’s purity. I was set to pine for an earlier time when we were allowed to pretend that flu-like symptoms were flu-like symptoms, Mickey Mantle was a hero, and beaver hunts were solely the province of voyageurs.

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Belovéd,

Would that I had been able to address you sooner, but the Day of Labor proved too laborious, and yesterday was Tuesday, and Cistulli says I’m not allowed to address you on Tuesday.  Someday, that tyrant will get his.

So after three days, you are undoubtedly aware that Delmon Young has triumphantly returned to the Major Leagues, re-surfacing in Tampa to play for the Rays franchise which bore him and unleashed him upon the unsuspecting league. Since his debut on Sunday, he has collected three singles in eight plate appearances.

In celebration of his accomplishments, the royal We insert Delmon Young’s name into a shitty representation of the Western Canon, thus diminishing those works even further into the flammable morass of Lake Erie that is reality-TV-based popular culture.

Today, Delmon Young is a deeply troubled albino monk assassin in The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown’s abomination of a best seller.  We find him in Paris, France, basking in the afterglow of murder and fighting back his throbbing masthead:

The plaza before the great church was deserted at this hour, the only visible souls on the far side of Place Saint-Sulpice a couple of teenage hookers showing their wares to the late night tourist traffic. Their nubile bodies sent a familiar longing to Delmon Young’s loins. His thigh flexed instinctively, causing the barbed cilice belt to cut painfully into his flesh.

The lust evaporated instantly. For ten years now, Delmon Young had faithfully denied himself all sexual indulgence, even self-administered. It was The Way. He knew he had sacrificed much to follow Opus Dei, but he had received much more in return. A vow of celibacy and the relinquishment of all personal assets hardly seemed a sacrifice. Considering the poverty from which he had come and the sexual horrors he had endured in prison, celibacy was a welcome change.

Now, having returned to France for the first time since being arrested and shipped to prison in Andorra, Delmon Young could feel his homeland testing him, dragging violent memories from his redeemed soul. You have been reborn, he reminded himself. His service to God today had required the sin of murder, and it was a sacrifice Delmon Young knew he would have to hold silently in his heart for all eternity.

The measure of your faith is the measure of the pain you can endure, the Teacher had told him. Delmon Young was no stranger to pain and felt eager to prove himself to the Teacher, the one who had assured him his actions were ordained by a higher power.

“Hago la obra de Dios [I do the work of God],” Delmon Young whispered, moving now toward the church entrance.

Who is this mysterious teacher? What does he have to do with Opus Dei? Why does Delmon Young suspect this is all a Zionist conspiracy? Tell us more about these sexual horrors! Perhaps we’ll find out next time in Delmon Young’s romp through the filthy bowels Western Literature.

With one of my spawn poised to return to the daily care of the nanny state, by which I am referring his elementary school, on Tuesday next, I will have the opportunity to impart important lessons to him to keep him on the narrow, treacherous path to successfully complete the first grade, and thereby bring honor to his family by academically outstripping Dayn Perry, the chosen son of the South.

Among those lessons will be:

1)  Straighten up and fly right.

2) Zip up your fly, dammit.

3) Play to win.

4) Don’t judge a book by its cover. Also read the liner notes.

5) Take that finger from out thy nose.

6) Shower, or you’ll look and smell like a dirty Frenchman, like your Uncle Carson.

7) No backsassin’ yer teachers.

8) Pick a fight on the first day with the weakest boy you can find until the guards pull you off of him. You’ll be in solitary for a while, but when you get out, nobody will mess with you because they’ll think you’re a little bit crazy and capable of anything.

9) You should learn computers.

Finally, perhaps the most important lesson comes to he and I from Brewers first baseman and outfielder Corey Hart, who has been sadly sidelined by knee problems for the entire 2013 season:

 Be cool! Stay in school: Prepare yourself for every day by completing your homework and getting enough sleep.

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Who among us would dispute that there simply are not enough songs about baseball, this game we love and that rarely loves us back? We have made so many advances as a society. Muscle cars, cellular telephones, The Internet, peanut butter and jelly from the same jar! And yet, our baseball song technology remains mired in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ruled by Katie Casey and John Fogerty with their iron fists. And please, don’t speak to me of the upstart rebellion of The Baseball Project, that sad fantasy of refugees from the 1980s and 1990s that suckered me in by featuring a non-Stipe from R.E.M. and a couple people from The Dream Syndicate, which I had briefly confused with The Dream Academy. What the hell have they ever done for us?

Addressing this crucial shortage is The Leonard Lothlen Band, out of the San Francisco Bay Area, with “The Best Baseball Song Ever Written,” about how much the singer really, really loves baseball. It is presented below soundtracking adorable moppets flopping about the ballyard. Please to commence with dispensing your feedback and scouting acumen:

Ryan Braun is in the news for all kinds of naughty things he did and put into himself in order to be a better, more productive, healthier baseball player. Ultimately, I’m glad that he’s being punished and I hope he learns a lesson from all of this.

That lesson, the one I hope he learns, is not one of the ones that the 2012 Milwaukee Brewers tried to instill in me and my son when we attended a game at Miller Park last year and provided us with self-improvement themed baseball cards, which I had totally forgotten about until my hetero-sexual life mate, Bill Parker, brought his kids to my house last weekend and found them. Perhaps Bill should have learned a valuable lesson about not snooping, but considering I’m getting an entire not-entirely-unamusing NotGraphs post out of it, I have decided to leave that lesson untaught. Instead, in retaliation, I plan to show Monday’s video to his children when they’re teenagers (note: someone remind me to do this in about 10 years).

Anyway, in the meantime, here is the first installment of Life Lessons with the 2012 Brewers, starring Ryan Braun:

“To those you meet, be sweet: Having good manners is important. Learn them now and use them forever.”

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