Let’s face it, reading a baseball site like FanGraphs (but not NotGraphs, of course!) is pretty nerdy. If you want to double down on being a baseball nerd, the best route is fantasy baseball. But what if you want to triple your nerdity?
As you may have heard, certain sinister Boston layabouts spent much of the 2011 season acting like doobage enthusiasts sans doobage. Well, America’s Worst Sports SectionTM is back on the case like a maggot on a leach on a lamprey, and they have a gallery that invites you to decide, with gentle nudging from America’s Worst Sports SectionTM, whether certain key members of the Red Sox got fat as the season deepened and the KFC boxes and cans emptied of shitty beer mounted. Here’s one representative photo of the previously un-indicted Clay Buchholz:
If you’re like me, then so moved were you by the implications of the photo above that you began scampering around on all fours, rooting at the floors, sprouting cloven hooves, and making your finest and most bellowing hog-to-the-slaughter noises. Look, will you, at that indolent sworper of a man in the second photo! The Caligulan excesses! The betrayal of The Nation! Fack!
By all means, peruse the entire gallery. It’s striking how lighting and angles can reveal before God and all The Fat and The Lazy.
So shape up, Sox, or that guy in Globe mail room who knows Photoshop will give you all piggy snouts.
(A piece of fried chicken shared like the strand of pasta in “Lady and the Tramp”: HBT)
If you carefully read the terms of service printed on every MLB game ticket, you’ll notice the following bit of muddled legalese:
XXIV(f): If Major League Baseball (hereafter, PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL CONCERN) can’t have you, then no one will.
A bit troubling, no? Indubitably so, but you might be left wondering how MLB wields such far-ranging plenary powers. The answer, which is also the correct answer? They take pictures of you at the ballpark and allow anyone with an Angelfire Internet Computer to ogle you and your native indignities. From the Computer Link:
Below are panoramic photos taken from the 2011 MLB postseason. Each panorama was created by stitching together hundreds of photos taken over a 20-minute span. By logging in via Facebook Connect, you can tag yourself, as well as friends who attended the game. You can even zoom in to identify individual faces. (Emphasis and bloodcurdling font mine, but should totally be theirs, too.)
Each of us is special, but each of us — above all, this writer — is also a misshapen idiot. If we wanted to be seen doing what we do at a ballgame — i.e., sweating, grunting at dot races, drooling on our foul-smelling shoes, screaming in tribal unison at the mascot with the t-shirt cannon, catching our breath from eating too fast, picking at scabs, idly probing our own orifices — then we’d log on to Chatroulette between innings. Some things, however, are best left unseen, and those things are we, the stinking people of the world.
So thanks, MLB, for ruining everything.
Perhaps you woke up this morning and, while undertaking the ablutions necessary for triumph at the office, in the gym and in the bedroom, thought to yourself: on this day, I shall not lay eyes upon a nude Jose Reyes and a Chris Carpenter freshly pruned of his base-and-ball chemise!
Know that these espousals were as hollow and empty as hollow and empty things:
That, of course, is Jose Reyes, his surely tensed organ blanketed by artful shadow, as part of an ESPN the Mag feature that will make you feel various feelings.
Are we done here? No, we are not done here …
When one’s co-workers are transformed into a shouting and leaping throng of bodice-rippers, it is known as “Success in Business.” Today, if you Move Enough Product, the same might happen to you.
In summary: Jose Reyes is naked, and Chris Carpenter is working on it.
(Bestripped gratitude: BuenoWaino)
The Florida/Miami Marlins, in advance of moving into a football-free abode of their very own, are busy re-branding themselves as the Señor Frog’s of baseball. First came the fashion-forward logo, then came the hat festooned with said fashion-forward logo. And now? Now comes … this. Click and fathom. My God, click and fathom:
That, friends and enemies, is what’s going to happen each time a Marlin (meaning, mostly, Mike Stanton) hits a home run. Once more for emphasis: This is going to happen.
Over at SBN, Grant Brisbee insists, with evidence, that this is a real, true thing conceived by, presumably, people paid in U.S. currency to conceive of things.
To what should one liken this thing? Would this be the output if Poseidon sexually assaulted Jimmy Buffett? Is it a rendering of the rarely glimpsed Kennedy Compound? Is this what “Eyes Wide Shut” meant? The entrance to a Very Infectious Seafood Restaurant where even children get the senior’s discount? Or just: The fuck?
Since the Marlins have already crossed the pastel-colored Rubicon, there’s really only one final step to take. Purchasers of season-ticket packages also receive … an evening of carnal pleasures with the Official Marlins Reverse Mermaid!
Undersea Baseball Yes!
It is known among the genteel that occasionally a gentleman prefers to take in a game of base and ball not with his wife and progeny, but rather with a paid Detroit whore. And for this very reason, Patrick Henry invented Craigslist. So it is not surprising that a certain well-bred, monocled spice trader recently took to the List of Craig in search of a female companion not necessarily averse to breathy sexual congress in a darkened Comerica Park utility closet:
looking for a reasonably attractive, relatively promiscuous, 23+ yo woman to accompany to ALDS game 4 tonight (10/4) at Comerica Park.
From relatively mediocre looking bald 33 yo man
Section 140, Row 8.
Face value plus sliding scale discount based on attractivenes and entertainment value.
PS – must have driver’s license, breakfast skills optional
True, the “mediocre looking bald man 33 yo man” bit is perhaps not the savviest example of targeted messaging, but, in his defense, those sound like pretty good seats. As well, kudos to this discerning patron for realizing that there is a time for the “relatively promiscuous” (e.g., at a ballgame) and a time for the “unthinkably promiscuous” (e.g., at a Dave & Buster’s in the suburbs).
(Consensual sex: SportsGrid)
Setup + Punchline = Comedy
While leading economists have found that, indeed, money (for the most part) can’t buy happiness, one thing it can buy is a Mets toilet seat from popular online auction house eBay. In fact, it can also buy toilet seats for six other teams: the Tampa Bay Rays, New York Yankees, Chicago White Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago Cubs, and Boston Red Sox.
Image (and everything else) stolen directly from Mets Police.
We know that Carl Crawford loves antiquarian books. Does classic literature love Carl Crawford back?
The answer appears to be a resounding “Yes.” Regard:
Or perhaps you prefer a more modern printing:
If there’s one thing the good, round folks of the Upper Midwest love more than consonants and slowly dying, it’s encased meats, dontchaknow. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Twins of Minnesota have lent their corporate imprimatur to at least one package — and probably many more — of lovingly prepared offal. And this brings us to your Daguerreotype of the Evening:
Luminous food critic Gael Greene has written of the Twins Big Dog’s “mellow notes of animal pecker and delightful sodium-nitrate finish.” Nom, nom, nom!
Recently, we were chagrined to report on the grim inner workings that led to The Logo That Killed America. Today, it is with grievous regret that we must present to you the next deadly step: The Hat That Killed America …
Not since the penis of that man on the subway has there been such an unwelcome reveal. Godspeed, Marlins rooters. Godspeed.
