Baseball, besides providing us with boundless joy and Things to Talk about with The Stern and Distant Fathers of America, also lays out before us the full complement of modern eyebrow styles. Let us now see to the essential business of identifying and naming those styles …
“Are we doing anything on Saturday, March 17th?”
“2012, or are we talking even more than three months into the future?”
“2012.”
“Okay, I have no idea.”
“So it’s okay to schedule a fantasy baseball auction for that afternoon?”
“What time?”
“I don’t know yet. Does it matter?”
“Of course it doesn’t matter– it’s three months from now. I was trying to be funny.”
“There’s nothing funny about my fantasy baseball auction.”
According to the above photo, baseball has officially taken over the entire universe today. While MLB has yet to release a PR statement, there is all kinds of talk floating around Dallas speculating what this will mean for us, the people of Earth.
• Everyone will be drafted; not for the army, but by potential employers. For the next six years, you will work for pennies on the dollar compared to what you’re worth (unless you’re a top-250 pick), but then you’ll get to explore the market for your services. Some call it indentured servitude, but I call it progress.
• You will not be in line for a promotion if the rest of your team sucks. Guilt by association. In a few years, this sentiment will eventually go away, but until then, get used to not being praised for your accomplishments.
• All things in life will now have a three-strikes, four-balls system. If you do well on four work projects, you will receive an automatic bonus. If you screw up three times, you’re fired. No if, ands, or buts.
• Just like baseball’s three-outs systems, once you get fired from three different jobs, you are no longer allowed to work for the next two years. You will be forced to find a Sugar Momma or Daddy to support yourself, as life is now out of your hands.
I, for one, welcome our new baseball overlords and their maverick policies.
Thinking man’s base ball-ist Eric Sogard is, natch, something of a local hero on these electric pages. So because of his heroism and because he is indubitably a Thing That Contains Multitudes, we are duty-bound to make a not a man out of him — I feel certain that Raquel Welch and Adrienne Barbeau have already attended to those refreshing matters — but rather make a meme out of him.
What follows is this Internetting Gentleman’s — this memesmith’s, this smither of memes’s — attempt to do just that …
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Here at NotGraphs, we’re taking it relatively easy today. We have a ritual. We gather together at the home of our beloved leader, Carson Cistulli, where we feast on the greatest creature that God has ever bestowed on the Earth, the Ken Turzimmoon:
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Apropos of nothing, here are three team names that are still unused at any level of baseball, accompanied by some suitable hometowns and likely mascots.
Team Name: Badly Wounded Stab Victim Hawks
Possible Locations: Cities with Crime and Hospitals
Mascot: A Supine, Blood-Soaked, and Half-Conscious Stab Victim
Team Name: Devastated Local Economy Bats
Possible Locations: Merced, CA; Cape Coral, FL; Michigan, The Whole Thing
Mascot: An Overzealous Loan Officer
Team Name: Scary Alcoholic Uncle Hounds
Possible Locations: Northern New Jersey, Middle New Jersey, Southern New Jersey
Mascot: Mickey Rourke
Hey kids, this is Eric with a very important public service announcement.
Moving can be a difficult process — especially for teenagers. Being uprooted from an environment in which you have learned to thrive and saying goodbye to the friends with whom you have developed strong relationships for a strange new place where you don’t know anyone is an extraordinarily trying undertaking at such a critical juncture in your social and emotional development.
Often times, in such a situation, you may find yourself feeling pressured to compromise your values in an attempt to gain the approval and acceptance of a new social group. It may start with them asking to borrow your Algebra II homework at lunch so they can copy your answers. Then you may be tempted to have a drink — or many drinks! — at a party. Then you may meet a cute girl or boy who manipulates you into sending revealing photographs of yourself to her/him over the phone (typically, in cases of “sexting” it is girls who are pressured to send photos). Then you may be offered illegal drugs under the bleachers of the school baseball field.
As much as you may desire to once again feel that sense of belonging you had at your old school, it is important that you remain true to yourself and resist the aforementioned temptations. In other words, don’t be like Jed:
“Kerry Wood” is a depressant commonly prescribed to treat anxiety associated with late-inning high-leverage situations. Taken recreationally in larger doses, however, it is addictive and known to produce effects similar to “Mark Prior” — a drug in the benzodiazepine family.
Just because you suddenly find yourself in an uncomfortable new environment does not mean you should abandon the principles that made you the person you are. If the people you aim to make your “friends” are pressuring you to do so, perhaps you should reevaluate your desire to establish friendships with them in the first pace.
Apropos of nothing, except the author’s own interior examinations, here are some brief and confidently worded remarks on the best and worst months of the year from the point of view of a baseballing enthusiast.
If, at any point, the reader should find himself doubting the veracity of the following remarks, he (i.e. the reader) should draw his attention to how confidently worded they (i.e. the remarks) are and find himself duly staid by same. Should that fail to instill due reverence, then he (i.e. the same reader) should contemplate the embedded image of the Grand Canyon and allow himself to be awed duly by it — or, at least, by the idea of the Grand Canyon — and to retain that sense of awe while entering the following.
Now, those brief remarks, briefly.
The Worst: October
Whoever said “‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all” was misled — first of all, because the “whoever” in question is Alfred Lord Tennyson (i.e. a person that basically everyone agrees was really misled), but also, second, because we very clearly learn from the world’s most successful ethical models that the largest threat to sustained happiness is the excitement of the passions.
“I once thought this game of base ball to be something paltry — a trifling, a merest emanation. Yet, lo, across my years I have learned that the end of the base-ball season is as redolent of death, of foreordained annihilation, as the vicar’s withered corpse.” – Pauly Shore
This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.
