Lest you think, even for a second, that George Radbourn (no relation to Old Hoss) was not a man of his century, please inspect the image above (salient points noted) and then think again.
Image taken from the very useful BR Bullpen.
As you may have heard, read or intuited all by yourself, Tim Lincecum is, somewhat famously, particularly svelte as professional athletes go. But it’s certainly not for a lack of trying to join the Great American Conga Line of Morbid Obesity:
He dines regularly at In-N-Out burgers, the popular fast-food burger joints on the West Coast.
His traditional fare?
Three Double-Doubles. Two fries. A chocolate-strawberry shake. Ketchup please, but hold the lettuce and tomatoes.
“I’m not a big vegetable guy,” he says.
Let’s see, three burgers at 590 calories. Two fries at 395 calories. A shake at 590 calories.
The grand total: 3,150 calories.
“I’ve gone away from eating more cheeseburgers,” Lincecum says, “and just adding patties.”
I suppose overzealous drive-thru orders are as much a part of the dedicated herbist’s lifestyle as Steely Dan on vinyl and laughing at hiking trails. So none of this is especially surprising. Something also tells me that, unlike a certain Mr. Maybin, Lincecum could cut a swath through Panda Express and manage not to spend the rest of the day yoked to the throne.
While the Washington Nationals are trending upward these days, there’s no disputing that the franchise plucked from the wilds of Canada and dropped in the capital of the Milky Way has endured some fits and starts. Part of the problem has been some rather ham-fisted marketing initiatives. Fortunately, for the Nationals and their discontents, we’re here to help.
There’s really only one thing that needs to be done to make this into a model franchise. Better scouting and development? Higher payrolls? Louder rock music between innings? Change the nickname to “Nationalz”? No. Cooler uniforms? Yea, verily.
The Nats have yoked themselves to the evocative powers of the dead president, which is wise, because everyone loves every U.S. president without exception. However, the relationship between baseball and the great landowning Episcopalians of history needs to be strengthened just a bit. First, the Nationals’ new road uniforms will have this image — ideally by way of iron-on decal — emblazoned upon the jersey:
Clearly, that’s an un-doctored photograph taken from some authoritative history text. As you can also clearly see, that’s Lincoln and Washington, each a chest-haired colt of a man, in the throes of a vigorous, manly, virile, potent, sinewy, and rippled presidential wrestling match that will end with someone’s Viking funeral. Who wins? All of us, but especially the Nationals.
As for the Nats’ road uniforms, well, wars on foreign soil aren’t for the spineless among us, so the Nats need to project an image of ruthless and terrible confidence. The jersey image that follows has graced these pages before, and now it’s time to make it a part of baseball’s tapestry forevermore …
Not only is Teddy Roosevelt slaying the foreign Bigfoot hordes in this un-doctored photograph taken from some authoritative history text, but he’s also stout-hearted enough to offer up his belt buckle as a fallout shelter. But besides Bigfoot’s encroachments, what’s he upset about? Probably his baseball humiliations. This is precisely the kind of terrifying presence to which the Nationals should aspire, especially when far from the comforts of home.
Finally, in a nod to the last remaining president whose actual giant, stone disembodied head sits atop Mt. Rushmore …
Some of you might be thinking, “Hey, that’s one of those creepy droid things from ‘Dr. Who.'” No, it isn’t. That’s a board-certified photograph of Robot Thomas Jefferson, and I see no reason why every Nats player shouldn’t wear this exact cumbersome robot suit on the field of play (along with, of course, the appropriate jersey design concocted above).
Do these things, Nationals Baseball Club, and the Republic’s precious discretionary lucre will all be yours. Promise. And please let Mr. Roosevelt win a race before he commits even more justifiable homicides.
The idea of the baseball nerd is pretty well ingrained in those who follow the sport: crazy acronyms, unintelligible formulas, and spreadsheets (oh, the spreadsheets!). In that sense, FanGraphs encompasses this entire definition – just read anything by me or the rest of our staff or, in particular, any of our big-time chart-and-graph gurus like Albert Lyu or Dave Allen (NERDS!). The kind of nerditry (similar to punditry) that we see on our parent blog is hardly matched around the internet, at least by this definition.
However, I think solely looking at the analysis blog here and claiming “This is the ultimate in baseball nerd-dom” completely misses the point of what it means to be a nerd. Although the FanGraphs analysis blog (and similar places) embodies perhaps the most mocked part of being a baseball nerd, it misses the true meaning: heart, soul, humor, with, and other characteristics of real-life, actual human beings. Thinking deeply about something and producing well-thought, well-reasoned, and intelligent analysis (whether or not that analysis discusses player performance, the history of the game, or Michael Young slash fanfiction) is what nerds do. It’s not what nerds are; it doesn’t show the human substance that resides within us all.
This past weekend, nearly 20 employees of this fine website descended upon the strip-mall infested wasteland described by maps and road signs as “Arizona.” The nearly immediate synergy between such a large group of people with assumed social ineptness was tangible from the beginning. Perhaps we partially cheated. Some of us knew each other from last year’s event, and some of us hail from the same city, such as Carson and I in Madison, WI and Joe Pawlikowski and Mike Axisa in New York City (although I believe Pawlikowski is in Jersey now, and we all send our condolences). Still, a majority of the connections that resulted from the trip were previously nonexistent outside of a few Twitter clients and a company message board.
However, we all have something in common, and that’s a deep bond with the game of baseball. Our knowledge of the game is similarly deep. That may appear to be a brag, but it’s not. It’s just something that we’ve devoted an insane amount of time to, and as many people acquire hobbies and skills and know them backwards and forwards, we’ve done a similar thing with the game of baseball.
It was a weekend full of laughter and fantastic times. Sure, the events with front office members from Cleveland, Seattle, and Chicago headlined the trip and may have been the “official” reasons we were there. Of course, the events were engaging, thought-provoking, and entertaining, but they merely served as the opening band for the headliner of really getting our nerd on.
Getting our nerd on is seeing 25-year-old AA “prospect” Charlie Blackmon and nearly pissing ourselves. Getting our nerd on is working the phrase “Extra 2%” into conversation at every possible junction (sorry, Jonah). Getting our nerd on is making jokes about career bench players and getting huge laughs from the entire room. Getting our nerd on is a group of 10 people from across the country polishing off a 30-pack of PBR and a 30-pack of Tecate over eight hours of ottoneu fantasy drafting and barely filling out starting lineups, much less finishing the draft. Getting our nerd on is taking pictures of Dayton Moore’s Escalade. And, obviously, getting our nerd on is writing this piece at 6:00 AM Eastern Time (the time zone I’m flying to) entirely for my own enjoyment, with the thoughts and concerns of the reader out of sight and out of mind. Tenuous relationships to actual baseball be damned, this is NotGraphs!
As Carson noted this weekend, even in a large metropolitan era it’s unlikely that “one of us” knows too many colleagues or peers in baseball nerdosity. So, when we meet others with like minds and similar investments in being a baseball nerd, the results can be magical. Magical like an “oh, like Gregor, Henry, and Andres Blanco” joke in reference to a “blanco” dish at a restaurant. Magical like multiple people (not even projection systems!) acknowledging Zelous Wheeler’s existence. Magical like a .gif of Matt Daley’s pre-windup butt wiggle or Aaron Rowand shaking his bat like a certain part of the male anatomy in the batter’s box(anything more than two shakes and you’re just playing with yourself, Aaron). Magical like waving at Dayton Moore as he drives past you in a club car.
None of those things will make any goddamn sense if you don’t have the kind of investment in baseball that we have. Whatever; if you don’t, that doesn’t make you a bad person by any means. In fact, you’ve probably accomplished far more than I while I was busy memorizing the entirety of Cot’s Contracts. But this is where the heart, soul, and humanity of the nerd begins. Naturally, part of it is the pursuit of intellectualism and analysis in sport and the almost inevitable social alienation brought upon us by that process (seriously, try talking about WAR at a sports bar). And we clearly embrace that part of being a nerd and we like to believe that it serves people; that it makes people at least partially as happy as it makes us. But at the same time, this is such a huge part of our lives that it not only manifests itself as analysis but as humor and history and simply as excellent stories free of acronyms and formulae.
And this is where NotGraphs crosses that (somewhat blurred) line between intellectual and truly nerdy. The analysis produced at FanGraphs takes an inner nerd to produce, but what is on the computer screen is not in itself nerdy. Throw 10 jocks in a room and force them to play Dungeons & Dragons and the resulting scene won’t be nerdy. It’s the incredible dedication required to memorize a monster manual and other ridiculous details of the game that create the nerd society of a D&D campaign. That dedication, that memorization and exploration of such minutiae and obscurities is the true essence of nerddom. I hope that, as either fellow nerds or simply one with a curiosity for the most minor of detail, that you continue to join us down our exploration of baseball and our own nerdhood. Such is the true joy of my pouring so much of myself into the sport, and when I’m able to share in this joy with other people, it becomes even sweeter (I mean, seriously, I got a picture of Ned Yost’s parking spot in Surpise, Arizona with another person?! Really?!).
Hopefully, we here at NotGraphs can share even a fraction of the joy we shared with each other through our nerdition over this past weekend. Come, let’s embrace the nerd within, together.
If you don’t know what Sporcle is, you clearly don’t know how to waste time on the internet. Just in case, for the uninitiated (read: those who use their time effectively), Sporcle is a website with a vast array of quizzes, ranging from “U.S. Presidents” to “Can you name the things Meat Loaf won’t do for love“.
So, for those of you who need to pass some time this afternoon (seriously, like you’re going to do any work), I challenge you to take me on in a Sporcle. I found this one thanks to The Common Man over at ESPN. The quiz presents 20 player graphs with various different statistics, and you have to guess the player from the graph. I managed to correctly guess 18 of 20. Can you beat me? Click here to try.
No, you don’t get anything for beating me. Also, just to be courteous, try not to spoil it in the comments!
While the actual baseball race in the American League Central should be compelling enough, there’s another pitched battle (baseball pun, free of charge) developing in Flyover Nation. This battle, naturally enough, is over proposed civic statues that will never actually happen.
In Detroit, home of the Tigers and Miguel Cabrera’s basest urges, there’s a movement afoot to construct a giant totem to the greatest half-man/half-machine to take back the streets since Nathan Hale. I speak, of course, of Robocop.
In Kansas City, home of the Royals and their discontents, the people want, automatically and for them, a statue of relentless tickler of funny bones Vicky Lawrence dressed up as everyone’s favorite rolling pin-wielding materfamilias, Mama from “Mama’s Family.”
Remember the Tom Selleck baseball vehicle stunningly titled Mr. Baseball? In said tale, a boorish American ballplayer goes to ply his trade in Japan and eventually gets a massage in a tub. As Hollywood and the Bill of Rights teach us, every Japanese person is quiet, workaday, self-serious, and hopelessly yoked to tradition. So you can imagine the clash of cultures that ensues. I don’t exaggerate when I use words and phrases like “madcap” and “hazardous to the funny bones.”
Anyhow, Giants skipper Bruce Bochy consulted on the film, and he recently recalled a thing or two about a thing or two related to said film …
For the most part, baseball manages to avoid bad weather. Other sports might tough it out through a monsoon but baseball politely tips it’s cap and says “another day, mother nature.” There is one type of less-than-ideal weather that players and fan do have to tolerate, and that is butt-numbing cold. Last year, Twins fans showed up for opening day and probably came to the horrifying realization that they were about to witness their first outdoor Twins game in 28 years. In April. In Minnesota. Thankfully the temperature was a kind 65 that day, but that isn’t always the case in some baseball towns. Here is a chart of the average temperatures in the colder baseball locales in the opening weeks of baseball, and their percentage of capacity filled during that time (indoor stadiums don’t count, wusses!!!!)
Normally you see a pretty steady trend upwards in attendance as the weather warms up, though there are other factors involved in that trend, such as basketball ending.
I actually can’t confirm officially that the look on Mr. Dirk Hayhurst’s face is one indicating mischief. What I can confirm is that the photo in question (a) is pretty funny and (b) comes to us courtesy the very amiable Mr. Hayhurst himself via his Twitter feed.
What I can also confirm is that, owing the fact that this photo is a tall, rectangular shape, it’s now incumbent upon me to supply, like, two more inches of text. Let’s do so with a quote from either Samuel Johnson or Ben Jonson (the internet can’t quite decide), as follows:
“Let them call it mischief; Then it is past and prosper’d, ’twill be virtue.”
And how here’s that same quote in much bigger letters:
Did you know that Major League Baseball 2K10 is available for the PSP game console?
In case you did not, I’m here to help. What follows will be an exhaustive, penetrating review of this gaming product. It will be rich in tech-speak, measured and sober in its appraisals and free from any whiff of mixed motive. If there’s one thing on earth I take seriously, it’s my ability to provide expert guidance when it comes to gaming, gaming machines, and the gamers who game them. If games and gaming are your River Styx, then I am your Charon, and I propel and steer our ferry not with a mere boatman’s pole, but rather with something long and electronic and related to playing video games. Otherwise the metaphor wouldn’t work. Anyhow, without further throat-clearing, please enjoy this REVIEW among reviews.
First, the packaging. It’s sensible, adequate and even charming in its tethered exuberance — early adopters like us won’t be surprised that the modest bifold laminate sheathing evokes a Hockney painting glimpsed in the gauzy half-light of late morning —
Actually, no. Nope. Nope. Nope. No, I’m not going to review this product because I’ve never played it. I don’t play video games. Putting me at the switch of the contemporary video game would be much like watching a howler monkey trying to open a coconut.
No, all of this strained and affected video-game talk on my part has been nothing more than tidy baseball-y rationale to post this: some guy who batters, deep-fries and then tries to eat a PSP …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E81j9M64Ssc&feature=player_embedded
And the people say: apropos of nothing!
