Archive for Audio and/or Visual

I have to agree with Serengeti. Nobody hurts more than Bartman.

H/T: Gapers Block. Their Tumblr account, in particular.

The staff at FanGraphs makes an annual trip to Spring Training, seeing as how we are all in this virtual workplace and occasionally need assurance that the people we are talking to online are in fact real, carbon-based creatures. Here is footage from that assurance ritual:

Did something kinda disgusting, actually — while you were probably sleeping — to a Shawn Kelley slidepiece.

To wit:

To celebrate “opening day that isn’t really opening day or is it?” over in Japan, a commemorative hand-drawn portrait of the player I will not be drawing for Every Hall of Famer who I think deserves it the most — Sadaharu Oh!

As per always, dear readers, click to embiggen:

The reader might be inclined to argue with the premise of this post — namely, that the gentleman pictured above (from this compilation of Louis CK clips of the early 90s) is Lenny Dykstra. Before doing so, however, he (the reader) would be well advised to consider that the consequences for being wrong in this matter are almost non-extant, while the spasm of joy produced by believing that said individual is Lenny Dykstra is pretty decent so far as joy spasms go (although decidedly less substantial than other joy spasms, which will go unnamed and nameless).

Furthermore, we must consider the ancillary value present here: that the gentleman pictured — even if he be a Pseudo Dykstra — has created a pretense for the rendering of the phrase joy spasm into electronic print. As if this weren’t already the best of all possible worlds!

“The Ballad of Rey Ordonez,” by The Isotopes, a “Punk Rock Baseball Club,” is fantastic. Enjoy:

I had to look up the lyrics. And now I like the track even more.

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This past weekend at the FanGraphs gathering in Phoenix, Mr. Carson Cistulli stated that he had never seen the George Brett-poops-himself video. I couln’t believe it, so I decided to hook him up. In case some of our other readers have also been deprived of this video, “enjoy.”

[Ed. Note: contains a wide and winning variety of explicit language.]

Original Version

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A couple years ago, I stumbled upon a set of negatives from one of my dad’s boxes full of them. He was a photojournalist and newspaperman in the early 1980s and while I was looking mostly for photos of our family, this one caught my eye. It was labeled “Astros/Cardinals 1980 ‘dome.” Some sleuthing revealed it to be this game, the second in a doubleheader between the Astros and the Cards (who will play presumably their last regular rivalry games this year, the Astros final in the National League). This Astros team, featuring Art Howe, Joe Morgan, Jose Cruz, Cesar Cedeno, and Luis Pujols, must have been a fun one to watch (these were taken two years before I was born; my brother was six months old). Here are a few of my favorites from the roll. As per usual, you can click to embiggen. All photos by my dad, Bill Burton, awesome person extraordinaire in more ways than 100:

Truth: this photo makes me all lump-throated.

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Ralph Kiner on Casey Stengel

Baseballing great Ralph Kiner, as he does sometimes, joined the Mets television broadcast team yesterday for the club’s spring-training game against St. Louis.

During the bottom of third inning, the conversation turned to the 1961 1962 expansion Mets, for which Kiner was an announcer. Kiner shared a couple of anecdotes regarding that team’s manager, Casey Stengel — and, in particular, Stengel’s opinions on when a baseballer should and shouldn’t do his drinking.

Enjoy said wisdom in its rough, uncut version via the the audio player above.

The Tim Kurkjian Impression Contest has been, hands down, the best part of spring training. Next up, Milwaukee’s Tim Dillard:

Kurkjian’s reaction when Dillard showed up was just priceless. As for Dillard, that was good. Very good. Excellent use of ridiculously obscure stats; Dillard did his homework. I appreciate that. And the Nyjer Morgan impression as Kurkjian put it over the top. Needless to say, I was very impressed.

So, who ya got: Dillard or J.P. Arencibia? This one’s too close to call.