Archive for Beer

I was stuck for an idea. I’ve got a folder on my desktop called NotGraphs Stuff, with a bunch of half-finished/half-arsed ideas that may or may not end up being used now that NotGraphs is in the Baseball Internet Hospice, but nothing in that folder was really jumping out at me, wanting to be done. So I went for a drink in my neighbourhood. Had a couple of beers, then went to another place and had tacos and more beer. Then it struck me: do a post about this Mexico City neighbourhood and its incredibly-tenuous link to your Major League Baseball. So that’s what I did.

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You first notice it during the top of the fifth inning. Don’t wanna break the seal. You wait. Then your buddy brings you another beer. Let’s say it’s, I dunno, something like a Mac & Jack African Amber. You continue to enjoy the game. It’s good to hang out, watch some baseball. The Mariners are in the lead. Félix is being Félix. You wonder if you should go. I’ll wait until the end of the fifth, you decide. It’s there in your thoughts, but you gotta wait. You don’t wanna go three or four times before the end of the game. Wait until the end of this inning.

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The Diablos Rojos del México play in a fairly crappy ballpark. It’s way too big for the team’s fan base, and the only game that gets near to selling out is the home opener. So it’s nice to go to other parks in the country. On Wednesday, I went to Puebla, a city about 130km southeast-ish of Mexico City. Puebla is where all the cinco de mayo stuff happened. More importantly, it’s the home of mole poblano. And it’s also the home of the Pericos de Puebla, who have a nice little park, called Estadio Hermanos Serdán. Los Diablos were playing the Pericos. And the following is my semi-true account of my time in Puebla, watching baseball.

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I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of Mickey Kefauver’s forthcoming biography of Hack Wilson, The Aching Beauty of an American Sot. Kefauver’s work contains multitudes, and among those multitudes is a walking tour of Wilson’s gut. By “gut” I do not mean any sort of belt-straining protuberance, but rather the life and ultimately self-immolating work of Wilson’s innermost innards.

Let me share a couple of passages. First, this medical revelation upon Wilson’s being hospitalized in 1933, for drunkenness in general and suspected Catholicity in particular:

It turned out that those medical professionals were wrong: the man had “auto-brewery syndrome.” His stomach contained so much yeast that he was making his own in-house brew, literally.

Hack Wilson was a drunk, but he was a drunk not of his own volition, you see. A bounty of yeast had turned his belly parts into a craft brewery, and so the gut-beer flowed without ceasing, like the prayers of the already damned.

Second comes this, when Kefauver, in the service of a more soaring narrative, shifts momentarily to the second person and in doing so snatches the reader up by his tailored lapels:

But he was dying when he called you, from a progressive fibrosis of the lungs brought on not by smoking — he never smoked — but, 
apparently, by years inhaling the alcohol fumes that surged up from his gut.

It was indeed the gut-beer that killed Wilson, but not by daily sieges upon the liver or even the boozy crash of a motor-car. You see, Hack Wilson died because he was overtaken by stomach fumes without ceasing, like the damnations of a prayerful man.

The best and brightest in baseball players are headed to CitiField today to represent their teams and battle for home field advantage. What this post wonders is what it would look like if it were beers headed to an All-Suds game instead.

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Today, we launched a beer website, a family member for FanGraphs: BeerGraphs. On that site, we hope to ruin beer with spreadsheets much like FanGraphs ruined baseball. But we hope to celebrate beer, like NotGraphs celebrates baseball.

And so my NotGraphantasy club is full of players that made me think of beers. Delightfully delicious beers. Some all hops, and smack you in the face, and some all about balance and poise.

C: Sal Fasano

What beer tastes like mustache and smells like the funk Sal Fasano put out there on a semi-regular basis? Maybe Jolly Pumpkin’s Bam Noire. That beer is made with Brett yeast — some says it smells like goat — and has a sour aspect that could make you screw up your face like you just got a face full of Fasano crotch on a play at the plate on a 90-degree August afternoon. The Bam Noire is worth a full negative four beer wins, but then again, Fasano’s not for everyone either.

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How can one tell if a refreshing can of alcohol is made not only of hops, barley and melted snow from Valley Forge but also honor itself? Reach for a can of Narragansett Beer, the one with the baseball-diamond scar tissue on the cask, and you can be sure that said beer will meet your daily requirements for honor …

You earn honor by punching thieves. You earn honor by giving up mortality for Lent. You earn honor by recounting your night terrors to no one save the dog. You earn honor by playing baseball.

Yea, verily: Play baseball, and no matter what else you do, you shall have honor. You shall be swollen and veiny with honor. Elijah Dukes once had honor because he played baseball — his name on his driver’s license was “Honorgood Stoutsterling” — but then he squandered that honor by not drinking Narragansett Beer, by drinking something sold not on merit but on avarice. His driver’s license then read “Communisto Slackweakling.”

Drink Narragansett Beer. You are free not to drink Narragansett Beer with the baseball diamond on the hogshead, but if you don’t drink Narragansett Beer with the baseball diamond on the hogshead, then you shall be slaughtered by a Bible.

This author recently made The Pliny Pilgrimmage, which is to say he woke up early, drove two hours north, and waited in line for an hour for a beer (Pliny the Younger) on a Tuesday morning. Given this *same* author’s desire to come up with a WAR-like structure for beer ratings — which recently took a lurch forward with a URL (BeerGraphs.com), a CTO (seriously), and access to the API from untappd, and all their beer ratings — it was only natural to think of baseball while on that drive to Santa Rosa.

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Those concerned about creeping Maoism will recall that Four Loko — the drink that helpfully combined restorative caffeine with mind-clearing alcohol — was banned by the meddlesome crypto-Etruscans at the FDA. After all, taking our guns away is easier when we’re neither awake nor drunk.

Anyhow, base-ball-ing legend Boileryard Clarke, who has for years sustained himself on a diet of nothing more than hooch and punched-out constables, has entered the fray and wielded his celebrity like a sword that looks like a dick.

So please do drink deeply of first the following paid advertisement and then a high-reaching pour of Four Loko …

Play better base ball and beat back tertiary syphilis with Four Loko.

We took sabermetrics to the streets this week, and tried it out with concerts. But the ‘readily available’ or ‘replacement-level’ concert is woefully hard to define. Beer? Not so much. Go to your local bodega and look at the beer aisle and you have easy candidates for replacement-level beer. And so baseball’s WAR framework can easily be applied to suds.

Beers. Above. Replacement.

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