As you may have noticed, here at NotGraphs we occasionally rely upon the kindness of readers to lead us by the clammy hand to content worthy of our revered imprimatur. Usually, this entails sending us a link or even vague hints at search terms. As you are about to learn, however, this writer is not averse to wholesale plundering of the reader’s innermost thoughts.

Cherished reader Reillocity, who maintains a philosophic calm despite his triumphs in Muay Thai, regaled us in the Busy Businessman thread with tales and examples of a thing that does things to things (URGENT UPDATE: Noble reader glassSheets also played an extra-vital role in doing my work for me). It is my belief that the Internetting Gentleman will appreciate what happens next …

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I wonder if that is ever going change.

“That is never going to change,” says Yankees supreme exchequer Randy Levine.

Fine.

“That” refers to the playing of “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch at Yankee Stadium. And “that” is too bad.

I could argue that songs oozing religious certainties have no place in the public square (we the taxed mostly pay for these ballparks, after all). I could even argue that Mr. Berlin’s “GBA” is a saccharine load that sounds like it was composed on a low-end Casio. And I could absolutely submit that the Yankees were creepy “Dear Leader” types about the whole thing for far too long.

But mostly it’s the idea of making a baseball game — a light, airy thing when not intense for reasons independent of world events — into something solemn. That’s why “GBA” should go away. Dead-ass Bin Laden is enriching the sea floor and being stripped for parts by gilled beasts. The Arab Spring, to continue the metaphor, flowers apace. So after almost 10 years of this, where’s the harm in letting baseball be baseball? Is it that we’ll … forget?

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The Burj Al Arab in Dubai: where every member of Family Violence was conceived.

The following aren’t necessarily real bands, but they are real phrases taken from this morning’s real-live baseballing headlines.

Family Violence
A tongue-in-cheek Garage Rock Revival quintet with members from Oxford, England; Tokyo Prefecture; and effing space. Their haircuts cost either nothing or $1000, but you can’t tell.

Red-Hot McCarthy
All Punkabilly, all the time. (Thanks a lot, Denver.)

Nyjer Morgan
Is actually just Kool Keith. (Did not everyone know that?)

Lackey’s Stuff
Sort of like Chris Isaak, if Chris Isaak were five mostly overweight quality management specialists from Chelmsford, MA.

Cryptic Swisher
A horrifying Christian-/Anarchopunk group from Paramus, NJ. They have, and will again, try to have sex with your mother.

Francoeur is as Francoeur does.

The informed reader will no doubt have learned by now that the Royals have extended Perpetual Sabermetric Talking-Point Jeff Francoeur for two more years. The news has sent ripples of self-righteous pleasure through the baseballing nerdosphere, nor is such a reaction wholly unjustified: despite his decent 2011, Francoeur probably isn’t even an average major leaguer. To their credit, the Royals aren’t really paying him like one, either: the reported contract of two years and $13.5 million suggests something like a 1.5-win player — something that Francoeur is probably capable of being.

For the present, though, we’ll put aside contractual matters and turn our attention to another thing for which Francoeur is known. For it was in a May 2009 piece by ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick regarding plate discipline that Francoeur famously asked the question “If on-base percentage is so important, then why don’t they put it up on the scoreboard?”

Some pointed out at the time (and rightfully so) that it’s not really the responsibility of a club’s scoreboard department to paint a precise portrait of a player’s value. Others — like Craig Calcaterra, for example — noted that OBP actually is on the scoreboard.

What if we took Francoeur’s comment literally, though? If we were to use importance as the only criteria of what should appear on a stadium’s scoreboard, what information would most likely appear there?

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Age is also a number — a number that informs statutory rape laws in almost every state.

As the reader has probably gathered, it’s the custom of Team NotGraphs to spend the better part of each day at our lushly decorated headquarters lounging about in different angles of repose whilst drinking delicious, peaty scotches and then comparing them to other delicious, peaty scotches, which we then proceed to drink.

It was, in fact, this very thing we were all doing this afternoon when — I don’t know how it happened, really — but when colleague Jackie Moore and I found ourselves discussing what constituted a “playoff race.”

Jackie submitted that, so far as he could tell, only two races remained in the major leagues as of today — those in the AL Central (between Detroit and Cleveland and Chicago) and NL West (Arizona and San Francisco). When I asked Jackie Moore how he defined race, he proceeded, first, to laugh out loud and then to roll on the floor while laughing and then to laugh his ass off. When he’d composed himself, he proceeded, at that point, to suggest that, in any case where a team had a 90% or better chance of making the postseason, that a race ceased to exist involving the team.

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Woody Allen says in 1977’s Annie Hall that we’re “always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life.”

In the relevant scene of that film, we’ve just witnessed Allen’s character Alvy Singer directing a play in which Singer has rewritten a breakup between himself and the titular Hall (played by Diane Keaton), such that she rushes after, and professes her love for, him.

For Allen’s Singer, the potential outcomes are binary in nature: either Annie does or doesn’t leave him. The former is what happens; the latter is what happens — what is perfected — in art.

The sort of perfect we find in the three drawings above, courtesy of (male man) Erin Wong, is different. Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax are, by most accounts, the closest thing that baseball has seen to perfect. There are details that could be edited — maybe DiMaggio’s personal life could’ve been less turbulent, maybe Mays wouldn’t’ve had an age-42 season, maybe Koufax’s brilliance could’ve lasted a couple-few more years — but one could also make the argument that these imperfections actually make each player’s respective resume even more striking.

But achieving — or, at least, gesturing towards — perfection isn’t always a case of choosing one of two outcomes in a binary relationship. Rather, Wong’s pictures are a product of a desire to re-see players whose respective mythologies are well known to the point of being tired.

Wong’s drawings — like a batter totally at ease with his own weaknesses — don’t try to do too much. Rather, they seem to ask simple questions. “What would Joe DiMaggio look like were he crossed with an older Ed Sullivan?” “What would Sandy Koufax look like were he thinking the words ‘I know something you don’t know’?” “What if gravity had only a minimal effect on Willie Mays’ hat?”

It’s not unusual to hear people say art is dead because everything has been done. What sort of conceit does it require to imagine that one’s age would be the one to kill an immortal thing? In its own, small way, Wong’s drawings make it clear that art isn’t dead, won’t die. All it requires is the desire to ask small questions and the technical skill to answer those questions in the relevant medium.

As I noted in these pages recently, one of the great pleasures of baseball is the amount of data it produces. Some of that is the sort of data that produces metrics like WAR; other of it, though, might be more appropriately apprehended by the softer sciences.

By way of explanation, allow me to introduce the reader to a work of art known as the Terry Francona Press Conference. While perhaps only an average baseballing tactician, Francona has distinguished himself as a sort of savant of personality management. Winning a lot, certainly, has helped subdue any would-be discontent among his ranks, but Francona has a way of making any issue seem manageable and human-sized — and nowhere is this more clearly on display than in his post-game press conferences.

Let’s watch the above-ly embedded one (from July 26th’s victory over the Royals) together and see what we see.

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The attentive reader will recall how, recently in these electronic pages, I submitted a post regarding the very serious issue of Sam Fuld’s moral fiber.

Because I had no real opinion on Fuld’s contretemps with Alcides Escobar, I elected instead to leave the question of Fuld’s guilt/innocence to the readership via a slightly irreverant poll. While the results of the poll aren’t particularly important (although I’ll note that close to 50% of respondents believe that polls are a cheap way to drive traffic), what does deserve remarking, I think, is how it (i.e. the poll) garnered answers from 16 different countries — including, for example, Slovakia.*

This, if you’ll permit me a rare (and, I think, warranted) foray into the explicit, warms my fucking heart.

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Chapter 1: 

…and in February of 2020, delegates to the provisional government of the SABRland Autonomous Region voted unanimously to establish an independent nation. By opening day, a full constitution had been drafted to delineate new borders, institute a permanent system of government, and lay out clearly the foundational principles of the fledgling country. The most notable principle was of course the 3-to-1 Law, which required every citizen to spend a total of one week every month doing whatever work was deemed necessary by local labor councils and the remaining three weeks watching, thinking about, discussing, and writing about baseball (and doing whatever else made them happy, within reason).

In the new capital city of Jamestown — named for the revered sabermetric forefather, Bill James — the constitution was ratified as the season’s first pitch was thrown. And thus the Republic of SABRland was born without so much as a drop of blood being spilled.

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Show Off

If there’s one thing Carson Cistulli is all about it’s feeling good and looking better. If there are two things Carson Cistulli is all about, the second one is making mountains out of molehills wherein matters of baseballing etiquette are concerned.

It’s the latter of these pastimes that I’d like to address presently.

This afternoon, while enjoying an entirely drinkable rosé, I found myself watching the Cleveland-Los Angeles Americans game via MLB.TV. Did I happen to notice that beardless youths Peter Bourjos and Mike Trout were not only playing beside each other in the Angel outfield, but also batting back-to-back in the Angel lineup? No, not at all. That’s ridiculous.

Okay, maybe a little bit.

Fine. Yes. Totally.

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