I don’t know where the saying came from. It’s partly a platitude, partly a statement of the rules. It is used to celebrate a player’s skill, while also unkindly magnifying precisely how that skill cannot be used. It’s a pat on the back, and a kick in the groin. It’s a definition of a back-handed compliment.

“You can’t steal first.”

This phrase, when used by broadcasters, usually accompanies an at-bat by a speedy, light-hitting player. It is meant to point out that while this player’s speed is an asset, it does not help his ability, or inability, to get on base.

“You can’t steal first.”

But what if, like, you could? What if the rules of baseball allowed a player to, at any time during an at-bat, take off for first base? You probably haven’t thought about this, due to the fact that it’s a silly idea. But I have, fair NotGraphs reader, for your benefit.

The pitcher is a fragile creature indeed, and the installation of this rule might be the thing that sends most of them to the asylum. Gone would be the days of walking around the mound. An errant pickoff throw would now put runners at first and second. And the wild pitches, my God, the wild pitches. If a pitcher bounces one with a runner on base, the runner moves up. Not the end of the world. However, if the batter were allowed to take first on a wild pitch or passed ball, regardless of the count? It may be a smart idea to buy stock in Gatorade-cooler repair companies, if this were to happen.

There were 104,403 plate appearances in 2012 where no bases were occupied. That’s 104,403 new opportunities for a pitcher to negatively his team’s win probability on ANY pitch, not just ball four.

How would it be scored? Would an extra category need to be added to signify the difference in traditional steals and steals of first? Would stealing first positively affect one’s on-base-percentage? What’s the WPA of such a feat? How many more steals would Ricky Henderson and Vince Coleman have amassed? Would there finally be a good reason to slide into first? Would speedy hitters and defensively-deft catchers be more valuable?

Mr. Cistulli recently penned a micro essay about the importance of the unknown and the yet-to-happen in baseball – how mere possibilities of fantastical things happening are, perhaps, more important than factual things happening. If this has truth to it, and I believe it does have some, the legalization of stealing first adds a new matrix of possibilities of which to gain pleasure.

So I implore you, Mr. Commissioner. Legalize the theft of first. If you won’t give us instant replay, or better umpire accountability, then at least allow Carlos Gomez to up his OBP when the pitcher spins a curveball 60’ 2’’. Tradition be damned. Long live possibilities.

Last Thursday, our Fearless Leader provided rumination on dreaming, or the unfulfilled and limitless potential of the future, as the game’s greatest strength. (If you haven’t read it, please take a moment to go do so; otherwise, my rebuttal won’t make much sense.) I’d like to take this opportunity to present an alternative viewpoint, in defense of the past.

I’ve always struggled with the present tense. We’re often cajoled, by motivational posters and the ghost of Satchel Paige, to live in the moment; but by the time that moment has happened, we’ve received the data, interpreted it and understood it, it’s long since passed. We’re always a fraction of a step behind reality. To cross that already treacherous boundary into the future, and to make predictions, sometimes feels incomprehensible to me. My own inability to dream, to imagine the unformed possibilities beyond the event horizon, probably says a lot about me, or at least my failures as a novelist. It might also say something about my home team, whose future and past are all too often similarly dressed.

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If Tim Parks, author of A Season with Verona (i.e. a real book that real people can really read) is to be believed, the fans of Italian football club Hellas Verona frequently chant — when they’re not making moderately to very racist remarks — frequently chant the words “facci sognare,” an Italian expression meaning “make us dream.”

It’s likely that readers of NotGraphs and FanGraphs, etc., follow baseball for a number of reasons. For the present author, however, it’s the sport’s capacity to facilitate dreaming that is its greatest strength. Offseason projections, prospect analysis, every Max Scherzer start: each is an exercise in the art of the possible. And each, I think, gestures at a version of a future that is perfect.

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That’s Ulysses on the left, Thersites on the right.

When FanGraphs CEO and maker of love David Appelman announced the launch of NotGraphs almost two years ago now, he noted that it would give us, the authorship, “a place to put things that would otherwise not have a place on FanGraphs, that we find interesting and we think you would also find interesting.”

Frequently and violently are the ways in which that original statement of purpose has been abused — and that’s accounting for the work of Dayn Perry alone. Nothing, not even all of the chickens at your local Whole Foods, have been given freer range by the relevant handlers than the contributors to the present weblog.

Still, that’s not to suggest that Appelman’s original and abiding directive is without merit. Indeed, like everything else he touches, it ought to be dipped in gold or stuffed or both. And, in most ways, the work that’s appeared here has reflected the concerns of the modern baseball nerd, purveyor of reason and wearer of spectacles.

It’s apropos both that original statement of purpose, then — and also a recent sojourn by the author into the Great Books section of his home library — that I’d like to introduce (or, as the case might be, to re-introduce) the reader to the only nerd in the Iliad: Thersites.

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“Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don’t need you.”
– James Michener, advice to aspiring writers

You may have noticed, dear readers, that nowhere in the previous quotation does our historical novelist friend mention statistics. Indeed, it’s a well-known rite of passage for each intrepid, young baseball writer to craft his or her own statistic, much as the children of olden times smithed silver goblets or shot bears.

My quest began, as all sources of intellectual thought and debate in our modern times, with the AL MVP debate. My target was neither the loathsome RBI-proponents who back Miguel Cabrera nor the equally loathsome trigonometry professors who support Mike Trout. Instead, my target was those lofty journalists and philosophers who preferred to stay above the fray by positing that the AL MVP race didn’t really matter anyway. It’s not cool to care about awards, after all. Winning and process reign supreme; nationwide validation for one’s achievements is meaningless if not conceited.

But it does mean something. Look at Detroit’s own Alan Trammell: if he had won the 1987 AL MVP over RBI-machine George Bell, it would have changed the face of his Hall of Fame candidacy. He wouldn’t have been plagued by the consistent, good-but-not-great label that wore the creases into his face and killed his chance at immortality. Not even learning that Wade Boggs took the WAR crown in ’87 could quench my newfound thirst for justice.

And so it is with both pleasure and light self-satisfaction that I present, with my colleague Joel (twitter: @CajoleJuiceEsq), FanGraphs’ newest statistic: FAME, or the Fanfare and Acclaim Metric Extraordinaire.

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What does a saber-savvy organization look like on the field?

The questions oscillates from easy to difficult as you appraise it. Obviously, sabermetrics have made certain advances in research that could easily be played out on the field, though, and if we could answer the question, we might be able to look at how a team actually plays on the field and compare that to our Saber Checklist. So, what does a saber-savvy team look like on the field?

I have some suggestions, and I’d love to see yours. Most of mine concern the precious nature of outs and the platoon advantage, but there are other ways to see a saber mindset impacting the game on the field directly. And feel free to question the ones I have up there — it’s hard enough to sum up sabermetric research as a monolith, and even harder to draw a straight line from that research to the play on the field.

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What precedes is (as one will find out if they click to embiggen) a map of the area codes in which the Baltimore Orioles have assigned outfield prospect Jerome O’Bryan “L.J.” Hoes. The detailed list:

941

Gulf Coast League Orioles (Sarasota, FL)

410

Delmarva Shorebirds (Salisbury, MD)
Aberdeen Iron Birds (Aberdeen, MD)

301

Frederick Keys (Frederick, MD)
Bowie Baysox (Bowie, MD)

757

Norfolk Tides (Norfolk, VA)

It pales to the amount of area codes in which Ludacris claims to have regular hoes, but that’s some impressive work by the Orioles and Mr. Hoes nonetheless.

12 Jul 1980: Craig Swan (right) and coach Joe Pignatano tend their vegetable patch in the bullpen at Shea Stadium (Image by © Bettmann/Corbis)

With the Mets bullpen so putrid right now, the jokes are tempting — “I see a lot of hoes out there;” “For once they could just lettuce be surprised by a good performance;” “Can they grow a decent arm without illegal fertilizer?” or “They certainly got enough cabbage to be so terrible;” — but that’s just piling on. Instead, let’s use this as inspiration.

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If this doesn’t make for a good movie, then what does?

Jim Morris has one. Joe Jackson has several. Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, and Ty Cobb all have movies — and even Billy Beane has one now — but who still needs one?

This is a potent question because — as we all know — movie executives read NotGraphs with regularlity, so if we as a group decide on, say, the top five players who need baseball movies made about their lives, WE CAN FULLY ANTICIPATE SAID PLAYERS TO HAVE A MOVIE MADE WITHIN THE NEXT TWO YEARS. Counting from the moment we finishing crowd-sourcing the screenplay, naturally.

So who out there needs a movie — players or executives that either do not have a movie about them or only have a crappy one? My first choices include:

• Roberto Clemente
• “Three Finger” Mordecai Peter Centennial “Miner” / “Brownie” Brown
• Branch Rickey *
• Ron Santo
• Eddie Gaedel
• Dick Allen

* The upcoming Jackie Robinson movie 42 apparently has Harrison Ford playing Branch Rickey in a prominent role, but Rickey’s accomplishments merit a movie all to the themselves.

So whom else deserve consideration? Who on this list does not deserves consideration? Debate, and then we’ll vote.

ASIDE: Which one of you nerds wrote this on Dick Allen’s Wikipedia page? “Dick Allen was a true professional singer. He sang in a high, delicate tenor that belied his powerful body.”

“Great players don’t need a psychiatrist,” [Ozzie] Guillen said. “I didn’t see Pete Rose talking with any psychiatrist, Paul Molitor or all those guys.”

“I was from an era in baseball when Budweiser and vodka took care of the psychiatric things.” … “You fail, you get drunk and you come back the next day to see how good it feels. The psycho guys—the doctors—they never played this game. They never wore the uniform. They never came out of a slump. They’re not used to it, so how are they going to help?”

— Sporting News, 6/23/12

You know who else doesn’t need a doctor? Pitchers with torn ligaments. Great players don’t need orthopedic surgeons. I didn’t see Walter Johnson talking with any orthopedic surgeon, Christy Mathewson, Satchel Paige, any of those guys.

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