Dayn Perry and the present author are recording an Answer Time edition of FanGraphs Audio late tomorrow (Thursday) morning — a thing (i.e. Answer Time) not unlike Question Time, but also the exact opposite.
The reader is invited to submit an answer for Perry — who hasn’t made his bed, but is already preparing to lie in it — in the comment section below.
The coldest winter I ever spent was the last five minutes of a basketball game. What does this mean, exactly? I’m not sure. My brain can be very weird. You should see it sometime. Seriously. It’s here on the desk beside me, next to my cup of chicory. It’s wearing a pair of Captain Morgan souvenir sunglasses – the brain, I mean, not the chicory – and one of the lenses is missing. This gives it a kind of “crazed” look, but I would say it’s really more “demented” than crazed, or that the sun is in one of its eyes.
But let me tell you, basketball games last forever, if by “games” you mean those last five minutes and if by “forever” you mean, like, forever. Why, just the other night, I watched the last five minutes of an NBA playoff game and in the meantime began to enjoy the musical stylings of Lawrence Welk. I also found Angela Lansbury to be a handsome woman. In addition, I began to fart without intending to do so.*
*If you still haven’t caught on to what I’m saying, please consider: I also began reading AARP publications, not for the articles but for the pictures.
Anyhoo, nobody seems concerned about the length of basketball games. Why? Because those last five minutes come with commercials through whose content we might learn that beer is best enjoyed “cold.” But baseball games? Jiminy Cricket, people have been moaning about their length for-EH-verrrrrrrr, as if baseball games were Ming Dynasties or Phish jams, or Phish Jams whose themes, coincidentally, are Ming Dynasties.
To that end – ha! – I hereby offer these proposals for accelerating the game:
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The Cubs fan in his natural setting.
Since the establishment of this weblog by Kool Keith and Oscar Wilde at a Golden Corral in 1971, it is has been the editorial objective — above all others — to provide such work as to assist the reader along his horrible, forlorn journey from day to night.
In the tradition of that singular effort, the author presents the following translation — largely for the benefit of Chicago Cubs fans, who continue to finds themselves on intimate terms with misery — of very dead French poet Charles Baudelaire’s Envirez-Vous, or Be Drunk.
As a relative newcomer to the FanGraphs Family Of SuperBlogs & MarketPlace Grille, I am often asked by everyone everywhere if the FanGraphs Family of SuperBloggers is – or should that be are? – as dashing and magnificent as they seem. Now that I am fractionally recovered from my first Spring Break, or, rather, Spring Training with the aforementioned supergroup, I can say without pause or equivocation that, in fact, they are even more dashing and magnificent than they might seem to anyone who has not had the pleasure of sitting in a hotel bar with them until such time that the manager announces that they don’t have to go home but they can’t stay here – like, dashing and magnificent to the power of 10!*
* Graph not included.
Readers! It’s time for you to provide the creative spark where I cannot. That’s right: a caption contest—aka shameless wit-farming. Your job is to provide humorous captions for this Vine video published on MLB’s official Vine profile. Feel free to submit a caption or simply +1 the ones you like. The winner will be lauded for millennia, tattooed on the hearts of billions, and, most importantly, mentioned in the next post I publish.
The Video:
It’s not for the present author to say whether the reader should or shouldn’t click upon, and therefore embiggen, the image embedded above. What such a reader would find upon so doing, however, is a lightly annotated version of tomorrow’s (Wednesday’s) MLB.TV schedule — which schedule reveals that, indeed, three spring-training games are available for consumption by the capital-P People.
Among the players expected to appear, for example: the very curious Trevor Bauer (for Cleveland) and very promising Joc Pederson (for the Los Angeles Nationals) and not actually that Italian Tony Cingrani (for Cincinnati).
Baseball, streaming live and in Technicolor.
Probably like how Wallace Stevens was always of more than one mind anytime he saw some blackbirds in a tree, so the reader, provided he or she is a reasonable sort of person, is of more than one mind every time he or she considers MLB.TV.
Dayn Perry and the present author are recording a Question Time™ edition of FanGraphs Audio at 12:30pm ET tomorrow (Wednesday).
The reader is invited to submit a question for Perry — whose likeness is the emoticon for self-disgust, probably — in the comment section below.
It came to my attention this morning that Internet web site and the O.G. Google, Yahoo!, is selling off some of its domains. As I buy and sell domains like my portfolio depended on it (it does), this grabbed my interest. As a professional domain broker, I’ve come to quickly analyze the potential worth of domains. While some are certainly more valuable than others (if you think I’m spilling the beans on this, you have brain damage), one confused me: Batoota.com. I did some very quick and even dirtier Googling of the Internet to find out just what Batoota meant. It seems to hold little meaning in actual language, used mostly as a name in countries where brown people live. But this spoke to me. Batoota. Batooooooota. It has a ring to it.
So I turn to you, fair NotGraphs readers. Let’s come up with some sort of stat or acronym or something that makes this domain useful. Let’s create another term that confuses people and sets the statistical movement back a few years. Most importantly, let’s make me some money.
The author has wasted the last, probably, 25 minutes of his life constructing this poorly formatted survey. The reader is invited to wasted a shorter time than that participating in same.
