Archive for Call to Action

Internet Gentleman and NotGraphs union member Dayn Perry alerted me to the above sequence he most likely captured from his Postseason.TV feed. Since I am a functioning member of society who pays for television, I was watching the glossy, HD-enhanced feed from the Turner Broadcasting System, and did not subject myself to this ugly peek behind the scenes. Nevertheless, the above footage is important in that it 1). Is entertaining and 2.) Allows us to do a good, old-fashioned caption contest. I’ve submitted three ideas below (links will open in new windows, so rest easy).

Idea #1
Idea #2
Idea #3

As I’m sure you have your own ideas, feel free to submit them below. If I really like one, I might even convert it to a GIF, though I do not advise you hold your breath on that.

If you’re weary of the usual fare when it comes to broadcaster’s home run calls (i.e., “Back, back, back, gone!” or “Golly toots, a long potato!”), then please do consider encouraging your local mic-wielder to take some of the following suggestions for a test drive.

For instance, when a fair-hit ball clears fencing, the announcer might exclaim …

– “This all-you-can-eat seafood buffet just got pregnant!”

– “Are you ready for some football?!”

– “Go find a new a new grandpa, kid, because the one you know and love just got slaughtered!”

– “RBI, Brandon Phillips!”

– “Torquemada’s biscuits!”

– “King Kong’s ding dong!”

– “Donald Sutherland’s panties!”

– “Last night, I drank alone in the dark, just as my father did!”

– “The vicar died clutching not his rosary, but rather his secrets!”

Or …

– “Hand over your badge and service revolver, O’Boyle. You’re on unpaid leave as of this moment!”

Thank you for your measured consideration.

Dayn Perry and the present author are recording a Question Time™ edition of FanGraphs Audio at 1:30pm ET tomorrow (Friday).

The reader is invited to submit a question for Perry — who is probably drunk and should definitely go home — in the comment section below.

Culture is a fickle thing. As with tulips, as with visible ankles, as with Kardashians, the collective mores of society ebb and flow. We are cyclical and forgetful beasts, all of us. Today we sleep our children on their backs and encourage breastfeeding; tomorrow we gently spin them in electrical centrifuges and bottlefeed them a mixture of Four Loko and POG. There is nothing good or bad in this; it’s simply the way of the world.

Currently, physical possessions are on the out. The hippies and the yuppies, their battles, are long-forgotten; now, indelibly stained on our retinas are the reams of yellowing newspaper and molding beanie babies of the cable show Hoarders. Property binds us; noble, Spartan poverty reigns. We’re nearing the nadir, the point in which anyone who bothers to keep three of anything is treated as neglecting some deep-seated psychological issue, and the more useless the object, the deeper the person’s shame.

Pat Neshek, as is so often his wont, ignores the prevalent tendencies of the day. He has his own missions. And one of those missions, one I feel bound to support, is collecting an autographed copy of every single card in the 1985 Topps set.
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Congratulations.

Great news, registered user. You won a pizza. Did you realize you won a pizza. Did you. Congratulations.

Your pizza will arrive shortly. Congratulations. We’re excited for you. We’re also excited about the no-hitter that entitled you to this pizza. Did you see the final out. It was something. Always is under those circumstances. Hope you enjoy the pizza.

Have you ordered with us before. We hope you’ll consider doing business with us again. Next time, would you consider actually paying for our goods and services. Trying to run a business here. We’re franchised. Did you know that. So it’s really on us to execute all these ideas that corporate comes up with. Ideas that cost us money. Anyway, congratulations.

You’d think a location with our revenues and located in this hollowed-out, post-industrial Midwestern butt-scape would be exempted from this kind of promotion, but I suppose that’s asking for too much. Congratulations. Fucking Obama.

How old are you. We ask because ordering a pizza such as ours is fun for, say, pre-teens and adolescents. If you’re well into adulthood, though, then it’s something you do by force of habit and, at the same time, a willful diminishing of oneself — like making sheep noises while you crap.

Anyhow, congratulations on your free pizza. Hope you like it. Remember, 30 minutes or it’s free. Oh right. Never mind.

I live in a window-less efficiency above a funeral home. It’s an attic with an exterior staircase, really. I find the inconsolable weeping from below is loudest on Thursdays, for whatever reason. My icebox is slowly falling through the floor, so at this point I hear everything. By now, the sobbing is like a bad song stuck in my head.

So congratulations.

Click to embiggen, if you get what the author means.

As a Champion of the People, the author has participated in a number of community-service projects that have enriched lives and inspired the leaders of tomorrow. Not for nothing has he (i.e. that same author) been referred to, on more than one occasion, as a “goddamn Johnny Appleseed of human compassion.”

None of the author’s good works, however, has been so rewarding as the present one. Using a combination of wit and just his hands, he’s endeavored to produce the world’s first, or at least best, real-time stats leaderboard for Italian-American and regular Italian major-leaguers.

Click this hyperlink to experience the leaderboard.

Click this more different hyperlink to consult Wikipedia’s list of Italian-Americans in baseball, which the author mostly utilized in the composition of the leaderboard.

Utilize the comments section below to make note of other Italian-American or just regular Italian major-leaguers who ought to be added to the leaderboard.

Dayn Perry and I are recording a Question Time™ edition of the podcast at 11am ET tomorrow (Wednesday).

Feel free to submit questions for Perry — who has fewer than zero reasons to live — in the comment section below.

Deadspin recently reprinted a fascinating look into the depths of Steve Carlton’s mind. Turns out, a cabal of 300 people is running the world. Or the Jews. Or the Chinese. Or the bankers.

It can get a little confusing to keep it straight. And so, with a recount of the tale that cost Steve Carlton his life savings freshly in mind, here are a few suggestions for his tchochtka-selling business.

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A lot has already been accomplished in the year 2013. We have universally ratified the use of WAR in evaluating a player’s ability, conclusively established the exact correct players in the Hall of Fame, agreed upon the role of steroids in the game of baseball, as well as how to punish players who have used them and what in fact a steroid is, presaged the winners of this and the following World Series, and unlocked the horrible secrets of the inverted W and eliminated pitcher arm injuries forever. It’s an exciting time.

Now we can turn our attention to the heart of baseball’s matter: how to pluralize the RBI.

In his critically acclaimed book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, award-winning researcher Steven Pinker discusses morphology, or the rules we follow when forming complex words, and attaching prefixes and suffixes to roots. Unless you’re a linguist or an elementary school teacher, you know most of these rules without knowing them: for example, that the suffix –ed sounds like idif the verb ends in t or d, like t if the verb ends in p, k, f, s, sh, ch, and th, and like d for all other verb endings. You already speak this way, because it sounds right, and it sounds right to everybody.

If only communication were so simple in baseball. But alas, when wRC+ and “hustle” pass each other like strangers in the night, how can we forge common bonds? How can we, when we don’t even know how to describe that very basic function of human existence, the run batted in?

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Heartbreaking update:

@cistulli upon further review, I’ve learned that the ticket is for one game in April, not all of ’em. Goldstar regrets the error, or should.

— Ian Miller (@teen_archer) February 21, 2013

The author, who has spent portions of his life eating little more than vegetable soup and also other kinds of vegetable soup, understands entirely that $16 is different than $0. However, it’s also demonstrably the case that $16 for seven Oakland Athletics baseball games is mostly as close to $0 as baseball tickets will ever get again in all our lives.

Click this hyperlinked text to take advantage of this offer, which might also be just an internet virus accidentally.

Credit to Facebook friend 4eva (until one of us dies) Ian Miller.