Archive for Call to Action

Red Sox fans are effing everywhere.

I’ll use the word diaspora in conversation sometimes not, as you might expect, to convince other people of my intelligence, but rather merely to give my own self the (perhaps false) impression that my three years in grad school — where the word is ubiquitous — were not entirely a waste.

Beyond that sad, sad autobiographical aside, the concept of fan diaspora — that is, the phenomenon of a fan from one place living in another, totally different place — is a legitimately interesting one. The topic is treated on a scholarly level by Jon Kraszewski in an article from 2008 on Pittsburgh Steeler fans in Fort Worth, Texas, and invoked again just today by Kurt Mensching of SB Nation’s Detroit Tigers blog, Bless You Boys.

Mensching (and reader Todd Jones Mustache Ride) want to know where all the out-of-state Tigers bars are located. Because NotGraphs is a general-purpose blog, allow me to ask a more general version of Mensching’s question — namely, “At what bars do any out-of-state fans watch their team?”

From experience, I know that the Riviera Cafe, located in the West Village, Manhattan, is a Red Sox bar. So is the New Old Lompoc on the West side of Portland, OR.

Where else do people watch games, though? Besides their own homes, I mean. This is need-to-know information.

New sports and culture site Grantland has a commercial on ESPN. A television commercial for a web site full of advanced analytics, popular culture criticism, and Bill Simmons screeds. This has to be some sort of milestone. Either it’s a high-water mark, that moment when the dorks of the web got so close to the mainstream that they appeared, for sixty seconds at a time, on a major cable sports network — or it’s the beginning of new possibilities for cross-platform advertising.

Either way, as the supreme navel gazers that we are here at FanGraphs, it’s time to turn inward. It’s time to storyboard the FanGraphs commercial.

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Over yonder at MiLB.com, they’re hosting a voting-enabled hootenanny to determine the best human-person name in minor-league baseball. I find that I support this exercise, with some qualifications. To wit, I expect — nay, demand! — great things for the likes of Jetsy Extrano (pictured above!), Dusty Harvard, Dock Doyle, Mark Hamburger, and Cameron Greathouse, who’s always using his fortunate station in life to lord over the chimney-sweep with the lazy eye.

Jetsy Extrano!

Thanks to the hirsute likes of Oscar Gamble and John Henry Johnson, baseball has a proud history when it comes to the Afro and the rocking thereof. More recently, Coco Crisp is to be praised to the heavens and back for keeping it impossibly real.

All that is well and good, but the gauntlet — a hairy, awesome gauntlet — has been thrown down at the feet of those who take seriously the fusion of baseball and Afros …

And the people say: Your move, Mr. Crisp.

Sometimes inspiration comes over the author like the strong but tender hands of a Belarusian massage therapist named Miroslav or Milorad or Mirobad or something else beginning with M. Other times, inspiration strikes violently, not unlike in our friend Garth Algar’s encounter with Dream Woman, Donna Dixon (skillfully GIF’d and embedded above).

In the case of the present post, the author’s experience has been one firmly in the latter camp. The idea? Composing a pantheon of sorts for the joueurs of bat-and-ball.

Below is a brief list of the most notable Greek gods (with a full list available here, courtesy Wikipedia). Which current player is MLB’s Zeus, do you think? Which’n is Dionysos, god of wine and doing it?

They’re important questions, reader. And your answers are important, too.

God/dess: Aphrodite
Associated With: Love and beauty
Defining Acts: Offered Helen of Troy to Paris. Saved Paris from dying at hands of Menelaus. Both lover and surrogate mother to Adonis — which, somehow that’s okay.

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As you may have heard, a mistrial was declared today in L’Affaire Roger Clemens, which means he will avoid the hoosegow in spite of his grave crimes against humanity. How should you feel about this stunning turn of events? As ever, the AP brings the dirty, and the FOX commenters bring the lucid wisdom. For starters, here’s something called “caddy 1621,” who, as you might have guessed, is caps-fuc*ing-locked:

THIS HOLE (sic) TRIL (sic) WAS ABOUT CLEMENS LYING TO CONGRESS (sic) I CANT BELEAVE (sic) HOW CLEMENS FANS ARE DUMB SHTS (sic) (sic)

And that’s the entire story, isn’t it? All that’s needed for proper perspective and closure is an airtight, thoroughly appropriate comparison with which no one can rightly disagree. Care to help us out, “maineac”?

First OJ, next Casey Anthony and now Clemens! All guilty and let go!

Now go forth, emboldened by what you have learned here today.

Listed as: Lot 26: “Bay Bombers” Original Painting by Ron Lewis

Soooo. I know you’ve been trying to figure out what to get me for my birthday. And, these days it’s not even that easy for me to figure out what I want. We are no longer in the halcyon days of my youth. Those days, I just filled in the blank with the newest King’s Quest, Space Quest, or boxed set of baseball cards. Those days, I was so sure of what I wanted for the next special occasion that I pretty much had a running list in my head.

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In case the use of pronouns in the headline and the naughty letter to Burt Reynolds pictured above don’t tip you off, this is a post about Brian Fuentes. Mr. Fuentes is not a loser, but he’s lost things. To wit, he’s lost enough games this season to overwhelm something — maybe an over-sized bulk box constructed of triple-wall corrugated fiberboard or perhaps a a silo towering over the American prairies like a tensed phallus — designed expressly — and, it should go without saying, with expert craftsmanship and tantalizingly in excess of industry standards and best practices — to hold a great deal of losses.

Indeed: Brian Fuentes, despite being a reliever tasked with doing something besides recording decisions of any kind, is on pace to go 3-23 this season. Like others who make love to these pages, I’m aware that pitcher wins and losses are far from illuminating. Still, one can’t help but be impressed that a reliever has managed to be yoked with defeat seven times before June.

Getting to 20 losses will, of course, require another, greater conga line of foul-smelling performances on the part of Fuentes. That’s not difficult in a vacuum. The problem is that merely one or three more foul-smelling performances on the part of Fuentes will likely result in his being banished to the low-leverage terra incognita of the bullpen. And thus, the Republic’s dream of a 20-loss reliever will perish.

Not to place the dual burdens of Job and Frodo upon Mr. Fuentes and Bob Geren, who stands in the dugout and projects authority, but they simply must contrive a way to make this happen. This battered generation needs it. These beleaguered patriots need it …

So you say you stormed Omaha Beach, old man waiting for the bus? Adorable. I saw a reliever lose 20 games in a season.

You’re damn right I’ll take it from here.

And so it begins … What “it” is is a thing to determine the Base-and-Ball Cultural Alphabet. And what is that? Allow me to explain …

On occasion, I read this book to my young spawn. It assigns players, based on surname, to each letter of the alphabet. Some of the choices are … curious to the point of suggesting malice aforethought. I shall not pursue civil litigation. This is because I mostly enjoy the book. What I shall do, however, is expand the pool of eligibles to include not only players but also baseball humans of other persuasions, things related to our fair game, ideas, notions both fleeting and timeless, and so on. I do this in the service of, as you might guess, assembling The Base-and-Ball Cultural Alphabet. For that, I need your help, page viewers.

We start with the letter “A.” Below, I will list the 10 candidates for election, and I will also briefly regale you with tales of him, her or it. Voting is enabled and, much like regular applications of imported cologne, encouraged.

Who or what will represent the letter “A” in The Base-and-Ball Cultural Alphabet? That’s up to you, muscled readers …

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While we fans spend a fair amount of emotional currency on our favorite teams, many of us also adhere to a more leisurely form of tribalism. I speak of that thing called “The Second-Favorite Team.” It is liberating, this thing. While the fates of Cardinals can drive me to behave like a colicky infant or street murderer with nothing left to lose, my Second-Favorite Team inspires in me no such moron’s inclinations.

So without further throat-clearing: My Second-Favorite Team is the Pittsburgh Pirates. Why? The stovepipe hats of my youth helped, as did the dancing on the dugout during the ’79 run at the belt and the title, as did Pops Stargell, who is so cool that he simply must be the eldest son of the Statue of Liberty. Also entered into evidence is the fact-pinion that PNC is the best ballpark around. As well, longstanding is my weakness for cocaine-dealing bird-men.

And now I yield the floor to you, page viewers. What are your Second-Favorite Teams?

Second-Favorite Teams! Let us loosen these, the chains of giving a shit!