So this is how it ends. Will McDonald (now ExRoyalsReview on Twitter), longtime mainstay of Royals Review, has decided to call it a day after eight years of blogging about the Royals. During that time, Royals Review grew from just some guy’s blog to a team site on the fledgling SB Nation network to perhaps the most popular Royals blog around.

With the management formerly of Royals Authority taking the helm, things should be in good hands. Still, it is hard for many of us to imagine following the Royals without the incentive of knowing the referents for Will’s next brilliantly-written combination of anger and comedy. How will we get through the season without more Royals Bibliomancy or Mitch Maier’s Letters Home From Baseball Camp, or expressions of irritation over Royals prospect Wil Myers spelling his first name incorrectly.

Will has been a huge inspiration. Don’t hold it against him, but, while I never “worked” at Royals Review, I probably would not be blogging today if it were not for reading Will’s stuff. Will’s posts garnered attention far beyond Royals fandom — I think the first “big break” his blog received was when Keith Law linked to it in one of his ESPN chats. I cannot summarize Will’s work, but that is the nature of all good art. So as a tribute to Will (or “Freneau,” a moniker he adopted in recent times in tribute to a poet from the era of the Revolutionary War) and as a public service, I will briefly go through just a few of McDonald’s best moments of the last few years.

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Nothing screams summer like playing a nice game of simulated baseball with a the “Official Jackmster Baseball Knife”.

Who needs to carry around a complete Strat-o-matic game when the game can be stored in that cool little watch pocket on your jeans. It can played outside and inside (until mom finds out). Best of all, the winner can take home one of the loser’s favorite “Home Run” razor blades.

One assumes that, all appearances to the contrary, Boston reliever Alfredo Aceves isn’t a an actual pirate. On the other hand, that’s precisely the sort of thing a pirate would want you to think.

Credit to actual member of Britain’s landed gentry, Liam Milner.

Do not wonder, reader, whether I have modified a dispatch from the official Twitter feed of the Cleveland baseball Indians for my own, nefarious purposes. Wonder instead how many of your friends and family will die tragically from Carlos Baerga Fever, which is probably a really serious and actual thing.

According the Center for Disease Control, any of the following might be symptoms of Carlos Baerga Fever:

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Minneapolis — Considerable speculation has flooded the internet blogs regarding Albert Pujols’s motives for throwing his glove at Angels teammate Erick Aybar following the club’s 6-2 victory over the Twins on Wednesday (box).

In point of fact, the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has learned that the gesture was in response to an ongoing argument the pair have regarding the utility of deconstructionist thought.

“Pujols, he doesn’t recognize the internal contradictions of philosophical discourse,” Aybar said when reached for comment. “The moment we attempt to utilize rhetoric in the service of describing metaphysical reality, we have obscured reality.

Said Pujols in response: “I regard Aybar’s claims only as an attempt to deliberately obscure discourse and nothing else. He argues against language until it no longer exists.

“So how I do refute him? I throw my glove. ‘Deconstruct that,’ I said. Q.E.D.”

By a process known as embedding — which oughtn’t be confused with a different process for which the author has become famous around the home and office — I submit for the reader’s consideration video from last week of Chicago White Sox right-hander Jake Peavy discussing with equal parts enthusiasm and modesty a recent minor-league outing he made, which video reveals to anyone who cares to watch that Jake Peavy is remarkably pleasant.

“Apropos of what, precisely, are you doing this?” the reader might be asking. To which hypothetical question, I reply: “No pretense is necessary. Good behavior is always relevant.”

In an effort to reinforce the popular notion that all sabermetric analysts are poorly socialized nerdbones with unfortunate hair cuts, Brian Kenny and the producers of MLB Network’s Clubhouse Confidential have invited FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron to appear on today’s (Monday’s) edition of that program.

Kenny, for his part, does a good job with the show. He appears genuinely interested in asking, and attempting to answer, smart questions about baseball. Furthermore, he has a head of hair that will outlive us all.

The show broadcasts at 5:30pm ET — with what appears to be another showing at 7:30pm ET, for those viewers whose abdominal muscles aren’t fully cramped after pointing and laughing during the first.

From Tom Verducci’s column on his Hall-of-Fame ballot comes this little (Chicken Mc) nugget:

It was not preventing me from voting for Bagwell in 2010, but a development gave me pause just as I was filling out my ballot in his first year of eligibility: a perplexing interview in which Bagwell condoned steroid use and attributed his bulk to “eating 30 pounds of meat every single day and . . . working out,” making no mention of the andro, the beta-hydroxy-beta-methylbutyrate, the zinc tabs, creatine and whatever else.

Once more with the relevant portion in the town-crier’s all caps for maximum emphasis:

“EATING 30 POUNDS OF MEAT EVERY SINGLE DAY”

Like you, I don’t know whether to believe that Jeff Bagwell indeed made a habit of eating the equivalent of four human newborns every day, but I think I shall believe it anyway. Jeff Bagwell ate 30 pounds of meat every day. Thank him for the memories, but pity the hellscape of his colon.

(Nom nom: BTF)

As I am wont to do, I was recently reading Woman’s Day and ran across this championship bit of information, which was under the ever-evolving rubric of “Things You Can Put in the Dishwasher”:

4. Baseball Hats and Visors
“The dishwasher is a fantastic way to make sure hats keep their shapes,” says Linda Cobb, a cleaning expert who is also known as the Queen of Clean. Put hats on the top rack, head opening down, on a separate wash cycle from dishes because you can’t use dishwasher detergent (many contain bleaching agents). Instead, fill the detergent cup with borax, found in the supermarket laundry aisle. Run a regular cycle without the heated dry option, then place hat over a glass or jar to dry. Reshape brim while damp.

Slipping in (tee hee) a transparent double entendre like “reshape brim while damp”? That’s sooo Woman’s Day.

This has been a post about putting your hat in the dishwasher. This is the offseason.

It is well known that the Yankees, proconsuls to all that is gnarled and dark, exist primarily not to play base and ball but rather to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. As though we needed proof beyond what horse-sense confides, here’s a particularly damning GIF. Click and be appalled!

Little explanation is needed, but that’s a young fellow in a Yankee cap at the funeral of the late Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, who was coconuts. Kim was, of course, a vicious despot, so it should come as no surprise that the young man in the cap was a sanctioned emissary dispatched by the Yankee front office in order to ensure a post-transition diplomatic relationship with DPRK!*

Patriots awake!

(Secret handshake of the resistance movement: UniWatch)

^{* Not true, but still …}