There is nothing quite
like a Heyward diving catch
made while on the run.

This has been another poorly written NotGraphs Haiku.

“I want to sit in right field because that’s where Dioner Navarro is going to hit a home run.”

That was me, your humble author. I made this pronouncement on August 19, 2013, around 6:48 p.m. Then, at approximately 8:23 p.m. that same evening, Dioner Navarro did this:

Do you doubt my powers?

Read the rest of this entry »

Among the (certainly) many traits which the animated GIF embedded here — of NC Dinos’ designated hitter Ho-Joon Lee first releasing his bat with a great flourish and then, as extended coverage reveals, flying out to right field — among the many traits it shares with a West Coast party, certainly one of those is that neither appears likely to stop at any point in the near future.

For further similarities, please consult the author’s scholarly paper on the matter in the forthcoming edition of Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte.

Credit to concerned internet citizen Josh Augustine for bringing this to the editoriat’s attention.

While examining the animated GIF embedded here of Elvis Andrus first homering and then, second, lazily tossing aside his bat, one is confronted by three facts, as follow:

1. Firstly, that it is not uncommon for base-and-ball traditionalists to suggest that it is incumbent upon each player, when he has homered, to “act like he’s been there before”; but also that

2. Noted pre-Socratic philosopher and pretty sad mec Heraclitus famously announced that “one can never step into the same river twice”; and finally that

3. Prior to his home run this evening, Elvis Andrus had recorded precisely zero of those (i.e. home runs) this season.

Confronted by these facts, is what one is.
_____

Credit to concerned citizen of the internet Ben Hudson for bringing this to the author’s attention.

Tonight, we use the internet as it was intended to be used: to elicit page views by means of as little work as possible — in this case, by means of publishing footage of Cleveland right-hander Danny Salazar’s split changeup.

Like this one to Prince Fielder in the second inning:

Read the rest of this entry »

No less an authority than Wikipedia, a free and electronic encyclopedia of some renown, informs us that an existential crisis might result from any of the following conditions:

• The sense of being alone and isolated in the world;
• A new-found grasp or appreciation of one’s mortality;
• Believing that one’s life has no purpose or external meaning;
• Searching for the meaning of life;
• Awareness of one’s freedom and the consequences of accepting or rejecting that freedom; and
• An extremely pleasurable or hurtful experience that leaves one seeking meaning.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not uncommon in this world — is, in fact, celebrated at some length by the god of the Old Testament in the book of Nahum, probably, or Habakkuk — for the star-crossed lover, separated by some combination of fate and legal injunction from the object of his affections, to pull himself up off the bar stool, place a call via pay phone to the local AM station, and dedicate Foreigner’s 1984 power ballad “I Want to Know What Love Is” to the only woman who ever mattered to him for 20 minutes last Saturday out near the municipal lake.

It was in much the same spirit, one imagines, that internet lover Michael Spitznagel stumbled to his keyboard tonight, booted up his Twitter computer, and requested that the present author utilize one of his few skills to the end of sharing A.J. Griffin’s curveball with the world — such that, after witnessing said curveball, the world would have a better idea than Mick Jones et al. what, precisely, love is.

Read the rest of this entry »

In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake authored an equation (known colloquially as the Drake Equation) designed to estimate the number of detectable civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy, which equation accounted for the average number of star formations per year in the galaxy and the fraction of those stars that have planets and the average number of those planets that could potentially support life, etc.

Just tonight, the present author has devised a similar equation — except, in this case, one intended to estimate the number of other weblogs that might have already posted the bat flip by Wil Myers embedded above from the third inning of Sunday’s Tampa Bay-New York game (box). “Zero others,” is the likely answer via that equation’s impregnable logic.

Credit to concerned citizens of the internet, both je and Dan Rozenson, for bringing these important events to the author’s attention.

Please regard, with a sense of discernment, the following color-television GIF:

What is beyond dispute is that Vermilion Stockings philosopher-king David Ortiz has dislodged the second-base bag for purposes of mercilessly bludgeoning one of the three unsuspecting fops seated at the table in the foreground. What is left to question is which gentleman shall be beaten into a cadaverous pile of quivering mucus, paste, viscera and bloody snot-hominy. Who shall it be?

The answer, it turns out, is … yes.

If you have a television and that television has sports powers, you, sir or madam, probably saw this last evening:

A million life-debts to SB Nation for so precisely and cleanly enGIFing this so precisely and cleanly turned double play. And thank you Yunel Escobar and Ben Zobrist; thank you for you Jedi-like connectedness that allows for the glove-flip-to-bare-hand turn. I thank everyone.

This has been a HOT GIF.