Today is February 12th, the birthday of Don Stanhouse. That fact, and the fact that I have created the GIF below should be enough to declare today the next NotGraphs Feast Day — the Feast of Stanhouse the Very Orange.
To celebrate, a brief hymn:
1. The author purchased this weekend MiLB.TV as part of his 2013 subscription to MLB.TV. The service, which costs ca. $40 by itself, costs half that (ca. $20) when bundled with an MLB.TV subscription.
2. Here is a graphic — clickable for purposes of embiggening — of all the clubs whose home games are made available with MiLB.TV.
If Robert Pollard of famous and elderly indie-rock group Guided by Voices was in the business of making animated GIFs, he’d make an animated GIF not entirely unlike this one — of Ricardo Nanita tying the Caribbean Series title game, in the ninth inning, off Luis Ayala, from a probably illegal and rather low-quality video feed.
Does a GIF ever warrant a border 150 pixels in width?
I think you know the answer.
Oh! It’s such a hat tip that I give to Brian Reinhart.
There’s a possibility — like, probably about a 50% possibility or 65% possibility or something — that, at some point in his life, the reader will need to locate, with due celerity, action footage of former major-league shortstop and current minor-league pitcher Tony Pena Jr.
What this post at NotGraphs is all about is rendering that service real hard. “To what end?” the reader might ask. “Monetary gains? Political favors?” To which line of inquiry the author replies: “No. None of that. Only the satisfaction of having assisted a fellow pilgrim on this goddamn camino we call Life.”
Which is to say, what follows is Tony Pena pitching for Puerto Rican club Caguas Dominican club Escogido during Caribbean Series play earlier this afternoon.
First, striking out Dominican Puerto Rican outfielder Daniel Ortiz on a high-80s fastball:
“With mounting intensity” describes the way in which the present author conducts much of his business — and characterizes, specifically, the manner in which that same author has turned his attention of late to the art and science of the bat flip. Recently, we have considered in these electronic pages the contributions to this developing canon of Hiroyuki Nakajima (link), Carlos Ruiz (link), and — owing to yeoman’s work done by Eno Sarris — an instantly regretful Japanese right-hander (link).
Today we consider the following bat flip, by Johnny Monell, from Saturday’s Caribbean Series contest between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Monell, who is also a catcher in the Giants system, has already established his credentials so far as enthusiastic swings are concerned — so it’s not entirely surprising that he would continue his work in this field.
Here we find a GIF of Monell’s home-run swing:
Let’s not consider, reader, what course of events has led the childless and otherwise unencumbered author not only to seek out video of Arizona right-hander Chase Anderson’s plus changeup on this Saturday Night in America, but also to render that same footage into GIF form.
Rather, let’s consider the ways in which Chase Anderson’s changeup has facilitated ecstatic union with the One — like in that one book by Plotinus where he talks about attaining ecstatic union with the One.
Regard, from certain video of his appearance at the AFL Rising Stars game, here is Chase Anderson striking out Hak-Ju Lee via the changeup:
Even an important BBWAA-endorsed journalist like the present one doesn’t know precisely what Craig Kimbrel’s breaking ball is doing tonight. One assumes, however, that it’s doing something very similar to what it did on October 3rd, 2012, against Pittsburgh’s Jose Tabata — i.e. Kimbrel’s last actual pitch of the regular season.
Like the dark and mysterious stranger in a film about a young French woman’s sexual awakening, the reader has by now made love to the video footage provided earlier today by Eno Sarris of myriad Japanese hitters practicing the sacred art of the bat flip.
Now, like the reader of a blog post in which a metaphor is mixed almost immediately after being introduced, the reader finds himself reliving — via his mind’s eye — the ecstasies of that earlier encounter.
Why the mind is a cyclops, we’ll never know. Despite its lack of depth perception, however, it remains one of the best ways to relive ecstasies.
Still, in certain cases, an animated GIF is required. Like this animated GIF of, first, a hitter flipping his bat, and then, second, of a pitcher slamming his glove with Maximum Anger:
Jeff Sullivan wrote a great post — as he is wont to do — about putting Hiroyuki Nakajima in context. He mentioned Nakajima’s bat flip. Carson Cistulli posted it. It was grand.
But then I saw video of Norihiro Nakamura, he of the .051 ISO and the 41 plate appearances for the Dodgers in 2005. Doing this.
Where Nakajima had a sort of panache, maybe with an easy grace, Nakamura is an explosion, a cannonball, a rocket going off. Could just be some sort of coincidence? Many men have bat flips, after all.
Unless…