Since his most recent emancipation from the minor leagues, Travis Snider has been freely roaming left field, making — as you can see, above — highlight reel, and remarkably GIFable, defensive plays. I’ll be honest: I didn’t think he was going to get to that ball. I shouted a celebratory obscenity when he did.

More importantly, the reader will note, Snider, still only 24, is hitting home runs against left-handed pitchers. He’s hit three of them, actually, in nine games, since being recalled. In Snider’s previous four stints with the Blue Jays, the journey having begun all the way back in 2008, long before the patch of grey in my beard appeared, in 232 games, he’d hit — you guessed it — three home runs against left-handed pitchers.

Snider’s obviously  figured it all out. And that’s a good thing, because I don’t remember ever being as emotionally invested in a prospect as I am in Snider. I need this to work. I need Snider to become a star. With nobody but the Blue Jays. Or I might never trust another prospect again.

GIF credit: My favorite website, Blue Jays gifs.

It was recently brought to the attention of the author that Blue Jays hitmaker Edwin Encarnacion might bear more than passing resemblance to a certain, presumably extinct, predatory theropod.

Upon brief inspection by the author himself of some extant video footage, said resemblance was rendered unavoidable — both for that same author and, it should be noted, for the entirety of the NotGraphs readership.

For the sort of reader who’s always looking for more on developing stories as they develop, I’ve embedded some video footage from this afternoon’s Tigers-Blue Jays game (box) — during which game the aforementioned Encarnacion hit a fourth-inning home run and during which he also, once again, affected the posture of what we can only presume are his earliest ancestors.

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Insofar as it took him 32 pitches to record three outs and he walked two batters in the process, Friday’s appearance will likely not be remembered as the best of Jonny Venters‘ career, nor — as of now, at least — would it really even be considered representative of his work to date.

That said, the very entertaining Venters did provide the home audience with the following sequence, against Kinda Obese Everyman and Philadelphia third baseman Ty Wigginton in the seventh inning of Friday’s Braves-Phillies game (box). What the attentive reader will notice (and what the not-very-observant-at-all reader will probably notice, too) is that (a) not only are the three sinkers which follows thrown to basically the same location at basically the same velocity, but that (b) Ty Wigginton reacts in basically the same way to all of them — which is to say, he offers at them, but mostly with a view to hastening his return to the dugout and thus forestalling any further embarrassment at the hands of this cruel mistress, baseball.

Here are the aforementioned pitches, with Wigginton’s aforementioned swings:

Pitch Two

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Lost in all the hoopla last night over a New York athlete doing something fairly well, the intrepid and occasionally clammy Jason Vargas tossed a proverbial gem last night. Facing the feared Royals of Kansas City, The Mariners’ #2 starter allowed a single hit through eight innings, striking out five. Loyal and fictionalized reader Thorwald Fenton called in a request this morning for an encapsulation of Vargas’ kinetic, relativity-inducing fastball. And because Carson was too busy sipping chamomile and grooming his collection of prize Shetland ponies for the Jubilee Morgan Regional Horse Show next month, I stepped in. Granted, my computer is hardly the technological marvel that his is, but I can’t imagine you’ll have any complaints.

Vargas faced Jeff Francoeur to lead off the top of the third:

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The author’s wife is about to finish making the most impossibly delicious pizza; however, quickly, here are Matt Harvey’s first two, I think, sliders from his major-league debut that started five minutes ago.

Here’s one of them, to strike out whomever the Diamondbacks leadoff hitter was:

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GIFs from the author’s old computer are dull and boring:

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It has never been the case, nor will it ever be — so far as NotGraphs is concerned — that the reader’s wish is the present author’s command. Having been introduced even in the most cursory of ways to the sordid interior lives of this site’s readership, it is patently obvious that to put my wellbeing in the hands of such a group of psychological ruffians would be an exercise in folly.

This bit of common sense having been established, I’ll hasten to add that, as a reasonable gentleman, I’m more than willing to entertain reasonable requests — like this reasonable internet request, courtesy a man whose middle name appears literally to be Funk, for a GIF of Adrian Beltre mostly sliding, kinda, into second base on a double during the fourth inning of the Rangers’ 2-1 loss to Boston on Tuesday night (box).

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Twins catcher Ryan Doumit can’t catch a break. He gets hit by a pitch, and on the way to take the base he earned through his discomfort, he almost gets uprooted by the batboy.

This was obviously some sort of attempt on Doumit’s life. Even the shortest of glances would reveal that this thug is no boy. FanGraphs lists Doumit at 6’1”, making this bat-adult at least 6’3”.  This “batboy” is clearly a trained assassin, and if it weren’t for some wet grass, he would’ve used what I can only assume to be poison-laced spikes to inject a neurotoxin into Doumit’s leg, causing sudden paralysis and cardiac arrest. If not for the incompetent grounds crew at U.S. Cellular Field, this Ty Cobb of hired killers would have collected his bounty and retired to a village in – let’s say – Argentina.

Doumit, seemingly aware of the bounty on his head, simply shrugs off this event. This isn’t the first time he’s had a brush with death, and it wouldn’t be the last. His old boss Johnny Three Eyes obviously wasn’t going to stop until one of them was dead. Doumit gives the guerilla an attaboy pat on the behind in recognition of his efforts. It can’t be that easy to infiltrate a major-league ballpark, after all.

Doumit finishes his stroll to first, his mind concocting his next move. Christ, he hadn’t had this much heat on him since he botched that numbers job in Monaco.

Regarding Epicurus’s claim that “real wealth is poverty adjusted to the law of Nature,” Seneca writes in Epistle 1.59 that such an idea “can never be repeated too often, since it can never be learned too well.”

Among the other things of this world in which one couldn’t reasonably immerse him- or herself too deeply, another of them is manifestly Kenley Jansen’s cut fastball — itself captured (once again) in GIF form here, doing to the Laws of Physics what the author only ever dreamed of doing to the girls on his high school’s volleyball team.

The handsomist is no doubt aware that the fairer, substantially more impregnate-able sex loves nothing so much as the sight of a Gentleman at Work. As the succeeding action-news footage will prove, this is especially the case when the handsomist in question is one Johnny Damon, with beard of might and pecker of firebolt …

My only disappointment? Whatever the young lady has on her finger made me think, for a fugitive moment, that she was smoking a cigarette — a Virgina Slim, one assumes — in the stands. And only with a cigarette is the already beautiful and multitudinous elevated to the sublime.

And so I invite you, Lady of Claret Breeches, to watch me blog some time from atop my ordure. Would you not be similarly titillated, Lady of Claret Breeches?

(HT: The prepossessing Big Daddy V)