Can’t talk. Grabbing my go bag. Gotta lay low for a while, until this shit blows over. Stay frosty. Trust no one. Remember your training. I’ll see you on the other side.

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Baseball has a heavy tendency to fall into certain rhythms. A new game may start, but we have some pretty good guesses as to what’s going to happen. There will probably be some hits, some strikeouts, and maybe even a home run. There probably won’t be, however, a walk-off balk.

This oddity has merit in its own right. But it offers Ryan Raburn something more. Raburn is used to being a batter — a man in charge of both his and his team’s momentary destiny. He is used to being a spectator — watching things happen on the field that will affect the outcome of the game. This very moment, the moment the umpire points out the balk, is a moment rarely experienced by baseballers. He is the tiniest of moments past being the man responsible for his team’s fate and the tiniest of moments from watching his team secure a victory. Moments. Fractions of moments. The further you break it down, the further you whittle away the trace edges of these moments, they start to become one in the same — to the point where there exists a single plane in which Raburn is in charge of winning a game that is already won. He is the hero, the goat, and the happy teammate all at once.

Cheer, cringe, and cheer again, Ryan Raburn. You have achieved ultimate enlightenment.

After beginning the latter’s first-inning at-bat with very much an inside fastball, Corey Kluber proceeded to strike out Miguel Cabrera on three breaking pitches to the outer half of the plate — the last of which pitch is depicted in the animated GIF embedded here.

Also depicted within the aforementioned GIF is a series of speech acts performed by the Detroit hitter. While no audio is available of Cabrera’s message to Kluber, NotGraphs’ Forensic Speechreading Expert Panel of Experts confirms the following dialogue:

“Falafels are never fun… Fun.”

A cryptic message, one notes — but terribly rich and even more compelling.

This happens tomorrow.

It's official! Local HERO CAT will be throwing out a first pitch on Tuesday, May 20th! @TheHeroCat

— Bakersfield Blaze (@BakoBlaze) May 15, 2014

You, you’re here with me, on the internet. So doubtless you’ve seen this:

I know, right?

But you may not realize this brings about the final age of baseball. Writers know the best stories have inevitable endings — those stories that can end only one way — Juliet, Romeo, they must die — Yossarian must never leave the island but by desertion — and Finnegan’s Wake must, um, riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs… James Joyce is a helluva drug.

I diverged. This brings baseball to its final, most golden age. The Cat-Baseball Era.
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The great drummer Art Blakey has been quoted as saying “jazz washes away the dust of every day life.” If you have an ear for the most American of music, you might be inclined to agree.

If, instead, you have a penchant for the most American of sport, then perhaps Astros prospect George Springer can use his line-drive homer and casual bat-flip to help you out with that dust situation.

Feel cleaner now, yes?

It’s a matter of historical record that, while the technology to manufacture animated GIFs existed in 1949, it was the province only of select government agencies and utilized primarily to produce short videos of J. Edgar Hoover doing sex to the Articles of Confederation.

Had said technology been more widely available to the public, however — and had personal computers existed and also the internet — then an enterprising weblogger would almost certainly have captured the footage above of Satchel Paige’s marvelous windup and dispersed it to the people.

The Victorino	The Emotional Substance

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Earlier today, in the pages of FanGraphs proper, the author noted that Arizona right-hander Chase Anderson would be making his major-league debut against the Chicago Americans. Later today — which is to also say, now — that same author is noting that Chase Anderson’s major-league debut is complete. One thing Anderson produced was a 6:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio (box). Another thing he produced was the blessed changeup against Adam Dunn reproduced here for the placation of the braying masses.

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Anyone who has made a priority of acquainting him- or herself with the top jams of American cinema will recognize the following as a brief excerpt from the scene in Woody Allen’s 1975 film Love and Death in which Allen’s character Boris attempts to seduce the very ample Countess Alexandrovna at a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

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