The life of a knuckleballer is different than most lives, but it is still a life in the end. It starts, it stops, and the middle is spent exclusively thinking about how it will stop. Some other stuff also happens.

R.A. Dickey has had some stuff happen. Some heavy, some uplifting. Some may say he is in a good place, now. He plays a game for a living. Sure, but only once every five days. The rest are spent sitting, watching, thinking about how it will all stop. He does make a good deal of money, yes, but soul currency is what he’s most interested in — trading goods or services for enlightenment. He wrote an acclaimed book, but writing books comes with sad little details like dealing with publishers and literary agents. His book may have been optioned into a movie, but he has little say in that. He just gets to deal with movie agents, which are just literary agents with better haircuts.

And so here he stands, getting paid in foreign money to play a game in an enormous room on fake grass in Toronto — Toronto being an old Huron word for “shitty New York.” All this and how this all will stop is on R.A. Dickey’s mind. He is not real. He is a phantasm tasked with haunting his own consciousness. He is not human. He is not dancer.

He needs to feel alive again. This will happen at the expense of Dexter Fowler’s bat.

Kindly place your eyeballs directly on the monitor to fully enjoy this duel of filth between Alex Cobb and Yu Darvish. These two gentleman twirlers went seven scoreless on Sunday.

Pro Tip: If you watch these two loops, one GIF per eye, for thirty rotations, you will indeed be teleported to medieval England, where you can convince the locals you are a powerful warlock once they see your walkman, velcro shoes, and beeper.

8:01pm: Below is the footage of Tanaka’s first major-league swinging-strike — what appears to be, not surprisingly, a splitter to Jose Bautista. Much more surprisingly is how it came only after Tanaka conceded his first major-league home run.

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Earlier this afternoon, the present author published a ca. 1900-word screed at popular internet website FanGraphs designed ostensibly to examine a kind of baseball prospect that appears particularly immune to failure but intended secretly to herald relatively unheralded San Diego shortstop prospect Jace Peterson.

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The author, whose loving mother is talking at him without cease even as he writes these words, won’t belabor the point — which point is that the very excellent Jose Fernandez just threw a curveball to strike out the also very excellent Troy Tulowitzki.

Here’s, for example, one slow-motion GIF of that curveball:

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On more than one occasion last spring, the present author published in these electronic pages a love letter from deep within his own self to Pittsburgh minor-leaguer Phil Irwin’s curveball — making note of that pitch’s “wild eroticism,” for example, or its capacity to provoke religious experience.

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The image above of Torii Hunter (which image one can embiggen most expediently by clicking) appears merely to depict the Tigers right fielder taking advantage of a free moment to stretch his legs during the sixth inning of today’s Grapefruit League contest between Atlanta and Detroit — nor, in fact, are appearances entirely misleading in this case.

As both Sergei Eisenstein and probably also one of Sergei Eisenstein’s friends took pains to establish, however, any image must be considered with the context that it’s presented — and the context in which the above image was originally presented provides layers of meaning that would put most onions (which have many layers, is the point) to shame.

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Footage like this of Peterson tripling off tough lefty Javier Lopez is part of the problem.

JUPITER, FL – An internet baseball weblogger who is definitely not the same one responsible for this post acknowledged early on Tuesday morning that first making and then intently watching GIFs of a San Diego shortstop prospect — regardless of actual motive — was probably inappropriate in some way.

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It won’t surprise anyone familiar with my colleague Dayn Perry or his work to learn that he passes the majority of his nights and days entirely sans shirt. It is wholly within the realm of credulity, moreover, to find that the only garment for which Perry exhibits any tolerance — because it allows him to evacuate at leisure — is a disposable diaper. Finally, no one anywhere is likely to disbelieve the suggestion that Product of the American South Dayn Perry devotes a sizable portion of his waking life to striking his head against objects both foreign and domestic (with a marked preference for the latter, naturally).

What has happened today? Today, noted weblogger Dayn Perry was spotted at a Cubs game.

At about 4am ET this morning — a time when only criminals and Australians (i.e. a very tan criminal) are awake and active — the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers began the 2014 baseball season.

The event, of course, carries all manner of significance for all manner of people. For the present author, however, the main concern regarding the contest wasn’t the final score or how Yasiel Puig looked as he entered his sophomore campaign, but rather how many pitches right-hander Kenley Jansen would require to emasculate an opposing batter with his emasculating cutter.

The answer, as the footage below indicates, appears to have been “roughly zero pitches.”

With his club leading by a score of 3-1, Jansen entered the game in the ninth inning — which inning he began with a 92 mph cutter to Mark Trumbo, as illustrated here:

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