At RotoGraphs today — and also during breakfast this morning at a Tempe-area diner — the absurdly coiffed Eno Sarris presented evidence to the effect that, by one definition, that baseball’s best pitch in 2013 was the changeup belonging to right-handed Mets reliever Gonzalez Germen.

“I shall manufacture a GIF of it, then!” I announced during that same breakfast in response to Eno’s comments. “I have manufactured a GIF of it!” I am proclaiming right now, because Truth is the star by which my ship is guided.

The context having been established, then, I present this footage from September 27th of Germen striking out Milwaukee infielder Jeff Bianchi by way of the changeup:

Read the rest of this entry »

I spent this morning learning how to make GIFs, which officially ushers in the decay phase of my writing career.

In this GIF–which I alone brought into existence–Ben Revere makes an athletic dive but just misses the ball:

And here, in this GIF that I made by the singular strength of my will, Phillies prospect Mario Hollands makes a routine infield fly look harder than finishing Infinite Jest:

The proximity in time (back-to-back) of these two plays(depicted by hand-hewn GIFs) leads one to wonder what lesson lies behind these normally irrelevant spring training events. The lesson, if there is one, may be best described by the also normally irrelevant Yorman Bazardo, who observed*, “No matter how hard you try, someone else will succeed where you failed–someone with far less talent and poise.”

*Note: Did not actually say/observe this.

As the largely irresponsible leaderboard published by the author today at FanGraphs indicates, Washington right-hander Taylor Jordan has been the best pitcher of spring training by an obscure, if methodologically sound, metric devised by that same author that was just mentioned.

Read the rest of this entry »

Obviously we were all watching during the 10th inning of the Rays-Yankees game when Mark Montgomery struck out Vince Belnome and then celebrated with a televised snot ejaculation. But that doesn’t mean the event didn’t merit an entry in the index of Great Body Fluid GIFs. This way, we can preserve this moment between these two fine, if not well known, athletes.

Many of the voices in this author’s head considers NotGraphs to be the Skull and Bones of Internet Baseball Writing, mainly in that it’s secretive and pointless. But it’s our club, damn it, and we’ll be damned if we will have some millionaire baseball player steal our secret handshake and show it to some minor-leaguer on broadcast television. J’accuse!

Take solace, fair reader, in the fact that Mr. Cistulli and I will work non-stop next week when we meet in Arizona to devise a new secret handshake. Then, if you meet one of us in person and try to perform the old handshake, we can have you arrested for assault, which was our goal the whole time. Have fun in jail, dummy.

(h/t Mike Axisa)

It is often said in English that one “can’t get blood from a stone.” Why such a thing must be specifically established remains a mystery — and lends almost nothing in the way of credibility to the human race.

The point of this post, however, is to say that something quite different than attempting to extract blood from a stone is attempting to locate internet footage of N.C. State left-hander Carlos Rodon striking out an opposing batter by way of his breaking ball. Indeed, no more than five minutes of research this afternoon has yielded the animated GIF embedded above — of Rodon on February 21st striking out what appears to be Appalachian State’s Alex Leach by way of his (i.e. Rodon’s) breaking ball.

Owing to how they’re merely a collection of binary code made visible to the human eye by some combination of interlinked hypertext documents and the microprocessor within the reader’s own computer, the two GIFs here of Masahiro Tanaka striking out Ben Revere yesterday by way of his first glorious stateside splitter are not technically edible.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to the actual “rules” of “baseball,” any single home run technically only produces a quantity of runs equal to the number of players already on base plus one. According to that part of the human body, however, responsible for the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine into the brain, certain home runs are manifestly worth more, others less, in terms of aesthetic value.

This true truth having been established, one might readily conclude that, owing to how his whole life is in front of him and to how his levers are longer than a Terrence Malick film, that Gregory Polanco’s home run this afternoon against the Yankees’ David Phelps is not unlike a grand slam or maybe two grand slams.

Stolen without shame from this video of Bob Uecker’s 2011 speaking appearance at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the animated GIF embedded here documents many of Uecker’s entrances on the Tonight Show — and, more pressingly, the assorted vestments with which Uecker willingly chose to adorn himself.

The freely available video from which this GIF has been captured — and which appears to feature the College of Southern Nevada at Western Nevada College in 2010 — offers more or less everything a person could want so far as Bryce Harper and mountains are concerned. Like, Bryce Harper singling to left in front of a mountain, for example. And also Bryce Harper making an extra-inning relief appearance in front of a mountain.

What said video also offers is the footage above — of teenage Bryce Harper not only homering in front of, but also mostly onto, the mountain in question.

Surely, one realizes, Walt Whitman was right when he said… all those things that Walt Whitman is famous for saying about one thing and another.