Nerds shall inherit the earth. But first, Safeco Field.

Saturday was the somewhat-annual USS Mariner and Lookout Landing trip to Safeco to watch the Mariners, and I was in attendance. Needless to say, when a bunch of us nerds get together, things are going to get weird. With that in mind, here’s some things of note about Nerds at a Baseball Game, 2012.

• Even though it was a group of nerds, I was the only one wearing a FanGraphs t-shirt. I mean, I know it’s a Mariners game and people want to show their team spirit, but some teams are more important.

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One of two such headlines the author happened to find in his aggregator.

It should be noted that, by the word study in the title of this post, what the author actually means is “passing observation” — and that, by the prepositional phrase rife with, what the author really means, in this case, is “two MLB.com articles that recently appeared in his RSS reader.”

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BUSYTOWN, U.S.A. — When Mayor Fox of Busytown was merely Young Fox, he frequented the old-line immigrant swim clubs in the Busy Hill section of the since-industrialized Northeast Side. The story, still told in taverns with the whiff of the apocryphal but the essence of truth, is that Young Fox, debauched yet aspirational, was once set upon by a roving gang of Bulgarians. He was beaten savagely and left half-naked in the gathering cold.

Mottled with blood bruises and still hypothermic, Young Fox showed up back at the club the next day, as he had been warned not to, and strode with purpose to the same ruffians who had brutalized him the day before. “I’ll not forget what happened,” he said. “And you don’t forget this: there is more of me than there are of you.”

They laughed. “But there is only one of you,” one of them said.

“And now you understand,” Young Fox told his new enemies.

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For over a decade now, the MLB All-Star break has been filled with more than just the All-Star game itself. In addition to accompanying FanFests, we have the Homerun Derby (started in 1985), the Futures Game (1999), and the Taco Bell All-Star Legends and Celebrity Softball Game (2001; now with new Doritos-based bases!).

The NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has discovered, via measures that may or may not jive with the various etiquettes of journalism, that Bud Selig, ever the trailblazer, is planning to expand the festively festive festivities starting in 2013 with the All-Star extravaganza at Citi Field, home of the New York Mets.

The Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has compiled the following list of events that Selig and his closest cronies have proposed to MLB owners and officials. It appears here, exclusively at NotGraphs, for the spoiled and glistening NotGraphs readership:
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Many thanks to what-if.xkcd.com for putting the old radar gun debate to bed. According to legend, the faster the fastball, the better. NOT SO.

In answering the query “What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?”, the fine people of what if? have ultimately established that it would result in no less than a hit-by-pitch every time:

The NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team can proudly confirm that last night, during the second inning of the match between the Boston Red Sox and Oakland Athletics, only a few seconds before the recorded footage you’re about to watch, NESN Red Sox broadcaster Jerry Remy whispered to his colleague, Don Orsillo, “Dance as if nobody is watching, and love like you’ve never been hurt.”

Orsillo really took the advice to heart. The man can jam. Turns out, however, that a lot of people were, you know, watching.

The unwritten rules of baseball extend into the crowd. For example, there’s a decorum that governs when spectators should boo. Sometimes gentleman, sometimes bartender Jon Rauch helps us out:

Very disappointed with the fans who booed Jason Bay as he came off the field. This is a serious injury that affects his livelihood (cont)

— Jon Rauch (@jrauch60) June 16, 2012

Well, okay, that one was obvious. Jason Bay ran full tilt into the outfield wall trying to catch a ball and suffered a concussion for it. Maybe that wasn’t the best time to boo him.

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FanGraphs: the Game is real. I have proof.

First, how else can you explain my Giants first baseman? He’s ‘hitting’ .235/.314/.350… and Giants’ first basemen are hitting .207/.312/.336. My dude has a better ISO, the Aubrey Huff / Brett Pill / Brandon Belt monstrosity has a better walk rate. Both are right around replacement. Somehow I have my pick of the entire league, and the Giants have their pick of those three dudes, and we ended up in the same place.

On the other side of the coin, cwhitman is doing a heckuva job. His Nationals starter is performing like… a Nationals starter. His starter has an 8.76 K/9, 2.87 BB/9, and 0.83 HR/9 — the staff in our nation’s capital has an 8.48 K/9, 3.04 BB/9, 0.71 HR/9. Again, they had no choice beyond what was on their roster or in their system, cwhitman had plenty of choice, and they ended up in the same place.

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On Sunday afternoon, scheduling peculiarities resulted in me missing my fast-pitch baseball game on the south side of Chicago and instead helping out in a slow-pitch softball game for a friend on the slightly-less-south side of Chicago. During the second game of the doubleheader, a slew of little league kids appeared, waiting to take the field from us.

Upon seeing me, many of the tykes began chanting: “Brian. Wilson.” Clapclap, clapclapclap.

This is why:

But I am not, in fact, Brian Wilson, though my face proteins may resemble his. Let us examine the differences:
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We caught up with robot expert, rapper and part-time chicken enthusiast Kool Keith and picked his brain about the robot umpires that are surely on their way to baseball. What follows is a summary of his expertise on the subject, with commentary.

• Voicemail, pagers / These are the things that robots carry

Anything as arcane as pagers is possible in the backwaters of Major League Baseball, although why they would need to carry voicemail is an open question.

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