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As noted in this space, Banknotes Harper is about business, except on those occasions when he is not about business, and even at those times he is about business.

It follows, then, that Banknotes Harper’s unrelenting business travel schedule requires him to spend every spare moment in the high-level business skies and then arguing forcefully in Tokyo boardrooms, arbitraging on Abu Dhabi trading floors, and — while wearing an Oleg Cassini hardhat — pointing rolled-up architectural documents to indicate various cost-saving-but-against-code structural changes he’d like to see inside a Shanghai factory (“Take that load-bearing beam and have one of your boys make me a cigar-store Indian out of it,” for instance).

As Banknotes Harper will be quick to tell you, there’s no better way to let business know you mean business than by pounding a conference table. “The time for talking has passed,” such a gesture communicates. “Let us now transfer redeemable currencies and deeds of ownership.”

“While I’m interested in having Maroon 5 play the company retreat in Palm Beach, I’m not interested in the rates you just quoted me,” is something else it says.

Dropping a fleshy money hammer on the conference table has been known to send ripples through all market indices in all parts of the world that matter, especially when Banknotes Harper does it.

The problem for the high-ranking global executive is that when he — not she — is, say, attending a groundbreaking ceremony in Seoul or chit-chatting at a $128.6-million-per-plate super-pac fundraiser in international waters, there’s often no pounding-grade conference table to be found. The solution? The Banknotes Harper Portable Conference Table, For Pounding!

Yes, pictured above at its actual size is the Banknotes Harper Portable Conference Table, For Pounding. “Need to cow a recalcitrant regulator while pausing momentarily on the heli-pad?” Endorses Banknotes Harper himself. “This Banknotes Harper Portable Conference Table, For Pounding, which folds out to accommodate no fewer than one Business Soup-Bone, will seal the deal. Folded up, it fits in a tailored suit pocket or cigarette case. Fuckers.”

Available through SkyMall.

A very special gift from my buddy, Dylan.

Some time ago, probably about a year ago, I proposed to my fellow NotGraphs contributors that we do a NotGraphs Franchise Player Draft. It’s something in which there was at least mild interest, and I’d still like to see it done, despite my laziness in following up on my original inquiry.

And though I haven’t followed up on that inquiry, I’d say that the idea of a NotGraphs Franchise Player is something that I ponder almost daily — either directly or by way of considering (1) what makes NotGraphs NotGraphs, or (2) why, precisely, I am drawn to certain baseball players more than others.

Addressing those questions would be central to the NotGraphs Franchise Player Draft. Each participant in the draft would select one baseball player — living or dead, considering that death is such a strong theme in these immortal electronic pages — that he believes most embodies l’Esprit NotGraphs. Among the things that will be considered, I’m sure, are a player’s personal aesthetic (e.g. hair and facial hair); his extracurricular habits; his on-field antics; possibly his NERD Score; whether/in what ways he is photogenic; myths surrounding him; his sabremetric standing and/or statistical oddities.

So, what sort of player makes for NotGraphs Franchise Player™ material?

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In this site’s grand tradition of “taking pictures of stuff on the author’s table or floor,” the author has provided here a picture of something on the latter of those things.

The “stuff” in question is an art painting composed lovingly by NotGraphs contributor Patrick Dubuque and then sent via US Post to the author and then placed on the author’s floor — where it remains — for the purpose of taking this picture.

As great art does, Dubuque’s piece asks the biggest possible questions. Questions like: “How does one construct meaning?” And also like: “How ought one to resolve life’s horrors and its mundanities?” And finally, like: “In what correctional facility’s art class did Dubuque craft this work?”

Podcast veterans and those of right-wise inclinations will know of my affections for Nathan Hale, who invented the gun and the traveler’s check. So it is with a swollen and veiny pride that I present to you, courtesy of brawny frontiersman War2D2, the 1977 Nathan Hale High School Yearbook …

You will observe that that is Nathan Hale’s communist-punching soupbone, be-ringed in Artcarved, seizing the rainbow so as to use it to bludgeon those who wish us harm. The roiling thunderheads and troubled spires do not lie: water-colored trouble is about us.

But Nathan Hale’s soupbone will beat the fucking shit out of it.

“Slow news day.”

Along with my Starting Lineup figurines, I also salvaged these mini helmets from my mother’s latest rummage pile.

Taking advantage of my GF’s clean desk.

I used to get these for a quarter a piece from vending machines at grocery stores.

Once I had enough of them, I would play out entire seasons, the schedules scratched out in notebooks, each game decided by a coin flip. (I was never able to get all of the teams, so I just used duplicates to stand in for the missing teams, putting a tiny scrap of masking tape over the logo on the duplicate and initialing the tape to represent the missing team.) For the playoffs, I would do a coin flip per inning and keep track of the “score.” I sorta wish I still had those notebooks now. It was a life’s work, really.

In an effort to meld the past and the present, I decided to assign each of the helmets to an object/being in my current house. I made some effort to align some aspect of the team with the object/being it got placed with — but don’t read too much into that. Or do. There are some duplicates.
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I went home to my mother’s house this past weekend to paint her kitchen; she’s gearing up for the yearly rummage sale. Amongst the possible rummage items were my Starting Lineup figurines, all of which were Brewers players from the 1988 and 1989 seasons. I used to have a Kirby Puckett figurine from 1989, but somewhere along the line he vanished: I might have traded him for some cards back in the day, or he might have been the victim of another rummage purge by my mother. At any rate, I salvaged these guys from the purge-in-process.

Your 1988 Milwaukee Brewers

As you can see, none of them are still in their packaging. I was only seven years old when I got these, and I was more interested in crudely recreating one of the copious Brewers losses that I watched on TV or at Milwaukee County Stadium than I was in “resale value” or whatever. First I would write inning-by-inning scripts of the games (because, you know, I already wanted to be a writer and stuff) and then I would act them out the best I could with the seven or eight figures that I had.

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Nothing screams summer like playing a nice game of simulated baseball with a the “Official Jackmster Baseball Knife”.

Who needs to carry around a complete Strat-o-matic game when the game can be stored in that cool little watch pocket on your jeans. It can played outside and inside (until mom finds out). Best of all, the winner can take home one of the loser’s favorite “Home Run” razor blades.

Sometimes readers will ask me — on the present site, on Twitter, on the lawless streets of America — they’ll ask me, “Hey Carson, will you keep me abreast of products that might be of some use to me, as a consumer of base-and-ball?”

To which query I’ll respond: “You want me to keep you a breast of products like that?”

To which they’re like: “Yeah, abreast.”

At which point, I’m like: “A breast?”

And then they’re like: “Yes. Abreast. It’s a real English word, and has nothing to do with the female anatomy, like you’re clearly pretending it does.”

In any case, my answer to the original question is: “Yes, but probably only, like, a month after such a product has been released, because what am I, a machine?”

A thing that fits all of the above criteria was brought to the author’s attention over the weekend in the form of this tweet:

You know how the Red Zone channel only shows you all the important stuff? Check out MLB version here with mlb.com/fullcount

— MLB (@MLB) April 28, 2012

In fact, some cursory research reveals that the operator of the MLB Twitter account is not lying. MLB Full Count (link) is a video service (in collaboration, it seems, with Yahoo) that provides “look-ins” to games in progress — and, it would also seem, highlights of completed games. Also, it’s free.

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The Society for American Baseball Research has announced today that, owing to the diligence of one Mr. Jonathan Frankel, anyone with a cursory knowledge of the internet can access all manner of scanned game accounts from the earliest days of base-and-ball.

Frankel has uploaded to Google Docs scans of newspapers from 1897 to 1912 from the following cities: Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Louisville, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.

As you might expect — and decidedly through no fault of Frankel’s own — the quality of the papers is sometimes compromised, nor does every article scale the heights of Prose Mountain (a mountain that doesn’t exist, but which I have just invented for the purposes of a shit metaphor).

As you might also expect, there are some excellent moments, such as this excerpt from what appears to be the August 12th, 1911, edition of the Cleveland Leader — a passage that it is literally impossible to read aloud except in a Mid-Atlantic accent and while drinking scotch in Bert Sugar’s den.

The real test of a pitcher is his work in pinches. Barney Pelty stood the test. Three times Cleveland batters had the chance to put the spectators in a happy frame of mind and three times these batters ignominiously whiffed.

Below is an image of the paper from which that excerpt is taken. (Note: if clicking doesn’t lead to ample embiggening, attempt to right-click for the purposes of opening in a new window.)

Finder’s fee owed to Mr. Larry Granillo.

If ever, reader, you were the sort to click on an image with a view to embiggening it, this post — and, specifically, the image embedded here to the right — represents an excellent opportunity to revisit that practice.

Never clicked and embiggened before? It’s not as difficult or dangerous as it sounds. What’s really central to it is the clicking part, as the embiggening is actually just the result of that cause.

What one will find in this photo, after the appropriate measures have been taken, is Hall of Famer George Brett and teammate Bo Jackson, circa 1989, presenting from the lush fields of Baseball City, FL what is known to aristocrats everywhere as the doigt d’honneur — presenting it both to (a) some sort of freelance photographer and (b) future Americans, like us.

This image, signed by Brett himself, appears to be available in exchange for American currency, via reputable online auction house and retailer of pornographic materials eBAY.

Finger of honor to FanGraphs editor Robert Sanchez.