The author of this post is currently the sort of person scheduled to pass the next week in the Puglia region of Italy. He’s also the sort of person who has purchased a small Italian phrasebook, on account of that language (i.e. Italian) is utilized pretty extensively throughout the country.

A section of said phrasebook that’ll most likely serve no use for this particular Roman vacation is the one which contains a collection of colloquial expressions — many of them both (a) involving the interlocutor’s mother and also (b) best uttered in anger.

“What if, though,” the author has wondered, “what if I continued my nearly five-year streak being not fired from FanGraphs by parlaying this collection of Italian insults into a post at that same site’s absurd cousin — perhaps by attaching them (i.e. the insults) to baseball’s best player whose surname is also recognizably a product of that bel paese and thus creating a meme almost in full?”

What follows is the result of that long-winded personal query.

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Reading Jon Bois’s recent article on the collapse of Andruw Jones’s career reminded me of two things:

1. I’ve wasted my life. (Jon Bois is three years younger than me. Jon Bois is awesome, and I am fine with awesome people being younger than me, but I had been assuming that, because he is so awesome, that Jon Bois was older than me, and I was overcome with existential dread, until I remembered that being overcome with existential dread is meaningless.)
2. Mistranslated things are often very amusing.

If you don’t want to click on the link to Bois’s article (and you really should: it’s a very good read), I’ll tell you what the title and lead-in reveal: Andruw Jones has a tattoo on his neck of Chinese characters that were supposed to mean “Bull” but instead translate more closely (and perhaps more appropriately, as Bois points out) as “Beef Animal.”

So, I set out to see what other baseball nicknames I might hilariously mistranslate using Bing Translator — you know, just in case other players might want to get more appropriately [mis]translated tattoos of their own.

Let us meme!

[Important Amendment: El Oso Blanco]

Pronk (Project Donkey)

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While everyone else here NotGraphs is hopping on the Bold Prediction Bandwagon, I’m going to push the envelope by proffering to readers Ten Old Predictions, which is bold in its own right, I think.

Also, in case you didn’t notice, old rhymes with bold, ya see.

1. Carl Crawford will win Comeback Player of the Year.
2. Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, Mark Buehrle, and Emilio Bonifacio will lead their team to a division title.
3. The Houston Astros will fail to win 60 games.
4. Matt Wieters will be the best offensive catcher in the league.
5. Spending spree in Los Angeles will be followed up by a disappointing season.
6. Ryan Braun will beat his PED charges.
7. New place, new faces won’t be enough to raise attendance in Miami.
8. Yuniesky Betancourt will fall into significant playing time with a Major League club.
9. I will eat a burrito for lunch.
10. FanGraphs will acquire an excellent baseball website to add to its team.

Here is the deal, internet. 99% of the time, your fickle, cheezburger-ridden attention span is a thorn in my side, sometimes causing you to have forgotten something I’ve written while you’re still in the process of reading it. But not today! These are the golden times, the week before the season, where I as a Responsible Internet Journalist Figure can say anything I want about anything, and you will praise me for bold vision and keen insight. This, dear reader, is prediction season.

But you don’t want predictions. You want bold predictions, so bold that if my predictions were a barbecue sauce, they would melt through the meat, through the bone, through your fingers and the plate and the floor and the earth’s very crust itself with its spicy, spicy hubris. And I am nothing if not your faceless, linguistic slave. So partake – delicately, one or perhaps a fraction at a time – these bold predictions for the 2013 season.

(Other NotGraphs Bold Predictions: Jeremy / Bradley)

1. On Tuesday, May 21, the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Aaron Hill will face reliever Rex Brothers of the Colorado Rockies in the eighth inning. On the fifth pitch of that at bat, Hill will be thrown out on a grounder to third base. You will have forgotten this prediction by then. Read the rest of this entry »

Look at that thing. Look at it. The breadth and fullness of Jason Motte’s beard will never cease to inspire awe in me. I’m not celebrating it based on some hipster ideals based in irony and cheekiness, I generally love Jason Motte’s beard. My voice temporarily drops an octave every time I look at it.  Jason Motte’s beard can cut down trees and jump start 18-wheelers. Ladies who brush up against it, even by happenstance, will menstruate on the spot. Jason Motte’s beard is one of the last remaining members of the Bull Moose Party, and is the sheriff of this God-damned town. It can drink a bear under the table, and once bare-knuckle boxed with Sasquatch. Jason Motte’s beard will take you to the Promised Land. Just grab a whisker and hang on.

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Early reporting on the Geovany Soto and Reed Johnson deals came from eyewitness reports of… hugging. The players hugged each other as they said their goodbyes, and a meme was born:

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