Archive for Memorabilia

Look at David Nied! Just look at him!

David Nied is playing a boy’s game in a god’s country! Is that a cowhide baseball or a frosty snowball, both totems to a lad’s insouciance! The promises of youth! The crisp air in one’s lungs! The ball taking determined flight from the determined hands of a Young Man of America! Who cares if his paymasters will force him to pitch in Mile High Stadium! David Nied, Young Man of America, can do this!

David Nied failed.

This is Vic Tayback’s grave:

(Thanks, I guess: Old Time Family Baseball)

Casey McGehee or Sterling Honorheart?

Both are there for those with nowhere left to turn. Both stand when a lady enters the room. Both would prefer not to fight but will if pressed. Both eat their vegetables and have firm handshakes. Both begin each morning with deep knee bends and prayer. Both shall take back the streets.

I must ask again: Casey McGehee or Sterling Honorheart?

(Bang and a boom: Lifetime Topps)

Via The Big Event comes unsurprising word that the Oakland A’s 2012 calendar is chock full of infelicities and grim reminders. The belowly embedded image, much like my revenge-fists, shall do the talking:

Mr. Peter Hartlaub goes on to tell us that within the A’s 2012 calendar we find four months devoted to players traded, one to a player injured, one to a manager fired, and one to the dark heart and ways of Cliff Pennington.

Depressing stuff for any A’s loyalist, no? So in order to cheer them up, here’s Davey Lopes with enough devil-may-care jubilance to go around:

It was with a measure of confidence that today, in the break room, you attested: “That Rudy Pemberton. He was just a ballplayer.”

About this — in addition to your callow belief in a better tomorrow — you were horribly wrong …

Sure, the image above shows Rudy Pemberton in professional action, but what of the disembodied spectral presence, the one whose soft, Olan Mills edges suggest a man of a poet’s dimension and discontent? He hovers about our assumptions like a reproving moon.

You owe Rudy Pemberton an apology.

(Image taken from a GeoCities page called Boston.com)

Chestnuts Cistulli has already concocted a post that, leveraging the football-card models of the past, instructs the Baseball Card-Industrial Complex on ways to improve the product and or merchandise and or deliverable. Naturally, the Internetting Gentleman is left wondering what the Garbage Pail Kids line of enthusiasms can teach Topps and their business combatants. Here is your answer:

Yea, verily: Capital. Punishment. Humor. Now.

Let us have executions. Let us have ducking stools. Let us have trials by ordeal to see whether Aaron Miles is a warlock. Let us snuff out life in the service of human amusements.

Recently, abiding reader jcxy floated a Sketchy Internet Rumor of a Rich Garces bobble-belly. Needless to say, upon hearing said rumor the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team sprung to handsome action. After 12 or so tense seconds of Computer Googling, “Sketchy Internet Rumor” became “Internet True Fact.” Bear fat witness:

This has been two things: the last time I doubt anything on the Internet and your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

Your Daguerreotype of the Evening is perhaps fraudulent. But this space is not a bastion of quality assurance, so we don’t much give a shit about that. All we know is that artistic renderings of Morty Klaus Robbman’s uniform have been leaked, and we are absolutely a vessel for leakages …

Geography teachers the world over refer to Florida as “America’s tired-yet-sexless pecker.” The above image has nothing to do with that fact.

As we learned previously in these yellowed and courtly pages, board-certified Aqua Velva Man Vic Tayback has a proud history of Giving the Business to ballplayers. So it should come as no surprise that Mr. Tayback once put ink-dispensing stylus to cowhide orb. Clicky!

Sure, Mr. Ed — with his stupid, thumbless hooves — and Kate Hepburn — with what was surely a fetching pantsuit — are also signatories, but there’s everyone and thing else and then there’s Vic Tayback.

This is his grave:

If hot success eludes you, then baseball sort-of great Chuck Knoblauch is here to help. How exactly? This is how, exactly:

I have no idea whether the purchase of the above bit of Textile-Based Merchandise entitles the doer of business to a Twitter follow from Mr. Knoblauch, but that’s hardly the point. The point, friends and lovers, is that everyone you meet will be under the impression that baseball sort-of great Chuck Knoblauch follows you on his Twitter computer. As Martin Heidegger once queried, “Who gives a damn shit if what you purport to be true is actually true, baby!” The question is rhetorical, which is why there’s no question mark.

As we’ve told you before, NotGraphs is nothing if not an appointment with the secrets of triumph — lion-hearted triumph at the office, in the gym and in the bedroom. I scarcely need say this, but the same goes for a t-shirt that claims Chuck Knoblauch follows you on Twitter.

Halloween is less than three weeks away, NotGraphers. Have you chosen a costume yet? If not, you are in luck. We’re here to advise you.

Vampires, witches, zombies, ghosts, mummies, and sexy nurses are all so passé, you see. It’s time to add some pizazz to your All Hallows’ Eve getup by going as your favorite MLB personality.

I have saved you the trouble of going out of your way (to that seedy seasonal Halloween store in the bombed out shopping center in the building where the Blockbuster Video used to be with that cashier with his forehead pierced) by listing the necessary components for each respective costume along with links to online stores from which they can be purchased. Mindful of our tough economic times, these costumes are carefully constructed to cost you no more than $100 (before shipping).

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