The moment I climbed off the school bus, I knew. The field of dry dusty green that usually stretched out before us was stained with a rainbow of colors, clumped together messily like blotches of oil paint. There were boys: fidgeting boys, boys chasing each other, playing tag among the admonitions of their mothers, boys punching each other in the shoulders, boys flashing yellow caps or maroon stirrups. The field looked as though it had been occupied by gypsies. It was that lowest point in any season: picture day. Picture day. A day to commemorate the playing of baseball by canceling our baseball practice and forcing us to care if the bills of our mesh-backed caps were curved correctly.

I picked my way through the chaos to my own team, the navy hue of the Normandy Park Royals, and collected my crisp new uniform. A second baseman by trade, I was pleased to discover a nine adorning my jersey, the same as worn by the soon-to-be great Gregg Jefferies. I hoped that some of his magic could be carried through that number to my own performance, if only a little.

After that came the waiting, as the photographers sent secret signals to the coaches around us. To stave off boredom, we tried a game of pickle with two extra mitts as bases; this worked well until an errant throw clocked a grade-schooler in the back of the neck. After that, and a few angry words, we were forced to sit and pick at the grass in silence.

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The name on Young Ryan Theriot’s fake ID reads, “Fraternity Paddle Made Man.”

“Are you the quarterback?” Angel Boudreux once asked Young Ryan Theriot. No, I play baseball, Young Ryan Theriot started to say. But he stopped himself. “Yes, I am the quarterback,” Young Ryan Theriot uttered instead. “I am the quarterback of your panties.” This simple statement of unassailable fact is now carved into courthouse edifices all over Louisiana.

Every time Young Ryan Theriot makes a band geek cry — usually by frog-punching him until he voluntarily climbs into the dumpster outside the cafeteria — his Eddie Bauer rugby grows a new stripe.

If Young Ryan Theriot isn’t under the bra by the fourth track of Better Than Ezra’s “Deluxe” LP, then Young Ryan Theriot knows he needs to try something different.

Young Ryan Theriot is not most alive when playing baseball. No, Young Ryan Theriot is most alive when he’s at the wheel of his Bronco II with a Bud Light freshly shoved into his Señor Frog’s coozie and doing donuts in some poindexter’s front yard.

Young Ryan Theriot derives momentary uplift from chucking his empties onto the stretch of highway that, in the service of avoiding double-secret probation, pledges have been volunteered to clean up for the remainder of history.

Young Ryan Theriot’s buddies know better than to mention that night on South Padre. If they do, he’ll frog the shit out of them.

At the outset of any party, Young Ryan Theriot picks out the exact patch of drywall that he will later punch when Melissa Arsenault’s Catholic boundaries prove stronger than his rituals of dirty suasion.

Every five weeks or so, Young Ryan Theriot goes to the Regis Salon at the mall. Once there, Young Ryan Theriot surveys the stylist’s rack, slackens himself into the chair and says, “Make me look like conformity veneered with trouble.” She does. She does because he is.

(HT: Our boy Kyle)

Hipster on a Light Pole #1

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An empty bar.
Two fans.
Midnight.

VLADIMIR: Nothing you can do about it.
ESTRAGON: No use struggling.
VLADIMIR: It is what it is.
ESTRAGON: No use wriggling.
VLADIMIR: The essential doesn’t change.
ESTRAGON: (Drinking the remnants of his glass.) We should quit.
VLADIMIR: Drinking?
ESTRAGON: Watching games.
VLADIMIR: We can’t.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for Godot.
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“this is awesome”
“that is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life”

Watch to the end:

A guffah and a back slap to Dustin Parkes on Getting Blanked at The Score.

Young Charlie Manuel fills his shotgun shells with dried black-eyed peas. That way it just stings a little.

Young Charlie Manuel once benched all of West Virginia for not hustling.

While Loretta Lynn is rightly known as the “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Young Charlie Manuel is just as rightly known as “Damn Good Buddy to the Shenandoah Valley.”

Thanks to Young Charlie Manuel’s soothing presence and weather-predictive hinge joints, he remains to this day the world’s only certified Tornado Whisperer.

Young Charlie Manuel walked into one of Tokyo’s finest restaurants, and the staff knew immediately to prepare him an off-menu dish of squirrel meat and dumplings. He said upon sopping up the last swaths of gravy with a flaky buttermilk biscuit, “では、神を恐れるチャウチャウ、小さい相棒をありがとうございました。 y’すべての右である、知っているya’llですか?”

When Young Charlie Manuel needs to clear his head, he takes his black, street-illegal 1955 Olds 88 — the one with the aftermarket Piper J-3 Cub engine, which he and Rebel Dabney towed out of the junkyard with a battleship chain — out on the rural route and opens her up just a bit.

Young Charlie Manuel would probably be able to relax a bit more if he didn’t have a vast haul of corn liquor in the trunk and strap-bolted to the undercarriage of that black, street-illegal 1955 Olds 88.

Prolly be okay, though, since Young Charlie Manuel is deputized in every county that the creek runs through.

Did you see that shit? Young Charlie Manuel gunned her at the crest of that hill and easily cleared that doe and that opossum crossing the road. Woo-wee shit.

Young Charlie Manuel has, for several years running, been voted Meanest Sumbitch and Nicest Sumbitch in the Valley. Which one he presents you with pretty much depends on you.

Young Charlie Manuel would punch his way out of this dead-end town, ‘cept Young Charlie Manuel has always had thing for dead-end towns.

The next time someone in authority doesn’t survey a mounting disaster and mutter, “God Almighty Damn. Better call Charlie,” will be the first.

Ideally, he knows that the only way to get aholt of Young Charlie Manuel is by CB radio.

I can’t tell if this is FanGraphs or NotGraphs or even RotoGraphs material, so I’ll just say safe and put it here. My formula for expected RBI, supposedly a pretty simple stat:

xRBI = position-regressed indexed clutch score * league-indexed contact rate * position-indexed isolated power * health-adjusted and lineup-slot-indexed plate appearances * expected team OBP * projected raw plate appearances

I’m pretty sure I got something wrong.

12 Jul 1980: Craig Swan (right) and coach Joe Pignatano tend their vegetable patch in the bullpen at Shea Stadium (Image by © Bettmann/Corbis)

With the Mets bullpen so putrid right now, the jokes are tempting — “I see a lot of hoes out there;” “For once they could just lettuce be surprised by a good performance;” “Can they grow a decent arm without illegal fertilizer?” or “They certainly got enough cabbage to be so terrible;” — but that’s just piling on. Instead, let’s use this as inspiration.

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The Houston Astros are not particularly good at baseball. Their record stands at 36-74; if they won half their games the remainder of the season, they would still lose a hundred games. Whatever it is you call losing in baseball, whether it be tragedy or drudgery, has clung to the walls and seats of Minute Maid Park. It is buried deep beneath that little hill thing they have out there.

As a form of penitence for some unknown or as yet uncommitted crime, I decided to watch the Astros perform their Astroness last night, and was rewarded grandly by the Baseballing Gods. By now, I’m sure, the series of lights and colors that eminated from the top of the 11th inning have taken their permanent place in the back of your retinas; if not, go ahead and watch the highlight four or five more times.

Rather than focus on the play itself, I’d like to look at the carnage from another angle, show some pictures that speak to the heart of Houston baseball. Think of it as a human interest story. Specifically: I want to talk about Pleased Guy.

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A photo of the author, his loins barely covered.

The Beginning Part, In Which the Author Loses His Hat
The first leg of the author’s present Journey Eastward necessitated that that same author, along with his wife, make a trip via bus from Madison, WI, to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. This is no problem in itself: provided one has enough in the way of internet podcasts downloaded to his informationPhone, the ride is mostly-to-entirely bearable.

This particular trip skewed decidedly harrowing, however, owing to how the author, in his haste to account for the most essential elements of the Journey — baggage, tickets, wife — while alighting from the aforementioned omnibus, accidentally left behind his well-worn Milwaukee Brewers cap.

A Note on the Cap in Question
You can ask anyone: the Brewers cap in question was the very picture of Excellence in Men’s Headwear. It first called to the author from a vendor’s shelf at Miller Park, not unlike how the sex-nymph Calypso called to Odysseus from the sex-island of Ogygia — except that, instead of detaining him for several years from wife and child by dint of unabated lovemaking, the author’s hat merely sat atop his head and didn’t bother anyone.

In most ways that matter the hat in question was not unlike American wordsmith Walt Whitman, in that it both (a) represented the very best of what is possible in this life and (b) wasn’t allowed in nice restaurants, owing to some combination of its appearance and smell.

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