According to Bob Lemon, “Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up.”

In these dog days of the MLB season, I imagine it might be difficult for players — whether they are under the stress of a pennant race, or whether their team has already conceded to a losing season — to find the inner child and have fun both with baseball and in their lives outside of baseball.

A few players, namely those players featured in the images below, are trying to rekindle their love of the game and resurrect their wonder at being alive by acting like kids again. Hooray!!!

Num-num, I love all the flavors.

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Oh hi. I didn’t see you there. I’m Ruben Amaro, Jr. and I was just leaning on this railing, thinking about a couple of things that I really enjoy: the color green, and trading major league outfielders.

Hehehehe. Hi.

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I wanted to follow up on Kevin Youkilis’s return to Boston, so I was looking at pictures from the Red Sox-White Sox series. Yesterday, the [White] Sox got pummeled by the [Red] Sox, 10-1. I happened upon this picture, which, at first glance was exactly the sort of thing I had hoped to find.

There Youk sits, fully aware of the camera, disgusted with the eminent outcome of the game, with the outcome of the series so far (Chicago outscored 20-8, and down two games to one), perhaps longing for the comforts of an eggy frappe, perhaps bubbling with a hatred that even he doesn’t understand, perhaps ready to kill. His neck itches; his groin is a little sweaty.

But Youk is just one figure in this picture, which might very well represent the full gamut of human emotion and experience.

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[All quotes are approximate, the recorder was not running for this one.]

Me: Hey Miguel what are you reading.

[Hands me Lost Angel in Spanish]

Me: I have no Spanish — something about an Angel?

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So this is how it ends. Will McDonald (now ExRoyalsReview on Twitter), longtime mainstay of Royals Review, has decided to call it a day after eight years of blogging about the Royals. During that time, Royals Review grew from just some guy’s blog to a team site on the fledgling SB Nation network to perhaps the most popular Royals blog around.

With the management formerly of Royals Authority taking the helm, things should be in good hands. Still, it is hard for many of us to imagine following the Royals without the incentive of knowing the referents for Will’s next brilliantly-written combination of anger and comedy. How will we get through the season without more Royals Bibliomancy or Mitch Maier’s Letters Home From Baseball Camp, or expressions of irritation over Royals prospect Wil Myers spelling his first name incorrectly.

Will has been a huge inspiration. Don’t hold it against him, but, while I never “worked” at Royals Review, I probably would not be blogging today if it were not for reading Will’s stuff. Will’s posts garnered attention far beyond Royals fandom — I think the first “big break” his blog received was when Keith Law linked to it in one of his ESPN chats. I cannot summarize Will’s work, but that is the nature of all good art. So as a tribute to Will (or “Freneau,” a moniker he adopted in recent times in tribute to a poet from the era of the Revolutionary War) and as a public service, I will briefly go through just a few of McDonald’s best moments of the last few years.

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Carl Sagan was awesome. He “simultaneously emphasiz[ed] the value and worthiness of the human race, and the relative insignificance of the Earth in comparison to the universe.” This complexity aligns him with the aesthetics of NotGraphs, where we both celebrate the wondrous oddities of a human-made game (see any number of Carson Cistulli’s posts), and yet are all too aware of our insignificance as individuals and as a race of beings (see any number of Dayn Perry’s posts).

Baseballs and planets: of the same stuff.
All-Stars literary made of star stuff.

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One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing the backstops, pitchers breathing hard into curled hands, huddling in their windbreakers, catchers lumbering like great black beetles in their shells, crouching in the tall weeds. Baseball was trapped between the pages of Sports Illustrated, held by trembling fingers near lamplight, images of Mantle and Snider striding, smiling, before black and white fields, frozen.

And then a long wave of warmth crossed the country. A flooding sea of hot air, mixed with cut grass and oiled leather, mingled with loam and chalk dust. The snow dissolved to reveal diamonds, glaciation carving patches of clay out of grass. Aluminum birdcalls echoed above the fields.

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Some things contain multitudes. So does this:

A moment of bliss.

Close your eyes.

Imagine you are Dustin Ackley.
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I like writing about baseball because I like thinking about baseball. I like thinking about baseball because it’s such a complicated game. Often, the thoughts I have are critical, but underneath it all I have a great respect for those that play the game. I was a terrible baseball player, and I’m surprised John Flaherty, my coach, could even look me in the eye and keep a straight face when we talked about my development as a fourth outfielder and sixth infielder for the JV squad. These guys can do things with balls I can’t even imagine.

But I can think a little bit. So don’t ask me not to think.

As the handsome onlooker is no doubt aware, Andy Pettitte, weary of his mewling family, has decided to return to baseball and cash. But please know that he doesn’t feel good about it …

It is not often that an otherwise milquetoast base ball-ist such as Pettitte unleashes a quote that contains multitudes, but, lo, this one contains multitudes …