It is a fact that I am too old and stupid to play Little League, but, lo, how I want to play Little League for Coach Ballgame! Why do I want to play Little League for Coach Ballgame? Because he contains multitudes. Because he is beautiful …
Yes, Coach Ballgame, I have seen “Red Shoe Diaries.” How else may I win your favor?
What emotion is the Cards’ skipper feeling right now?
During the first game of the world series, the booth had a chance to talk to Tony La Russa about emoting in the dugout. They pointed out that Ron Washington had a much more expressive style and asked the Cardinals manager about his emotional state.
To paraphrase the stoic response (delivered with a smirk), La Russa said that he was broiling on the inside. And that Washington’s style (“when you do something good, show your emotions“) was fine as long as it came from a genuine place.
Popular psychology has a preference for emoting. The American Pyschological Association states that anger “turned inward may cause hypertension, high blood pressure, or depression.” Recent medical research even suggests that a single tear can help reduce allergies and reduce pain from arthritis — and maybe even help regulate the immune system.
What do our psychological cornerstones have to say on the subject? Would they want La Russa to emote more?
Depending on which fan base you ask, Mr. Nyjer Morgan of Milwaukee’s Brewers is either the People’s Champion or a cad, masher and stinker. Whatever your opinion of Mr. Morgan and his outputs, though, it is always heartening to see an Aqua Velva Man in quenched repose, flush with accomplishment and awash in the warming glow of triumph …
Brewers infantry helmet atop head, which contains multitudes, reasonably priced alcohol-water within reach, and a belt-and-title smile that suggests, at once, self-satisfaction and misrule in the planning stages — When not hard at work, Mr. Nyjer Morgan is a Leisured Gentleman, and with that you must cope.
(Please and thank you: Rhett Bollinger)
THIS IS VERY EXCITING.
In my writeup about BlogsWithBalls 4.0 and the future of blogging, there was some discussion of the role of access in a blogger’s life. It’s complicated.
Access to players can harm a writer’s ability to be coldly analytical. How does one dismiss a hot start as a BABIP-driven streak and then hang out with the player in the dugout later? Or knock a contract as too generous and then congratulate the player on signing it? Or point out that a trade brought too little back and then meet the new players in the clubhouse? Access can create a bit of a pickle, especially for the snarky blogger.
But access, combined with analytics, can also be very exciting.
It has been said that Dick Allen, patron Mahatma of these pages, has a head that contains multitudes. Besides his brain, skull and mind, Dick Allen’s head is rumored to contain a working ordnance factory, a family of ocelots, the spectral presence of Lionel Barrymore, and a dimly lit scriptorium where monastic scribes are busy copying the seminal documents of Western history. As you can imagine, all of this requires of Mr. Allen a rather sprawling melon. Thanks to The Painted Baseball, we may lay reverent eyes upon the real thing. Gentlepersons, your Daguerreotype of the Evening …
Dick Allen’s head — both large and important, neither small nor unimportant.
The conclave of beauty and discernment that is the NotGraphs readership will no doubt recall Brian Cashman’s fondness for the invoking and toking of something called “The Objective Pipe.”
Yes, the Objective Pipe — it is a thing and we are a people of things. And so in celebration of Mr. Cashman’s loosed Id and in commemoration of this thing which has become such a cultural touchstone that it is worthy of measured consideration on the part of all living artists, I present to you a painting of the Objective Pipe.
My preferred medium, as beholders of restaurant-quality artstuffs are no doubt aware, is my kid’s coloring-book app on the iPad. And as is the case with all my work, the tableau that follows is one-half impressionism, one-half abstraction and a bonus one-half of stupefaction.
Now, please and thank you, gaze upon my toil like Cameron Frye agape before a sprawling Seurat. And by all means, click to absorb as the artist intended …
Lo: Brian Cashman’s Objective Pipe being smoked in its natural habitat.
You no doubt noticed that this work of art contained multitudes. So indubitably does it contain multitudes that there is now a NotGraphs category called “Things That Contain Multitudes,” a phylum to which this post now belongs.
And now I shall finsh this carafe of absinthe and then make palliative love to Anaïs Nin.