“Prepare your body for the Asunder Dome.”
— Secret Umpire’s Guild in a letter addressed to Lawrie

Several days ago, NotGraphs informer syh sent us the preceding imagine. At the time, we found it curious but decided to sit on the unusual footage until we could better understand the matter. On Sunday night, we received the following letter, leaked to the NotGraphs Bilibino headquarters in the Bilibinsky District of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, Russia:
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LaHair with his giant Winner’s Cup, courtesy NotGraphs.

The attentive reader will know that my colleague and champion of the vulgar Dayn Perry has made a practice in these pages — via his Nickname Seeks Player series — has made a practice of (in his words) “assign[ing] cool nicknames to players rather than perpetuate the tired, lamewad practice of assigning cool players nicknames.”

While Perry’s point regarding the assignment of nicknames is unassailable, it’s also the case that sometimes nicknames are not assigned at all, but are instead revealed — as if out of the ether.

Such was the case, this afternoon, when out of my friend Dan Woytek’s mind (itself not unlike the ether) and onto his computer email screen came a suitable nickname for major-league baseball’s current leader in BABIP and owner, now, of a career BABIP somewhere north of .385, Bryan LaHair.

This is the nickname in question: In Play, No Outs.

This is your reaction to it: surprise and/or amazement, probably.

This is what you might proceed to do now: tell at least one person.

This is what you’ll probably also do: the other things you had planned.

Follow Dan Woytek on Twitter at @dwoytek, in case he says one more amusing thing before he dies or you die.

So today I realized/learned that Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland is 67 years old. Seriously? Just 67? Look at this guy:

Stunned by my discovery, I did what any sane person would do: I expressed my shock and dismay to the approximately two dozen sad, lonely souls and spambots who follow me on Twitter.

Wait, Jim Leyland is only 67 years old?

— Matt Klaassen (@devil_fingers) May 8, 2012

America’s response tells us something about something, I tell you what.

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Baltimore’s Chris Davis made his major-league pitching debut against Boston on Sunday, earning the win with two innings of scoreless work while striking out two, walking one, and allowing two hits (box).

For the benefit of both (a) our readers and (b) baseball’s various advance scouting departments, we present this entirely complete and infallible scouting report on Chris Davis, right-handed pitcher.

Role: Late, Late Inning Reliever
When you talk about Chris Davis, you’re not talking about a starting pitcher or middle reliever or set-up guy or closer; you’re talking about a guy who’s gonna get the job done in, like, the 16th and 17th inning. He has a career average leverage index of 2.35 — considerably better than second-place Brian Wilson’s career 2.07 mark. Words like “gamer” and “clutch” are insufficient: you need to translate them into German and then back into English to fully characterize Davis’s mound temperament.

Stuff: Unclassifiable
What does Davis throw, exactly? Don’t ask PITCHf/x:

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Last night, Ryan Braun hit three home runs at Petco Park, the second (and probably most impressive) of which reached the top floor of the Western Metal Supply Co. building in left field (video).

The sequence led Bob Uecker, the famous and wise radio voice of the Milwaukee Brewers, to provide — for the benefit of both the home audience and broadcast partner Joe Block — a totally true and in-no-way-fictional history of the Western Metal Supply Co. itself.

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1. Harper wears #34 in tribute to Rockies pitching coach Bob Apodaca.

2. Harper’s older brother, Bryan, is half-mermaid.

3. Harper has been featured on the covers of Sports Illustrated, Baseball Digest, The New Yorker, and Every Day With Rachael Ray.

4. In 2008, Harper was Batting Average Leader for the State of Israel.

5. Although Harper played catcher in high school, the Nationals drafted him as a pitching coach.

6. Harper is in the middle of a 5-year contract worth more than the gross national product of over 80 countries around the world.

A Catskills resort where comedy team Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo probably killed.

What a lot of people — including probably even their own families — don’t know about Boston Red Sox television broadcasters Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy is that they are not actually trained broadcasters but rather a famous Borscht Belt comedy team from the 1930s.

While the pair has ably concealed their true and respective identities for years, they accidentally slipped into an old bit last night (called “Mittens and Gloves”) that used to get huge laughs at the Concord Hotel, I’m telling you.

Said bit is transcribed below (and available in Technicolor video).

DON: [Holding up gloved hands] How ’bout the mittens?

JERRY: Nice. [Beat] They’re gloves.

DON: They’re mittens!

JERRY: They’re gloves!

DON: They’re mittens!

JERRY: Mittens? Mittens don’t have fingers. [Pauses, looks incredulous] Mittens do not have fingers.

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Detail from Francesco Traini’s Triumph of Death, an inspiration for Totentanz.

While there are surely a number of factors to consider when assessing the degree to which a musical work might serve as an effective closer entrance song, the most important of these (i.e. these factors) is surely the degree to which the music in question gives an opposing team’s batters the sense that some manner of gross physical discomfort is about to be visited upon their respective persons.

It has recently come to the attention of this author that the opening minute-plus of composer Franz Liszt’s Totentanz — or, in English, Dance of the Dead — ably fulfills this most important of criteria.*

Note: the author is aware that Liszt’s piece is not technically a “song.” I’m merely using the term colloquially.

Liszt, who himself was known to visit hospitals and asylums as a recreational activity, never formally described the piece as “the soundtrack to an impromptu and forcible colorectal exam performed by the Devil himself” — although one assumes, while listening to the work, that this was his intention.

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#Rays Maddon on “minimalist” road trip to Texas: 1 pair jeans, 3 shirts, some socks, “those who wear underwear bring underwear”

— Marc Topkin (@TBTimes_Rays) April 25, 2012

Neither. Because, let’s face it, you always wondered.

We know too much, my friends. We know too much.

H/T: @AnswerDave.

ACT I

(The curtain rises to reveal TOM MILONE, left-handed pitcher for the Oakland A’s.)

TOM MILONE: My name is Tom Milone, of the Oakland baseball club. My ambition is to become a character in a great play!

ACT II

(The office of a GREAT PLAYWRIGHT. TOM MILONE enters.)

TOM MILONE: Sir, my name is Tom Milone, of the Oakland baseball club. My ambition is to become a character in a great play!

GREAT PLAYWRIGHT: A great play? I’m not aware that such a thing exists anymore.

TOM MILONE: But I thought you were a great playwright?

GREAT PLAYWRIGHT: I’m a fictional character!

ACT III

(CARSON CISTULLI’s dream from last night. TOM MILONE appears suddenly.)

TOM MILONE: Carson Cistulli? Hello. I’m Tom Milone, of the Oakland baseball club.

CARSON CISTULLI: Of course.

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