Last night, colleague Jackie Moore brought it to the author’s attention that the home-plate umpire of the Angels-Mariners game was large — was, in fact, larger than any of the players for whom he was calling balls and strikes.

A brief inspection of The Facts reveals that said umpire — in this case, Minot-native Gary Cederstrom — isn’t just large relative to American athletes but, also, to the world’s tallest manmade structures.

Consider, this unimpeachable and incapable-of-being-not-peached chart (click to embiggen):

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.

While Max Scherzer’s shoulder is tired, his capacity for experiencing awe is constantly renewed.

Detroit Tigers right-hander and perpetual case study in human potential Max Scherzer was removed after two innings from his start on Tuesday due to “shoulder fatigue.” While an MRI revealed no structural damage, Scherzer and the organization will proceed with caution.

To address concerns about his health, the Tigers media relations staff has distributed the following statement, composed (it seems) entirely by Scherzer himself.

It’s almost impossible, in light of my recent medical concern, not to be reminded of that great record-keeper of the ephemeral, Tang Dynasty poet Tu Fu — his entire oeuvre, really (or, as much of it as is available to a commoner like me, whose Chinese has suffered from disuse in recent years), but, in particular, the second section of his poem “Meandering River”, which David Young translates as follows in his excellent collection from Oberlin’s Field Translation Series:

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“Take your glasses off to truly see,” Carl Jung never said or wrote or even thought.

The present author has made no attempt to hide his enthusiasm regarding Mets right-hander Matt Harvey’s excellent debut this past Thursday (box).

A brief inspection of the internet reveals the present author isn’t the only one to have noted the profundity of Harvey’s start, though. What follows, for example, is a first-hand account of influential Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s own personal experience of Harvey’s 11-strikeout performance.

It was as if I were in an ecstasy. I felt as though I were floating in space, as though I were safe in the womb of the universe — in a tremendous void, but filled with the highest possible feeling of happiness. “This is eternal bliss,” I thought. “This cannot be described; it is far too wonderful!”

Ahem (click to embiggen):

Via thief of hearts Yirmiyahu comes urgent breaking news regarding the stat line of Red Sox 18th-round draft choice Shaq Green-Thompson. Mr. Green-Thompson is currently plying his trade in the rookie-level Gulf Coast League, and his bestowals to date defy belief, explanation and one’s capability to impart basic facts:

Woo, shit. Look at that.

We are doughy. Often — disconcertingly often — our flatulence is so severe that we require a nap in order to prepare ourselves for our regular nap. We have lost weight just twice in our lives: once when we got food poisoning after eating Gaines Burgers at the movies and once when we slept for 96 straight hours after walking up the street to Baskin-Robbins and back. We are barely ambulatory. We manage to combine scarcely prehensile hot-dog fingers with wrists as reedy as reeds. We are not athletes, unless drawing 30 wheezy, loaded-chili-cheese-fries breaths per minute while taking up the entire sofa counts as a jockish endeavor.

So this brings us to a necessary and urgent query: Could we, in such foul-smelling disrepair, replicate Mr. Green-Thompson’s performance to date? That is, could dumb, ugly we strike out 25 times in 26 at-bats, ground out weakly once and back into five walks? Or would we fare even worse?

Call-to-action Internet poll!

Thank you for exercising the franchise. Also, thank you for yelling for your wife to come downstairs and hand you the remote.

BIRMINGHAM — The Toronto Blue Jays have got their man, and, once again, nobody saw it coming. Renowned orthopedic surgeon Dr. James Andrews — Mr. Tommy John Surgery himself — signed a multi-year contract with the club late Sunday night, and will report to the Blue Jays minor league complex in Dunedin, Florida on Tuesday. As per club policy, financial details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but sources indicate it’s a five-year agreement in the neighborhood of $14 million, with full no-trade protection through 2014.

“We’re very excited to add Dr. Andrews to our core moving forward,” said Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos. “More importantly, much like Jose Bautista, we believe in Dr. Andrews as a person more than anything else. We wouldn’t make this type of commitment to him if we didn’t believe in the type of person he is, and in what he brings to our organization. We’ve done our due diligence, and we felt it was the right time to take our relationship with Dr. Andrews to the next level.”

Dr. Andrews’ first order of business: A meeting with left-handed reliever Luis Perez, the latest Blue Jays pitcher to be lost to elbow issues. Perez, a stalwart of Toronto’s disappointing bullpen, has been placed on the 15-day disabled list with left elbow tightness.

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As the reader will likely know by now, Tampa Bay right-hander Joel Peralta was ejected from Tuesday night’s game against the Washington Nationals before even throwing a single pitch. Indeed, Nationals manager Davey Johnson — who was a member of the front office in Washington when Peralta played there in 2010 — asked home plate umpire Tim Tschida to inspect Peralta’s glove as the latter warmed up. Following a brief delay, both Peralta and his glove were removed from the game, due to a “foreign substance on or in” the latter — pine tar being the substance in question.

To say that pine tar and its application to a baseball are “illegal” — this is fine and good. To suggest that pine tar constitutes a foreign substance, however, is a bit misleading: in fact, a popular brand of pine tar is sold by Mueller Sports Medicine, Inc., located in beautiful Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin — a town (Prairie de Sac, that is) famously known its potent domesticity.

Below is a list of five substances that are decidedly more foreign than pine tar. While we can only speculate upon what sort of competitive advantage any of them provide to the American baseballist, one is forced to assume that their use is rampant in Major League Baseball.

Betel Nut (Link)

What It Is: Generally, some combination of the areca nut, betel leaves, and (powdered) lime designed to be chewed or gnawed upon. Also called paan, it seems. Red in color. Habit-forming.
Where Found: India. Kinda alot.

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You may have heard that Aroldis Chapman was arrested for speeding yesterday.

In other breaking news:
– Francisco Liriano arrested for jaywalking.
– Cole Hamels arrested for child abuse.
– Jaime Moyer arrested for loitering.
– Brett Lawrie arrested for disorderly conduct.
– Emilio Bonifacio arrested for not coming to a complete stop.
– Michael Bourn arrested for hit and run.
– Carlos Lee arrested for larceny.
– Giancarlo Stanton arrested for breaking and entering.
– Josh Hamilton arrested for illegally discharging a weapon.
– Albert Pujols arrested for illegally carrying a concealed weapon.
– Jim Johnson arrested for vigilantism.
– Chuck Knoblauch arrested for sexual harassment.
– Mariano Rivera’s ACL arrested for obstruction of justice.