From the infinite spring of wonder and delight that is Logan Morrison’s twitter account comes today’s illustrated tweet. I am in debt to Notgraphs commenter Yirmiyahu for bringing this one to our attention.
click to enlarge!
WELCOME TO THE WASH SHOW I AM THE MOTHER F**ING HOST.. #WashTime
— LeVon Washington (@L_wash) December 13, 2011
By day LeVon Washington is a minor league outfielder for the Cleveland Indians, but by night he is the mother f**ing (although we can’t be sure what F-word he meant to bleep out, I’m going to guess it was the normal one, despite not having enough letters) host of the Wash Show, the hottest minor league twitter in the game right now. He’s still looking for his swag on the diamond (.218/.331/.315 split in A ball last year), but believe me, he’s dripping with it all over the internets. It’s a legitimate crime that he has only 782 followers, so I’m passing the #FF buck to you, dear friends.
Bill Simmons recently appointed me the ‘czar’ of MiLB twitters (much to Carson’s chagrin), so I have the power to name LeVon Washington top dog in the inaugural NotGraphs Twitter Prospect List, and also to issue this official word of warning @TheRealTPlush: Your crown as craziest baseball twitterer is in jeopardy. Consider yourself on mother-f**ing notice. Batton down the hatches while you still can, because it’s bout to be #WashTime #WashTime #WashTime #WashTime #WashTime #WashTime #WashTime #WashTime #WashTime #WashTime #WashTime #WashTime
Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein writes — or wrote, ca. 1921 — in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (proposition 6.22) that “the logic of the world which the propositions of logic show in tautologies, mathematics shows in equations.”
In response to — and, perhaps, in spirited negation of — Wittgenstein’s declaration, American baseballing prospect Casey Kelly submits this via his Twitter computer:
To which sentiment Kelly adds in his next Tweet: “Vienna Circle? More like Vienna Apeirogon if you ask me!”
Thank you to Ben Carsley, whose chain the hottest girls in the game are undoubtedly wearing.
UPDATE: It appears as though Mr. Cole has been the victim of internetting roguery! Per Tim Williams of Pirate Prospects, Cole has exactly zero Twitter accounts. Sadly, it seems as though our attempt to take pleasure in the frailty of another has been thwarted.
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If you’re not familiar with it, Twitter is an online social networking website that allows users to share status updates — known as “tweets” — with friends and other “followers.”
Tweets can be about anything: about a restaurant you’re at, a sitcom you’re watching, or, for example, how you might quit baseball to dedicate yourself more wholly to America’s favorite psychotropic:
It should be noted immediately that the above could very well be the result of (first-overall draft pick) Gerrit Cole’s Twitter account having been hacked. If that’s the case, a word of advice to Mr. Cole: passwords with letters, numbers, symbols are most secure.
Note: it should also-also be noted that this, in fact, might be Gerrit Cole’s real Twitter account.
H/T: Reader Mike, code name “Mike”
While the majority of baseballers use their respective offseasons to the end of playing golf and/or impregnating females, this tweet (courtesy MLB Trade Rumors) reveals that Texas Ranger second baseman Ian Kinsler dedicates at least some of his leisure time to decidedly more scholarly pursuits — namely, lively discourses with Ranger GM Jon Daniels et al. on the subject of FDR’s revolutionary economic programs of the early 1930s.
While we’re unable to confirm the information at this time, the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has reason to believe that Kinsler’s next conversation with the Rangers will concern, specifically, the Wagner Act of 1935.
With the likelihood increasing that Jimmy Rollins will return to the Phillies and Rafael Furcal won’t be signing with the Brewers, beat writer Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel believes it’s likely that Yuniesky Betancourt will once again be the Brewers starting shortstop in 2012.
Let’s gauge the public reaction on that, via this sharply embedded YouTube video…
If you’ve been following baseball today, you’ve been following the buccaneering romps of the Miami Marlins. In recent days, of course, they’ve inked Jose Reyes and Heath Bell, and today they reportedly made a whopping offer to Albert Pujols. As you can imagine, everyone who’s anyone is talking about the bundled derivative that is the Miami Marlins. One Hanley Ramirez, however, seems not to appreciate that he is no longer What We Talk About When We Talk About the Marlins. In fact, he’ll have none of it:
So if you see Hanley Ramirez within the next news cycle or three, please be a dear and let him know you were just talking about him.
Questions about Albert Pujols’s age should hardly be off-limits. With the baseball’s most feared hitter primed to receive perhaps the largest free agent contract in the game’s history, it would behoove any team that is bidding for his services to consider his age. Questions like “How smart would it be to give this player a contract that could pay him $25+ million into his forties?” should weigh heavily on any competent GM’s mind.
A related concern, which has haunted Pujols for much of his career, is that he may be a few years older than he says he is. After all, it is not without precedent for young Latin American players to fudge their DOBs by a few years in order to make themselves more appealing on the US market. Just this September, it was revealed that Marlins reliever Juan Carlos Oviedo (Leo Nunez) had assumed a false identity and is a year older than he had previously claimed. As Edward Mujica explained, just a year can make a world of difference in how much a Latin American player is paid, creating an incentive to fudge:
“At 17 years old, you maybe lose $100,000 or $150,000 when you sign [compared to a 16-year-old with the same skills]. And if you’re like 18, you might sign for $5,000 and maybe they give you an opportunity.”
But as Dave Cameron writes over at Fangraphs, the case for believing that Pujols fudged his age has numerous holes.
Baseball scribe Jon Heyman is having none of it, however. You can count Heyman among the Pujols Birthers:
(It is not unfair to wonder whether Heyman would be calling for Pujols to produce his birth certificate if Pujols was a client of Scott Boras.)
Below I present Jon Heyman’s twitter timeline from the future.
Today in Tweets Illustrated Literally, Rich Thompson of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim is outraged and self-censoring.
click to enlarge
Heh.
The character Doc Wilson proclaims in David Mamet’s 2000 comedy State and Main that “You should never trust anybody who wears a bow tie,” and continues: “Cravat’s supposed to point down to accentuate the genitals. Why’d you wanna trust somebody whose tie points out to accentuate his ears?”
That, along with the above tweet, are the two most notable items in my file folder marked “Rosenthal, Ken.”
