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Sharing space with the lawyers, doctors, and management consultants with quirky artisanal side businesses in this weekend’s New York Times weddings section was Shelby Miller, who married his biggest cheerleader. An actual former cheerleader for the Springfield Cardinals. I skim the weddings section each weekend (seriously) and am always excited when I can send my wife the link to a baseball-related article that she might actually read.

Highlight:

When she wants company for a pedicure or a tanning session, he joins her. “When Amy wants me to be a girlie guy,” he said, “I’m willing to do that for her. It’s fun.”

Surely no one in the locker room will be making fun of him for this. Surely.

Happy Thanksgiving.

2002: Theo Epstein works for the San Diego Padres; Kottaras is selected in the 2002 draft by the Padres.

2006: Theo Epstein, GM of the Red Sox, trades for George Kottaras.

2013: Theo Epstein, President of the Cubs, trades for George Kottaras.

Bad photoshop below.

Yesterday, font of journalistic integrity and “horrifying diarrhea sludge” Deadspin announced they had purchased a Hall of Fame vote from a BBWAA member/bribed that member to vote the way the site’s readers would like him or her to.

“Fun,” a lot of people seemed to think. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

You mean aside from the creeping stench of outright corruption in the voting process and of one of the few places left that was doing quality investigative sports journalism? Ok, I suppose that’s not enough for some people.

Well, I imagine nobody thought this through very hard. There are ramifications and repercussions coming, people, possibly including but not limited to:

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Friends, I have seen the future, and the future is now. It comes with hyperlinks, tab-delimited tables, and bulleted lists. It comes in typefaces with dignified names, like Times New Roman and Courier New. It comes fast and it changes on a dime, provided you click reload often. It’s called the World Wide Web, and it will forever explode your notions of possibility.

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Last Thursday I presented to you readers some useless snack-like facts to get us from one thing happening in the offseason to the next thing happening. I’m sure it left you momentarily satisfied, and then, about an hour later when your blood sugar dropped, egregiously unsatisfied and cranky. Though my methodology in determining most of the facts I listed could be described as “dubious” and “mainly derived from answers people provided on WikiAnswers,” some of the facts were even less rigorously determined. They were determined by no method, really, except for me guessing and laughing. One such item was particularly amusing to me and is reproduced below:

Possible Defensive Alignment with Nobody On if Baseball Was Played with a Jellybean and Not a Baseball

What this post is, is more of these types of silly guesses on how one might align themselves defensively on a field if one were playing baseball differently or under unusual circumstances. All of the following assume no one is on base.

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Courtesy of Baseball Think Factory, I have discovered MLB.com’s online auction site. You or I have junk, we throw it away. A major league baseball team has junk, they try to sell it to the highest bidder. These are prime items here.

A game-used locker nameplate from the ALDS, for A’s third-base coach Mike Gallego.

A game-used baseball from a Henry Urrutia single.

Cubs coach Jamie Quirk’s team-issued pants.

Sign used during AL Wild Card game, Indians vs. Rays, labeling the “Still Photography Workroom.”

Rockies game-used lineup card from a random game in May 2009 (can be yours for just $1.00!).

And, finally, just for Thanksgiving, Brewers pitcher Jim Henderson’s turkey-shaped hand tracing.

Happy bidding!

Ken Griffey Junior Executive is nothing like a junior executive. Rather, at age 20, he is the Chief Executive of World Baseball Talent. He reports directly to Willie Mays himself.

Ken Griffey Junior Executive hasn’t any time to write or type, but whatever he projects into this state-of-the-art car-phone receiver — right down to that infectious smile — is transcribed by adoring millions. Right now he is finalizing the acquisition of a majority stake in the newly public stock of fashion-sweater moguls Dolce & Cosbyana. Ken Griffey Junior Executive will see to it that his fashion-sweaters are made of 100% ebullience.

Ken Griffey Junior Executive is driving a lightly used 1988 BMW M5 not out of financial necessity (pffft!) or any sense of frugality, but rather because it is far classier than the new 1990 version of the same model. Also, his million-dollar ass cannot be put in jeopardy by the arduous task of breaking in that stiff Bimmer leather. Next month, Ken Griffey Junior Executive will buy a new lightly used 1988 BMW M5.

Ken Griffey Junior Executive was just checking in on his Ken Griffey Junior Smiles Outlet, where his used smiles are sold at wholesale prices with a portion of the profits benefitting children’s charities. Now, he is off to consult with the printer about some new business cards. Bone coloring with Silian Rail font? Eggshell with Romalian type? Ken Griffey Junior Executive is thinking of something more subtle: an off-white stock of tasteful weight, watermarked with a nautical compass…

Sorry for chiming in again so quickly after my last post. Usually I need at least a couple of weeks to recuperate after writing a few hundred words for Internet consumption, but this Jhonny Peralta signing really got to me. I have experience in the area of drug suspensions and attempting to find a new job afterwards. A few years ago I found myself terribly addicted to a complex cocktail of Ambien, Lexapro, and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream every night. My supervisor down at the content mill where I worked noticed that I was, well, a little zonked out most days, and getting a little too big to fit in my cubicle. He obviously couldn’t afford to move the wall out by a few inches — “you get two square feet, Joe, that’s just how it is in the real man’s workin’ world,” he would say, while counting his Bitcoins — so he put me on unpaid leave and told me to clean myself up. I stopped the Ambien and Lexapro cold turkey, switched from Ben & Jerry’s to some diet substitute, and spent the next two weeks awake, manic, and unable to leave the bathroom, because whatever was in that diet ice cream just made me go and go and go without end.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, so I came back to the office, and the content mill had gone out of business, replaced by a team of Tweeting robots trolling for page clicks, and my job was no more. And then — and here’s where the similarities to my situation and Peralta’s really become obvious — a man in a Cardinals hat said he wanted to take me as a prisoner for the next 4 years, and pay me in Cheerios.

Sudden withdrawal from Ambien may cause hallucinations. I think.

I did take steroids once. Cleared up a rash I got, from this one time I sort of volunteered at a homeless shelter. I didn’t realize it was a homeless shelter. And the volunteer coordinator didn’t realize I was homeless. The steroids gave me another rash, somewhere else, of course. I take steroids, I get a rash. Jhonny Peralta takes steroids, he gets $52 million dollars. They say money doesn’t buy happiness, but no one’s ever said they prefer a rash. So I think he wins.

I should check out that Cardinals fan’s Cheerios prison. It doesn’t sound that bad, sort of.

In an effort to get this show off the air faster, ABC pulled a fast one on us, dear readers, and showed an episode last week, even though it had originally said the show was on hiatus until this Wednesday. Their skullduggery is your gain this week, though, reader, as you get a super-sized double review and recap of the last two episodes. So far, this series has gone to great lengths to demonstrate the awfulness of all of its characters, and to portray humanity as a greedy, oblivious, selfish, and devoid of empathy. Let’s see if they can do better going forward. Maybe the extra time off has caused them to reevaluate the general tone of this unfunny dreck. I mean, if it can’t be entertaining, maybe it can be pleasantly benign.

Nope, it turns out it can’t.

Episode Seven opens with the team “shagging fly balls” in practice. While your Little League team probably put players into positions and spread them out, Coach Terry and The Cannon instead let their players huddle in a mass of squirming, shoving 10 year olds who jockey for position, all shouting “I got it” over each other until all of them dive out of the way at the last second, and the ball falls to the ground. Let it not be forgotten that Terry and The Cannon are, in addition to being rotten people, terrible coaches.

While “Regional Safety Officer” Sheldon Bickle (a paycheck-cashing John Michael Higgins) looks on, one fly ball hits Dong square on the head when he forgets to put up his glove to catch it. This is accompanied by actual Looney Tunes sound effects. Horrified at the lack of medical attention Dong receives, Bickle orders both The Cannon and Dick, the misogynist league president, to attend “safety school” (safety schools being a concept this show’s creators are probably very familiar with).

Meanwhile, Coach Terry stays late after practice with Dudley (the fat kid) because his parents forget to pick him up for what sounds like the umpteenth time. They’re divorced, you see, and far more interested in hating each other than paying attention to their lonely son. They even refuse to attend his games, because, as his father says “It’s not my custody day. I got plans. And besides, do I want to sit in the stands with my ex-wife yelling at me?”

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