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First came the vote for the American League Rookie of the year.

Fine. Maybe they just didn’t feel comfortable voting on a guy they didn’t see before voting. It’s pretty hard to call up a stat sheet, maybe call a friend covering the Rays, and hey Cody Allen did have a great season. Position players are over-rated.

Then came the vote for American League Manager of the year.

Well, now that’s a little peculiar. Could it be?

I can be small. Happy that John Farrell didn't win manager of the year. Still think he pulled a fast one on some really great people.

— steve simmons (@simmonssteve) November 13, 2013

Hey now.

Reminds me of the time I offered to get the table beers while losing at poker. Winner got my twenty bucks and a warm skunked Heineken I found downstairs. Or the time I convinced the scorer — she liked me — to change Carson Cistulli’s hit to an error because Cistulli played more often than I did on our JV squad. Or the time I bid all of my free agent budget on Travis d’Arnaud just because I knew Mike Podhorzer needed a catcher in our TOUT league. (He won anyway.) Or the time I traded Adam Wainwright because he struck out Carlos Beltran like that. Or the time I kicked my nineteen-month old son’s ball over the fence because he scored a goal on me.

Sour grapes taste good.

It’s high time someone spoke up about a potentially dangerous trend in Major League Baseball. The league has been pushing its luck for years in assembling awards candidates at season’s end. Driven (I can only assume) by some kind of twisted sensationalism, it has been arranging players not only in closer and closer proximity for photoshoots, but forcing them into more and more active and realistic positions, and thereby greatly increasing the chance of accidental injury. Don’t get me wrong: we all love looking at these pictures. But someone, at some point, is going to get hurt. And we cannot allow that to happen.

These shoots have been going on for as long as we can remember, but the basic safety controls have been gradually eroded for years now. While players were traditionally photographed in casual, head-on poses:

…these poses were abandoned in favor of “action shots” like the following — though each player was still confined to a separate small room, with fairly thick walls.

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Ah, the MVP awards. Where we make virtually every player feel bad just so we can honor two guys for their luck-enhanced statistics. Haven’t we figured out by now that it’s all just statistical noise? Roll the dice and Jacoby Ellsbury can hit 32 home runs, or R.A. Dickey can be unhittable for six months, or Nick Punto can be above-replacement-level. One in a million seasons, I could probably get a hit or two, walk once or twice, and end up with a million-dollar contract instead of this minimum wage job shoveling coal into the boilers here at the local mental health facility. And yet we continue to award the random nature of results instead of what’s really important: the rational understanding that life is meaningless, sports are diversions to help us forget we’re all going to die, and the real most valuable player is the one who best distracts us from dwelling on the truth.

Which makes this year’s most valuable players Alex Rodriguez and Mariano Rivera, because I still have hundreds of articles to read about each of them, and that will prevent me from thinking too hard about the exceptions in the fine print of my life insurance policy.

Please direct all complaints concerning lazy photoshopping to cistulli at notgraphs dot com.

Breaking news from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s article about Clint Hurdle winning the NL Manager of the Year Award:

“Clint’s passion is infectious,” Pirates owner Bob Nutting said in a statement.

PITTSBURGH– The entire city of Pittsburgh is under lockdown after it was revealed that Pirates manager Clint Hurdle has an infectious case of passion. According to sources, he developed this condition after leaving his post as manager of the Colorado Rockies, where he mostly floundered with indifference for years, occasionally flirting with mild excitement, but never developing the full-blown passion condition. It is not known at this time where Hurdle acquired his passion, although rumor is that Andrew McCutchen may be a carrier.

State law requires all Pittsburgh residents to have received the passion vaccine, which protects against most strains of the illness. The passion vaccine involves living in Pittsburgh for any amount of time.

In the US, approximately 800 to 1,500 people are infected with passion and 120 die from the disease per year. About one of every five survivors lives with permanent disabilities, such as euphoria, inertia, laughter, and psychological problems. Even in cases where treatment has been given, the fatality rate is around 15%.

If you have close contact with Clint Hurdle, see your doctor for prophylactic antibiotics.

A great philosopher and beloved dead uncle once said “with great power comes great responsibility.” To date, no one has deemed me worthy of receiving great power (and rightfully so; I would misuse it the first chance I’d get), and so I’m reduced to creating and maintaining a fictional Hall of Fame based on the teachings of fictional character Ron Swanson. This gives me some infinitesimally small amount of power, and since Uncle Ben never mentioned that, I don’t feel obligated to exercise any responsibility at all. As such, I am abdicating any and all responsibility in the selection process, save for organizing the candidates for your voting pleasure.

Based on your feedback, the new nominees are:

Wade Boggs – For mustache-having, For love of meat (fried chicken before every game) and scotch, For popularity with the ladies, and For unquenchable iconoclasm as expressed through his appearances on The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Cheers

George Herman Ruth – For love of meat and scotch, For popularity with the ladies, For unquenchable iconoclasm, For disdain of unnecessary rules and regulations, For general joie de vivre.

Bill Veeck – For toughness (lost a leg in World War II), For woodworking (carved an ashtray into wooden leg he received after losing leg in World War II), For love of meat and scotch, For unquenchable iconoclasm, For blatant disdain for unnecessary rules and regulations (hired Eddie Gaedel to pinch hit), For general distrust of authority. You know what, just go read this comment.

Satchel Paige – For love of meat and scotch, For unquenchable iconoclasm, For blatant disdain for unnecessary rules and regulations (jumped contracts constantly in his youth), For general distrust of authority.

Mickey Mantle – For love of meat and scotch, For general popularity with the ladies, For toughness (played on a bad knee his whole career).

Ted Williams – For love of meat and scotch, For having wives with similar names, For toughness (fought in both World War II and the Korean War, crash-landed a plane and walked away), For unquenchable iconoclasm

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Yoga was invented by British naval officers during the Siege of Malta to confuse enemy semaphore interpreters, and brought to the mainstream by Japanese schoolchildren in the 1950’s. These days yoga is for everyone, not just Brits and young Asians. This is good news! Along those same totally not untrue lines, it just so happens that my favorite yoga positions are inspired by real-life baseball players. This post is me sharing three of them with you.

Counsell Pose

This pose is only fully realized if you have a baseball bat handy. First grab the bat, left hand over right. Take a deep breath, and feel the fat draining from your horrid, porcine excuse for a human body. You now weigh 85 lbs., like Craig Counsell. Your mind, too, is in Counsell-space . Feel the alignment of the universe as Craig felt the alignment of well-executed double-plays during his 16-year career as a defense-first infielder. Splay your legs wide beneath you and slowly raise the bat above your head. Now raise the bat even higher. Feel the stretch in your chest as you poke the gods. Take a breath. Release the pose as if weakly dribbling a grounder to second base.

Martinez Pose

This two-part pose is meant to get your juices oogling and boogling. Carlos Martinez is, of course, a rowdy young fire-baller known for his yoga-inspired delivery. To channel his Martinezness, begin by putting all your weight on your left foot and sticking your leg out to the side at a 90-degree angle. Try to focus on one point, like a tree in the distance, or Yadier Molina, to help maintain balance. Now think of all the things in your life that are stressin’ on you, like the kiddos, troubles with a lady-friend, getting blamed by the boss for something that was Doug’s fault, or pitching to red-hot David Ortiz in the World Series at age 22. Next, picture all those stresses congealed as a fuzzy-bad-ball-thing floating in the air in front of you about thigh high. While maintaining eye contact with your “object in the distance” (your “Yadi”), violently twist the hips and sweep the right leg through the fuzzy-bad-ball-thing like Charlemagne swept the Lombards out of Northern Italy. Repeat until you feel like your stresses are thoroughly routed.

Rizzo Pose

Next let’s try an endurance pose. The Rizzo allows us to embody eternity within the terminal confines of our infirm human shells. Start by forcing a smile—make sure it’s forced! Don’t think of any actual reason to smile. Instead, think of a time you have to force a smile, like anytime someone shows you a YouTube video. Next, twist your arm back as if thousands of fantasy owners are punishing you for disappointing them when they needed solid first-base value. Now, hold that pose for ten-thousand years. This one is tough! Keep that forced smile and twisted arm as long as you can. Eventually your smiling face will melt into a vacant world-weary stare, and layers of dead calciferous sea organisms will coat your face (you think that’s shaving cream?) as you rest on the ocean floor where Chicago once was (thanks global warming and other ocean-causing catastrophes!). Your twisted arm will fall off and become a gathering place for bored sea minnows. Your other arm will meld into your side as your body slowly becomes a featureless monolith. As you watch human civilization crumble around you, try to recall the little things, like fresh sheets or how the smell of blown-out candles reminds you of your eleventh birthday. After ten-thousand years of holding Rizzo Pose, relax and carry on as usual.

The 18,172 proud gentlemen who have donned a Major League uniform, plus Boileryard Clarke, can be said to be the finest baseball athletes the world has ever offered. But of course such a statement requires an untenable simplification. It ignores Josh Gibson, for instance, and Sadaharu Oh, and it includes Yuniesky Betancourt. Not only that, but it discounts a great many gifted athletes who, for various circumstantial reasons, were never given the opportunity to excel in this particular sport. One can safely assume that Jesse Owens would have stolen more than a few bags, and that Mikhail Baryshnikov would have made one hell of a shortstop. One once said similar things about Michael Jordan, but one bad apple doesn’t spoil the bunch, now does it? And why stop there, really? Why not speculate about the baseball IQ of the Duke of Wellington, or the scrappiness of Spartacus, or the mound presence of Moses?

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*

…but probably not that soon, since he just moved into a new house last summer.

There is a surprising amount of information on the Internet about where Joe Mauer lives. There is this weebly page that appears to have been created by a child. A 2007 video tour of what was then called his “mansion.” An aerial shot of the estate he bought in 2012. And a 2006 Sports Illustrated “Cribs” feature on the house he shared with Justin Morneau, proving that Mauer drinks orange juice and collects bobblehead dolls.

*Yes, let me just leave this image here without further comment on the headline.

Hello? Oh, hi, sorry to bother you so late, it’s Matty Baseballs.

…

What? It’s not that late? Haha, of course. To me, it’s always baseballs o’clock, please pardon me.

“Hello, Baseball? Matty Baseballs here. I hear you’ve got baseballs for me…”

…

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