Halfpence is is plural of halfpenny.
Therefore, I am about to make a pointless joke that has been made a million times before, probably.
Also, remember the band Sixpence None the Richer? They existed.
Therefore,
Part of the NotGraphs Holiday Greeting Cards Series, coming this winter!
That question, the question in the title, is what everyone is wondering these days who doesn’t have anything important to do. “We haven’t seen him around these pages for a whole week, and that’s not like him. Is he drunk?” No, but I understand why you’d think that.
“Is he too poor to pay for Internet anymore?” Another likely answer, but not the correct one.
“Has he been fired?” Regrettably, no.
“Is he dead?” Possibly; I can’t verify this one way or the other.
Of course, the reason I can’t verify that is because Carson, or at least his graceless corpse, currently is residing in Paris, France, which is the greatest of the Parises, narrowly eking out a victory over Paris, Texas, Paris Hilton, Plaster of Paris, and Paris of Troy. There, he is allegedly staying with his inexplicably lovely wife and is immersing himself in the French tongue (that sounds dirtier than I meant it). And this has apparently also been the week for his new surroundings to acclimate themselves to him.
While there, in addition to reviving the thoroughly stupid FranceGraphs, Cistulli will serve as an ambassador of sorts, bringing the goodwill of American baseball and sportswriting to the City of Lights, as you can read in the letter below:
What even are numbers? I definitely don’t know! That’s why I write for Notgraphs. But luckily Lord Google exists, and I can pray/search for the percent-chance an AL contender makes the playoffs, and then see what other events have or have had a simliar chance of occurring. This way we can ground the shameful ambiguity of numbers in concrete real-world occurrences. Away with the wishy-washy insipidity of numbers, whatever they are.
Tampa Bay Rays
Playoff Chance: ~64%
– Time travel to last spring! There was a 64% chance of major flooding in North Dakota. Time travel to now! Guess what? There was tons of major flooding!
– Choose at random a human from the Rwandan Parliament. There is a 64% chance of that human being a woman. Good news for women and Rwanda!
– Hey Rays fans: Does your child have ADHD? Yes? Look a rabbit! If so, there’s a 64% chance it’s due to their diet. The Rays have the same chance of making–rabbit!?–the playoffs as you being a terrible parent who pumps your kids full of sulfites, salicylates, MSG, and omg a school bus!
– The percentage of people who read Notgraphs at work is probably about 64%. The rest read it at home, not wasting work time but instead neglecting their families.
The search for material to write about this week has led me to this New York Times piece from a few days ago, titled “A Drab and Cherished Relic of Shea.” No, it’s not about the home run apple in center field. It’s about a clipboard, given away to spectators at a game in 1977.
Yes, you may wonder, as I did, why you are reading an article about a clipboard.
But it’s a nice piece about being a fan.
Made me think about the Mets-related nonsense in my old bedroom closet in my mom’s house, collecting dust. Old yearbooks and programs, an inflatable bat, a bunch of hats and t-shirts, a few bobblehead dolls, some baseball card sets, towels and canvas bags…. I used to love when the schedule came out every spring and we’d think about which tickets to get, which 6 or 7 games we’d go see, chosen in large part because of the promotional giveaways.
And then you get older and… I don’t want a bobblehead doll. I don’t want a bat or a foam finger. I have a hockey puck on my bookshelf that I got at an Islanders game a couple of decades ago and I keep it only because three laptops ago, it was very good at propping up the back so that air could circulate underneath and the thing wouldn’t shut off whenever it got too warm. I come from a family that never threw things away and now I end up wanting to throw everything away, because stuff just becomes something you have to clean and store and move, and everything you actually need is available streaming on the Internet.
The point of this piece is… unclear, even to me, but I did want to point you to the fine New York Times article. The clipboard in the picture looks really dirty.
It’s been a rough season for the Toronto Blue Jays organization, to say the least. They’ve been officially out of playoff contention for a few days already, and the disappointment and resignation for Jays fans must have started far earlier than that.
That they will finish the season with two [more] of their all-stars on the disabled list adds injuries to insult. That they will finish the season without a few other things…well, that’s just par for the course:
(Adapted from Mike Axisa, “Blue Jays shut down…”, 17 September 2013.)
It is like they do not exist!
Who do you think?! The Libyans!
On Friday, I’ll be taking the final spot subbing in for Carson and writing the Daily Notes on the main site. Or perhaps Hopeless Joe will be writing them. I haven’t decided yet. What I have decided is that you, loyal NotGraphs readers, who often find yourself over on this side of the home page, might be able to help me put together some awesome Daily Notes. If there’s something you’d like to say about Friday’s games — any of them, all of them, or none of them — send me an e-mail before 9 AM tomorrow. Or anything you’d like to say about the Daily Notes. No guarantee I’ll use it, but I might. So if you’ve ever wanted to be credited over on the main site, here is your chance. And now I need to figure out how I’m going to come up with better NERD scores than Bates did.
In the course of my work for another Internet writing outfit, sometimes I get strange emails. This usually happens when one of the assignment editors there mistakes me for someone else and asks me to do something for which I am not even a little qualified. For instance, I essentially stopped paying attention to football six years ago when my son was born. I got dumber then, and had only room in my brain for one sport with all the parenting I had to learn how to do. As such, I have vague ideas of who some of the players are, especially if they’re old, and I know the Vikings will break my heart at some point, but otherwise I’m pretty useless.
So yesterday, I received the following email from one of said editors:
“Dear contributor Mike Bates,
You have been assigned to write a Article on [redacted] called Heath Miller injury: Steelers expect tight end back at practice for the purpose of Demand. It will be published at Early morning on 2013-09-17.
Take note of the following:
https://twitter.com/
EdBouchette/status/ 380000346493304832 Please reply to this message if you have any questions or are unavailable to post this. As always, thanks for your contributions.
Thanks,
Assignment Desk Editor”
Here is Joe Ferguson, throwing out Sal Bando:
This, from a Hardball Times article by Bruce Markusen back in January, which contextualized the play:
In Game One of the 1974 World Series, Ferguson cut in front of center fielder Jimmy Wynn to make a catch and then unleashed a 290-foot tracer to the catcher, erasing Sal Bando and taking a potential run off the board for the world champion A’s. It was also a smart play by Ferguson, given that Wynn was playing with a badly injured throwing shoulder and would have had little chance to throw out Bando.
When a friend of mine forwarded me a link to this video the other day, I felt like I wanted to write about it, but I’m still not sure why. It was a great play, to be sure, and I love watching frozen rope throws from the outfield. The fact that it happened in a World Series game that featured a classic 1970s rivalry adds to the coolness. But still, I’ve seen throws that are just as good or better, so why write about this one?
Last Thursday, I broke the Internet. I caused priceless and irreplaceable mental effort, belonging to 183 actual, sad human beings, to be diverted away from countless worthy ends and toward quite possibly the least worthy end in the universe: commenting on a Notgraphs post. According to reports, the tremor of futility was registered on sensitive instruments as far away as China; the dumbing, experts say, may be irreversible. For this I will shoulder the blame entirely.
From MLB.com:
…which is a perfectly good reason why the Rays are going to win a wild card slot.
Except:
1. You can’t spell Wild Kard without Kuroda, although if you’re trying to spell Wild Kard, you really can’t spell.
2. You can’t spell Wild Card without Wada, as in Tsuyoshi Wada, with a 4.03 ERA in Norfolk, the Orioles’ AAA affiliate.
3. You can’t spell “You Can’t Spell Wild Card” without Yu, as in Darvish.
4. You can’t spell anything without the letters in Marc Rzepcynski’s name, since they’re all in there. And he’s on the Indians, in case you didn’t know.
And, also:
5. You can’t spell “Fail to Win The Wild Card, You Royals Fans” without Falu, as in Irving Falu, who hit .341 last year and hasn’t even gotten a single at bat in the major leagues in 2013. Poor Irving Falu!
Which all combines to tell me nothing.