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Dear Internet Users,

I am not Vance Law the former Major League Baseball player, but I am a fictional persona who will be evoking Vance Law as I write (what I hope will be regular) Internet letters to you here on this little strand of the World Wide Web. Without further ado, here is a letter I have written to you!

I am noticing lately that I am a meticulous person. When I wipe the spots from my spectacles, it must be with a clean towel, for if the towel is dirty, I will surely dirty my spectacles with more than just the finger-smudges and water-spots that are already upon them. Only after wiping the spectacles do I allow myself to use the same towel on my sweaty brow &c. Then, it’s off to the laundry bin with the towel. My meticulousness accumulates quite a lot of towels to be laundered!

Though, as I seek to cultivate peculiarities and grow in complexity, I wonder if I might attempt a different method of towel usage: drying my brow first in order to have a clearer vision for wiping my spectacles — yet being sure to preserve a corner of the towel for the spectacles. Above all, I believe spectacles must be cleaned with an unsullied portion of fabric; but of almost equal importance is to meet the task of spectacle cleaning with an unsullied mental focus — and unobstructed sight.

To this point in my life, I have abided and enacted only the former rubric of towel usage. Now, having reconsidered this issue in my first letter to you, I see clearly the advantages of the latter method, and I believe I shall try it. That’s right, dear Internet Users: do not think that I am such a rigid man that I would refuse to revise my habits even based on sound reasoning. Just because my name is Law does not mean I do not bend! I am an astute editor of personality!

But what a strange first impression I must be giving you. What a way to solicit your future audience! I hope that the mundanity of the above reflections does not lead you to believe I am a poor or thoughtless lover. I am a sensual man with a clean face, and I intend to make unique, detailed love to each of you in due time.

With love,

In celebration of Vladimir Guerrero’s retirement, I offer this video from the YouTube archives, from 1999, celebrating his time as an Expo. There is some terrible hero/Guerrero rhyming going on, but it’s still kind of fun. Song by Mal Thursday and Paul Rocha, sung by Amy Sullivan.

Oh, while I’m at it, here’s a video of bloopers from Todd Helton filming a commercial for Longmont Ford in Colorado. Right now this video has 315 views. It deserves at least 320.

Okay, one more. Vlad knocking Tommy Lasorda over with a flying bat, while Lasorda was coaching third base and Vlad was hitting.

This edition of things your boss probably doesn’t want you to watch at work is sponsored by Retirement. Retirement: sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Some idjit named “Mike Bates” was riling up the masses over on SBNation this morning, comparing stathead culture warrior Brian Kenny to a British colonialist barreling through Africa and the Middle East, telling the locals how to dress and organize themselves, redrawing boundaries of nations to suit his whim, and not giving a damn about the consequences. And all because Kenny insists that the win be murdered in a well, along with all whose sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped them conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given them enough clairvoyance to find the rebels’ hidden fortress.

Frankly, the whole thing seemed ludicrous and offensive and this Bates fellow should be summarily fired (from a cannon).

In conclusion, here is Sabermetric Colonialist Brian Kenny in a pith helmet and with a silly mustache and a monocle:

 Ridiculous! He barely even looks British.

Any day now one of the most esteemed records in professional sports, the Japanese single-season home run mark, will be toppled by a man whose name nobody can pronounce. This seems to be a recurring problem with people from Wladimir Balentien’s native Curaçao. It is almost as though these people want to discourage immigrants through sheer linguistic perversity. Even if you can master the name of the country itself, you get there and you have to make friends with folks named Andrelton Simmons and Jair Jurrjens and Hensley Meulens and Jonathan Schoop. Scanning the names of some “famous” non-baseballing Curaçaoans only reinforces the suspicion: consider Riechedly Bazoer, Angelo Cijntje, and Ruelly Etienne-Winklaar. These are names that sound like regular names from around the world, if regular names were torn into pieces, put into a hat, shaken thoroughly, and reconstituted by small children.

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The words “MOST VALUABLE PLAYER” contain a mystery word! That word is not “most” or “player” or “churro.” It’s “valuable!” You guessed it! The “value” of a player is a hotly contested/annoying debate that is already happening and will happen for weeks on end. At Fangraphs, the tendency is to choose the individual who performed best based primarily on observable/measurable data. OBJECTIVE criteria, if you will. But here at Notgraphs we shun objectivity, because we know that in the end no matter what we measure or how well we measure it our ultimate destiny is to return as dust to the earth and be forgotten. Death is immeasurable! Terrific!

Instead, I propose a means of choosing MVPs using egregiously subjective criteria. Specifically: Use MyCeleb celebrity face match on the MyHeritage App to find out who MVP candidates most look like, and then pick league MVPs based on which celebrity I like best. Solid methodology, bro!

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Hopeless Joe wrote yesterday about the Mets losing their spot on WFAN sports radio, now left to scrounge for whatever lesser station will have them. Assuming they don’t choose to go with Hopeless Joe Radio, here are my top nine stations to replace WFAN:

1. WBAD
2. WPOO
3. WTJS
4. WGEE
5. WIKE
6. WGDP
7. WUGH
8. WPED
9. WAAA

English may not be Koji Uehara’s first language, but that does not mean puns in English are lost on him. When Uehara noticed the above pun written by CBS fantasy baseball writer Jeff Lippman, he (Uehara) decided to put on a fun display for the public, enacting the pun in two separate recent incidents. Both incidents have been documented by NotGraphs photography intern Billy Gillibands.

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Yesterday, aside from the usual losing the Mets have been doing, they also lost their radio station. The Yankees are set to sign a deal with WFAN, bumping the Mets– who have been with WFAN since it became a network in 1987– to a new station to be determined.

Hopeless Joe Radio would like to make its pitch. I’ll turn the rest of this post over to the Hopeless man himself:

Hey there, Mets. I know how you’re feeling. A 25+ year relationship up in smoke. Just like when my mother moved and didn’t tell me where she was going. (Which hurt, but not as much as when she un-friended me on Facebook.) Where is loyalty these days? You Mets have proven themselves in that department, like paying Bobby Bonilla for half a century, but how does WFAN repay you? By abandoning you for those clowns in the Bronx, with the winning records and other nonsense like that. Wins don’t count! Every smart fan knows it. The Mets have so many more pitcher hits than the Yankees, and everyone knows that’s the most important measure of a team.

But WFAN’s silly decision can ultimately be your gain, Mets, because you would fit just perfectly on Hopeless Joe Radio, and we would be honored to carry your schedule, at least until Syria takes over and bans us from broadcasting sports on the public airwaves. Afternoon games would be a terrific replacement for our usual 1:00-4:00 Dirge Music Jamboree. And our evening call-in show, “Suicide, or Not Today?” has been slowly slipping in the ratings, mostly because we lose our most loyal viewers on a nightly basis. Seriously, why didn’t our program director realize that a call-in show about suicide was destined to fail? I would fire him, but I fear he would do something drastic, especially since over the years he’s now heard thousands of people’s ideas of how to do it.

We would love to add a pre-game show to replace our long-running “Name Those Symptoms” game show, which has sadly run its course, having covered every disease in the medical school curriculum. And a nightly post-game report would save us from having to turn to plan B and offer Anthony Weiner his own nightly show once he recovers from his mayoral primary defeat. I mean, on the one hand, he would help us make some headway into social media– we haven’t really been able to build up much of a Twitter following, and we hear he’s an expert at that– but on the other hand, he would likely thrive in a more visual medium than radio.

Mets coverage can easily be incorporated into our morning show, “Ernest and Gertrude live from the Hospice,” and we’d love to do a weekend block of Mets-related programming for kids, integrated with our usual kids shows, “Life Will Only Get Worse,” “Your Parents are Dying,” and our annual seasonal offering, “Santa’s Not Real.”

Really, the Mets would fit right into our lineup, since you usually lose, no one likes you anymore, and being a Mets fan is almost literally like being a Bernie Madoff fan. And since we run nightly interviews with people who lost their money in Madoff’s investment accounts, it couldn’t possibly be a better match.

Mr. Met is already our mascot, except our version has blood dripping from his ears. Give us a call and I’m sure we can work out a deal. We’re around all day, except between 11 and 2, which is when the entire station will be live on the air for a group electroshock therapy session. Wish us luck.

The above image comes to us from the pages of a friendly rival organization, who make it their business to spoil everyone’s fun and tell us exactly what the odds are of your favorite team making the playoffs (the answer, I’m sorry to say, isn’t good for most of us). Today, on the other hand, they provide us with an amusing game wherein we get to imagine a scenario where the Diamondbacks, Padres, Rockies, and Giants all have a zero percent chance of making the postseason, but still have a 0.1 percent chance of winning the World Series.

Here’s what I’ve sketched out: Read the rest of this entry »

In triumphing over the Rangers on Monday, Pittsburgh finally lurched over the .500 mark and thereby joined a proud, and recently underpopulated, list of winners in the Steel City. Let’s take a stroll back through the annals of successful buccaneering, shall we?

1671 – This dominating season saw Henry Morgan seal his case for the Pirate Hall of Fame, completing the unprecedented feat of sacking and burning the city of Panama.

1925 – These Pirates rode future Hall of Famers Kiki Cuyler and Pie Traynor to a pennant and, ultimately, a seven-game world championship for their second time in history.

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