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The excellent and prolific Jeff Sullivan is responsible for the idea of “Little League Pitch Framing as NotGraphs Post,” though none of the shortcomings of what follows should be blamed on him. Many thanks to Jeff for the suggestion.

Baseball is a kids’ game, they say.

As a baseball geek who has no children, lives in a Major League city, and obsesses over his fantasy teams, I consume my baseball mostly from the Major Leagues. When it’s not MLB, it’s probably the high minor leagues or something like the college world series. Essentially, I’m watching baseball at the highest levels, the top 3000 or so players, guys who have been playing for decades. It’s easy for me to take for granted a basic level of coordination and awareness — which is why watching Raul Ibañez or Delmon Young in the outfield is so amusing.

Watching the Little League World Series, even though I’m watching the best twelve-year-olds in the world, I’m still watching twelve-year-olds, kids who have only been playing maybe six or seven years instead of 15-30 years, whose bodies are in the midst of rapid and significant changes, who haven’t learned to completely control their emotions.

So, it amazes me, while watching the Little League World Series, that twelve-year-old pitchers can even throw strikes on a consistent basis, or throw out a runner from the outfield, let alone have the mental wherewithal and bodily control to think about framing pitches. And just as some of these twelve-year-olds will sometimes be unable to throw strikes, some of the twelve-year-old catchers don’t have advanced receiving skills, either.

But: Watching those skills in development, that’s the cool thing for me. Noticing when a kid is trying to mimic what he sees in the big leagues, or when he masters his own body and remains perfectly still as he accepts the pitch, that’s cool. Also, noticing when the raw, nervous energy of adolescence and pre-adolescence make it near impossible to be composed, that reminds me getting better at something takes time and effort. It’s really great to see.

The excellent and prolific Jeff Sullivan suggested that someone at NotGraphs take a look at pitch framing in the Little League World Series. I volunteered, though I’m not sure if Jeff was hoping for something more humorous here. Originally, I intended to make this post more humorous, but as I made and then watched these GIFs over and over, I felt unexpectedly inspired. I developed favorites. I created narratives in my head. So, now that I’m making this post, now that I’ve made my plebeian observations, I’ve decided to present these moving images with minimal additional commentary.

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It’s impossible not to love a fantasy baseball draft. I can even get my non-sports-watching wife to understand why the draft is exciting. Each year, I prepare too much. That’s not a good thing. It’s a waste of time. The plan goes out the window after ten minutes anyway — the guy you’re convinced you love more than anyone else could possibly love him gets taken early, and you’re left to rejigger your entire plan. And you spend the rest of the draft three picks behind, just trying to catch up, and get back on top of things. But that’s the fun of it. The adrenaline. The back and forth — whose ups and downs do you want to live with for the next six months, who do you want to be rooting for, who do you truly believe in, beyond what the numbers say you should?

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Okay, I know the fashionable stance to take on Derek Jeter’s defense is that it’s bad. But surely it’s not this bad.

From MLB.com, your official home for ballboy news.*

I thought I was kidding, but a search for “ballboy” really does bring up far more articles than I expected. We’ve got “Ballboy catches Davis off-guard on foul fly,” “Bullpen catcher owes this Rays ballboy a steak dinner,” “To the relief of everyone sitting behind him, ballboy nails leaping catch,” and this weird four-line article about Livan Hernandez throwing sunflower seeds at a ballboy that seems to be missing a much-needed video.

Clearly ballboys need their own 24-hour sports channel.

You might ask yourself, dear reader, you might ask yourself, “what were the Twins doing in 1991?” Especially, you might be asking yourself this because that is, in fact, the title of this article. After you’re done asking that, “Probably playing baseball,” is one answer that you could give, if you weren’t particularly clever. “Winning the World Series,” is another for the more literal-minded of you. Yes, these are both things that the Twins were doing in 1991. But among other things they were also doing, such as eating, sleeping, grooming their mustaches and mullets, watching Cheers, enjoying the musics of Color Me Badd and C+C Music Factory, and wondering if a viable third party candidate might emerge in next year’s presidential election, were the following:

Being hot.

Coming on strong.

Having Kelly at the wheel.

Not going wrong.

Lookin’ straight ahead on the right track.

Not turning back.

Having Puck, Chuck, Jack, Mack, Chili, Willie, Bush, Tap, Harper, Gladden, Al, and Gags. Hrbek, Willis, Gene, and Pags. Aguilera, Erickson, Teddy, and Bedrosian. Guthrie, West, and the rest.

Having the best.

Commencing to get off and running.

Observe:

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Today I present to you something that isn’t sabermetrics. It isn’t even really anything. But I do have a great name for it: PSEUDOMETRICS. Pseudometrics* is the red-headed stepchild of sabermetrics, if said stepchild were a pile of moldy socks woven from backhair.  Pseudometrics, like sabermetrics, answers questions about baseball. Where it differs is in the kinds of questions it asks. Whereas [real statistic] might try to answer [real question], pseudometrics attempts to answer questions like, “Which baseball player is most like a grape?” and “What would happen if we made Kyle Farnsworth the next Dalai Lama?” In other words, pseudometrics asks the unanswerable and then answers it, gauchely. In doing so, it employs methods that are less than precise. It’s like bombing a field of rocks in Utah and then looking for fossils in the crater. You might find a dinosaur, but probably you’ll also be at the bottom of a crater with no way up and no friends and no hope and planes flying overhead dropping bombs.

One might say pseudometrics is “useless,” but I’ve already thoroughly abused this website with a truly useless statistic. Instead I prefer to think of it as “ineffable,” in the same way the word propels the plotline of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. That is, in a possibly meaningful, possibly irrelevant way. It’s an umbrella under which unquantifiable inquiries are crudely quantified and dispensed to readers (you) who starve for numbers that tell you what’s really going on. Except these numbers don’t. But they feel like they do, and that’s what counts. Even us stolid empiricists require a little good feelin’ every now and then.

To celebrate the introduction of Pseudometrics and its overflowing banks of ineffability, I want to begin by considering who the most and least ineffable ballplayers are. Sound dumb? Grape!

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Paul Coro of azcentral sports recently reported on Diamondbacks outfielder Adam Eaton’s eight-month-long struggle with hives. Eaton himself surmises that the excessive sweating caused by the hives is the main reason of his weight loss over the last month.

Eaton is hoping to reestablish his ba-donka-donk.

Coro’s news blip is chock-full of colorful quotes from Eaton that amused me greatly and that, ultimately, I could not ignore. Consider this one:

I was taking [allergy pills] twice a day and it didn’t care. It just came through. Real bad itchy. Just terrible. Sweating all the time.

I guess I haven’t done an exhaustive search for similar language, but this, to me, stands out as an unusual incidence of an athlete anthropomorphizing his ailment. The hives, here, are aware of the attack being made on them, and in spite of that, they continue their sojourn throughout Eaton’s body, stimulating his itch and sweat glands in the process.

Also, there is the phrase “real bad itchy,” which, well, alternately makes me laugh and conjures imagines of a murderous clown hulk. (Note: said phrase also has utility as a euphemism when revealing to one’s significant other that one has a mysteriously acquired groin irritation.)

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The following headlines actually appear on MLB.com today:

Giambi Gives Tribe a Brant New Day
Another Homer for Miggy Before Tigers Get Jiggy
Fish Feel LoMo-mentum Shift Late in KC
Blue Jays Lay Down Lawrie, Edge Red Sox
Hair Rays-ing! Walk-off Win Snaps Skid
Texas Bullish Against Milwaukee ‘Pen
Robbie Is Aptly Named as Astros Stun Athletics

The questions abound. When did this start? Who thinks it is a good idea? Why does the National League not get the same treatment? Does MLB.com have one person on staff writing their NL wrap headlines and another person, presumably 9 years old, writing their AL counterparts? Has MLB decided to market the junior circuit as their “fun” league? How long can this possibly continue before the eyeballs of Internet readers everywhere rupture from the sheer pressure of awful punnery? And, most importantly, what awful puns can we ourselves contribute?

Newly-acquired Royals outfielder Justin Maxwell has nice teeth.

And he should. From The New York Times:

Maxwell, from Olney, Md., is the son of Austin Maxwell, who was the presidential dentist for five years, starting in 1997. He handled dental care for President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and their families, and then for President George W. Bush before retiring from the Navy in 2002. Justin Maxwell, 29, was a star amateur player for much of that time and drew the attention of one of his father’s patients.

“My dad told me that when Bush was president — he’s a big baseball fan — during one of his appointments, he asked how I was doing at the University of Maryland,” Maxwell said. “And my dad said he had never talked about baseball, so he obviously did his research. I thought that was pretty cool.”

That was a conversation the elder Maxwell could share. As for what he saw inside the mouths of the presidents, that was strictly confidential.

“He was never allowed to tell me anything,” Maxwell said. “Even to this day, he’s not allowed.”

Belovéd, yesterday Craig Calcaterra, of Hardball Talk, foretold of the coming of a cinematic experience so singularly important that it dwarfs any of the petty and mundane concerns that make up our lives. When this film, Mr. Go, arrives from South Korea upon the shores of these here United States, we are compelled to drop everything and greet it with the awe and reverence it will clearly deserve. And yet, I am confused by so much in the following trailer:

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The early 1970’s were a pivotal and epochal epoch — the most pivotal and epochal, perhaps — in the great Mustache Wars that have convulsed civilization since its very inception. If we were, for the sake of building a narrative, to point to a single event that forever turned the tide of those wars, it would surely be the 1972 World Series. Famously dubbed “Hairs vs. Squares,” this contest pitted the full-foliaged Oakland A’s of Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, and Rollie Fingers against Sparky Anderson’s baby-smooth Reds. The outcome — Oakland by a hair — validated mouthbrows everywhere and tipped off a long slide into obsolescence for shaved-lip purists.* It must have been a tough pill to swallow for old Sparky, who was so tenacious a defender of the clean-cut face that it cost him his firstborn son for a year and a half.

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