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Long, enjoyable Men’s Journal profile of Matt Harvey that makes me reasonably certain that, despite living in the same city, we will not be running into other.

This is not to say that Matt Harvey doesn’t seem like a decent enough guy, but, uh, I was on the math team in high school.

Harvey lives in a bachelor pad in the East Village, a downtown neighborhood known for its raucous bar scene, which he indulges in on occasion. “I’m young, I’m single,” he says. “I want to be in the mix.”

I live in a one-bedroom apartment with my wife in Midtown, a neighborhood not known for its raucous bar scene, or maybe it is but I’m not paying attention. I can’t remember the last time I was in a bar. It definitely wasn’t raucous.

With two hours until Harvey has to be at Citi Field in Queens, he decides he has time for some quick shopping. “Do you know the store John Varvatos?”…. Harvey eyes a linen blazer with about a million buttons running along the seam and a funky, upturned collar – a baroque garment more befitting a general in Napoleon’s army than a ballplayer. “Think I can pull this off?” he asks.

I think the last new piece of clothing I have is a polo shirt my wife bought me off the sale rack in Banana Republic, maybe a year ago. I did buy some new undershirts a few months ago. Does that count as shopping?

“Dirty martinis and music – that’s the big motto in our family,” he says, describing his extended Italian-American clan as a rowdy tribe, fond of letting loose as often as possible. “We get the booze going, and the music starts playing. Always old-school hip-hop. Jay-Z. Tribe Called Quest. The Pharcyde. My parents love that stuff.”

There’s half a bottle of red wine in the back of my refrigerator, and 7/8 of a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream. The wine has been there for an amount of time that can be measured in months, is surely well beyond undrinkable, and probably wasn’t all that drinkable in the first place, since we bought it for $4 at Trader Joe’s. But I really can’t tell the difference. The Bailey’s was a gift the last time we had a party. I used a few tablespoons of it to make ice cream, and can’t think of anything else to do with it. When I crank up the Pandora, there’s a pretty good chance James Taylor starts singing.

Harvey mostly hangs with finance and marketing guys in their twenties and thirties.

That sounds terrible.

Still an awesome pitcher though.

Via common sense, that precious gift from our god and creator (David Appelman), we know that there is a limit to which any elite athlete can push his or her body. Often, that is an abstract concept, some theoretical level that we could never hope to attain, but that people like Mike Trout, Michael Phelps, and Michelle Kwan can approach.

Like most people with a name derived from the archangel Michael, I have finally reached that plateau. Over the past weekend, which I spent in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as a willing, nay enthusiastic, participant at the annual conference for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), I put myself to the test and touched the face of Appelman (note: I am speaking figuratively; in the strictest legal sense, I did not violate the restraining order).  Under the watchful eye and painful lash of my NotGraphs “editor,” Carson Cistulli, I made it my mission to discover if a man could live almost exclusively on Yuengling Lager and cheesesteaks for an entire SABR convention.

I arrived on Thursday morning, and stayed until Sunday morning, so I was limited to three lunches and three dinners. As such, I did strive to have what I thought would be the breakfast equivalent of a cheesesteak on both Friday  and Saturday mornings. Most of this came from the amazing Reading Terminal Market, which was located directly across from our hotel in the heart of the city. I can’t recommend this conglomeration of quick restaurants, fresh produce, meat, and seafood, bakeries, coffee bars, and assorted deliciousness enough. And since I’m told that Power Rankings are SEO gold, here are the official rankings of the food I ate over the course of three days: Read the rest of this entry »

I think the headline writers had a little fun with that one.

And the line break is perfect there.

Frisco fans revolt. (Even more so if Sardinas was spelled Sardines instead.)

Baseball is a pointless, aimless, unfair, repetitive, and endless display of unpredictable failure. But if there’s any readership that snuggles up to the teats of defeat and feeds on its malevolent draught, it’s this one. Even separate from baseball, awareness of our ultimate irrelevance and propensity to fail miraculously and fantastically at whatever we do brings this readership pleasure, right? Maybe it’s just me. I love a good failure. I brim with glee when I heckle Cubs fans about what they’ve been up to since 1908 (and love, perhaps more, when they heckle back), or when I see an Olympic runner crying on the track as she falls on the final lap. It is pleasure I’m feeling, distinctly, and for me there’s nothing more like a guilty pleasure than the pleasure I experience at witnessing a complete disaster. Guilty or not, I love it.

Which is why it brings me immense pleasure to present to you COOL Game Scores. This endeavor is perhaps the clearest example of failure any of you will ever witness. It is a paragon of dumb joy in the face of catastrophe. It’s a number that is horrendously constructed, and whose purpose itself is pointless. Not only does it miss the point, the point it misses doesn’t exist. It’s like having Tofurkey that neither looks like turkey nor is it constituted of tofu. COOL is a total sham. It is literally nothing but space on a server. But like so many human pursuits, we grunt forwards, hoping somehow that something means anything. COOL, though, definitely means nothing.

Read the rest of this entry »

But at least he’s grateful for it.

Thank you @phonesuit for the battery pack…can't go anywhere without it.. pic.twitter.com/N1OPXux4hm

— jordan pacheco (@JstyleP) July 26, 2013

Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night, Andrelton Simmons beat the Rockies with a walk-off triple.

One inquiring Twitter user wanted to know, How’s that happen?

@RobertJBaumann How the hell does one achieve a #walkoff 3B? I actually understand how a walkoff 2B is possible but a 3B? #Braves #ATL #MLB

— Brian Jones (@TheFantasyPronk) July 30, 2013

My immediate thought was that a walk-off triple would have a lot to do with base-out state, and by how many runs a team was trailing. In the case of Simmons’s triple, there were no outs with a runner, Dan Uggla, on first. If Uggla, who’s not a particularly fast runner, had been thrown out at the plate (there was a relay throw to home, but it wasn’t close: Uggla scored standing up), Simmons would have wanted to be in the best position possible for the next hitter to drive him in. Simmons was aware of that, maybe, and he was also aware that any throw would have to go to the plate, and he’s fast enough to take advantage of that and scoot along to third base. Taking that extra base didn’t matter in the end — the very nature of the walk-off triple is such that taking that final base never matters — but Simmons was showing the kind of awareness and hustle that’s a pleasure to see, even for fans who don’t obsess over things like hustling.

But. We still might want to know how common the walk-off triple is, and whether the context of Simmons’s game winner was typical for WOT.

Using the always amazing and often life-ruining Event Finder at Baseball-Reference, I easily generated the following, presumably comprehensive list of 141 instances since 1945 in which a game has ended on a triple:

Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times had a lovely piece yesterday on Ken Harrelson, White Sox broadcaster and sabermetric denier.  We at NotGraphs caught up with him yesterday evening, while he was putting on a pair of lead boots just in case gravity were to suddenly disappear, to get his thoughts on the banking industry:

The banking industry?  I remember when you could just go into a bank, ask for money, and they wouldn’t worry about all that crazy stuff, like checking your balance, or adding and subtracting.  You didn’t give people money because of how much they had in their accounts — you gave them money because you could see what kind of people they were, and whether they looked like people who would have money.  Too many good bankers have lost their jobs because they weren’t able to calculate interest rates, or determine whether a number was above or below zero.  Good bankers, who’d spent their career giving money to people, getting penalized just because all of sudden they were expected to know the difference between a number and a letter, or how to count.  Counting is nonsense — one of the biggest jokes I’ve ever seen.  A good banking man can look at a pile of money and know exactly how much is in there, or at least be close enough that the details don’t matter.  If you start distilling banking into dollars and cents, you’re making a huge mistake.  The numbers are ruining banking, I’m telling you.  Ruining it.  Now excuse me while I go push on the wall for a few minutes — it takes every one of us to make sure the Earth keeps on spinning, so I’m just trying to do my part.

Thanks, Ken.  Here’s to 38 more years of broadcasting, since you can’t trust those doctors to tell you how long a person’s lifespan is. You’ll be broadcasting — and making almost as much sense as you do now — for decades after those silly numbers on the heart rate monitor say you’re no longer breathing!

That last one is very confusing, I know.

NotGraphs reached out to Tino Martinez for some thoughts about hitting, coaching, Derek Dietrich, and bunny rabbits.

On hitting: “You’ve just got to make the f****** bat hit the f****** ball. That’s all there is to it. Pick up the f****** bat, swing it when the ball is coming, and, f***, you get a hit. It’s not that f****** difficult, and if you don’t understand, maybe you’ll get a better sense of it after I pick you up by the f****** neck and throw you against the f****** clubhouse wall. Also, you’ve got to watch out for the offspeed pitch.”

On being a coach: “I f****** love it. As a parent, I’m used to only having a couple of kids to f*** with, but now I have twenty-five. Even more if you count all those f****** good-for-nothing rookies who keep coming up to the f****** team. I’m a f****** legend to them, so even if I punch them in the face or kick them in the f****** crotch, they still worship me. I learned from my role model, former Yankees manager Idi Amin, that the way to get players to listen to you is force. A little force, a little tough love, and a little f****** baseball bat in the f****** skull. That’s all it takes to succeed.

On Derek Dietrich: “You mean I didn’t f****** kill him yet? I thought a little ***** like that would be f****** dead by now. I asked him to hit the ball the other way, and he kept on pulling it, so I took a baseball bat and **********************************************************************************************************************. Good kid, though. I think he has a bright future.”

On bunny rabbits: “They’re f****** losers.”

Thanks, Tino.

[Image: Tino demonstrating his trademark choking technique.]

Dear NotGraphs,

Paul

Paul,

I don’t know. Chad would probably say yes, based on what he told Ottoneu owners earlier this week, but I think there’s a more fundamental set of questions to ask about your hypothetical. How did you become the GM of a major league baseball team? Who did you replace, and how? And if you became a GM through nefarious means, should you be spending your time attempting to trade for Ryan Braun, or instead trying to cover your tracks and ensure you have a foolproof alibi.

For instance, did you club Brian Cashman over the head after you heard that he was trying to trade for 96-year-old Alfonso Soriano, and then wear his face as a mask on top of your own, fooling the world (and your fellow general managers) into thinking you were him? If you did do that, then I think this would probably be a great time to buy Ryan Braun, since the Yankees need some players who won’t be either suspended or Medicare-eligible in 2014. Of course, there would be no need to buy low, since the Yankees can afford to buy high.

Or did you pass Dayton Moore the same sleeping pill he has passed to the owners of the Royals, and quietly sneak into his office and take the seat at his desk? If so, I also think this would be a great time to trade for Ryan Braun, except that you probably won’t be permitted to take on his salary. Oh well. You tried. Maybe you can just build a farm system and eventually have a winning record in 11 or 12 years.

See, it’s very complicated. Also, why would the Brewers bother to sell low, since they’re not going anywhere this season anyway? I don’t expect there’s much reason for them to trade him. So I think you should probably spend your time as GM doing all sorts of other cool things, like helping more Cuban stars defect (actual question for readers: is Henry Urrutia keeper-worthy in an AL Scoresheet league? I’ve been offered him in a trade), or making waiver claims just for the heck of it.

Incidentally, if anyone else read this question and was wondering whether or not suspended players can be traded while suspended, initial Google results do not indicate a problem.

Good luck,
Jeremy

You can Ask NotGraphs too! If you have any questions, about baseball or otherwise, and want answers, about baseball or otherwise, feel free to send them my way.