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Without delving too deeply into what it means to be a fan, I think we can recognize that one develops something analogous to a romantic relationship with players and teams. As delusional as it is to believe people on the ballfield can return any of the affection you direct them, it still hurts to be cheated on. It doesn’t feel like Braun cheated, it feels like he cheated on me. A certain part of my heart wants nothing more than to clutch a sequin-framed 3×5 portrait of Braunie and rock back and forth, mascara running, as “Love Hurts” by Nazareth blasts from my laptop speakers. An autographed University of Miami Braun jersey smoulders in the fireplace. Scribbled sharpie covers my caricatured Braun tramp stamp. My children Ryan and Joseph bang on the front door begging to be let in and fed. My wife, Braunhilda, rots in six separate garbage bags in dumpsters distributed randomly across Dane County. I want to have, you know, a typical breakup reaction to this whole situation.

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“I don’t understand why no one is signing up for my Photoshop* classes. It doesn’t make any sense.”

*Actually, GIMP, which seems really powerful, if only I knew what the heck I was doing.

I assume the one-armed man is Johnny Damon.

According to Bill Madden of the New York Daily News, Alex Rodriguez “is the Whitey Bulger of baseball, the most wanted criminal in the game’s history, more condemned by MLB authorities tan Shoeless Joe Jackson…Pete Rose…or Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds.”

Indeed, Whitey Bulger ran organized crime in Boston for roughly a  decade, murdering almost indiscriminately.  After being on the run from 1994-2011, he was captured and has been charged with 19 murders and is currently on trial.

That’s a pretty apt comparison, actually. We may never know how many deaths Alex Rodriguez is really responsible for, but here’s a list of those in whose death or disappearances he’s most certainly had a hand:

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Dear Hopeless Joe,

Cheers,
B. Todriguez

Mr. Todriguez,

Thanks for writing. It’s a lost art. Writing, I mean. Kind of amazing anyone does it anymore, with video games and the Internet and all of that. Also paper cuts. That’s a real disincentive. I hate paper cuts. But I should get to your question. Yes, watching baseball is an escape from everyday life, but even escapes from everyday life are sometimes similarly bleak. After all, they have to be believable. Maybe you need an escape from the escapes from your life. Have you tried the fire escape? I think it’s high enough off the ground that you have no chance of survival if you jump. Not that I’m telling you to jump. I watch baseball as an escape from my everyday life, too. Did I ever tell you where I escaped from? They’re still looking for me.

Cautiously,
Hopeless Joe

If you have a question for Hopeless Joe, he already knows it.

I set up an interview with Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo to figure out how much of a Mets fan he was. If you know the story of the band’s name, you know that there’s a link to the team. And there are a few other clues that link the band to the hapless Mets. But every fan has a different level of engagement with the sport.

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I recently downloaded MLB.com’s Home Run Derby™ game. I am very bad at it. After playing dozens of rounds, I’ve never hit more than four HR, never advanced to the second round. Like with any of the copious examples of failure in my life, my lack of skill with regards to this game does not surprise me; as with any failure, this one saddens me nevertheless.

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The New York Times reported on Friday that Nate Silver is leaving The New York Times to join the ESPN/Disney/ABC empire. He is expected to contribute to “Olbermann,” the new late-night ESPN2 talk show to be hosted by Chris Berman Keith Olbermann. But surely there will be more.

** Nate Silver Presents “30.172 for 30.465,” a more mathematically-accurate film series celebrating numerical moments in the history of sports, like the amazing technology that measures home run distances, or estimating how many pounds C.C. Sabathia weighs.

** ABC’s “Bet on Your Baby,” now featuring accurate spreads.

** Statman and Robin, a new animated superhero series voiced by Nate Silver and Robin Roberts. Statman will apprehend statistical criminals, like whoever was responsible for the Windows 8 advertisement featuring the nonsense ERA vs. Lefties stat.

** Disney’s Statistically Accurate Movie Remakes: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, plus or minus Two Dwarfs; Three Pigs, Each 20% Littler than the Average Pig; One Hundred and Seventeen Era-Adjusted Dalmations; An Estimated 19,834 Leagues Under The Sea, Depending On The Tide; and 46% Chance of Snow Dogs.

** Kids in the National Spelling Bee will now be properly ranked. (Gosh, that’s been an oversight for years. How am I supposed to make my fantasy spelling league picks without having a sensible ranking system in place?)

** “The Statistical Wizards of Waverly Place,” coming to The Disney Channel.

** ESPN replaces March Madness with a National Burrito Tournament.

Dayn Perry and Carson Cistulli — NotGraphs heartthrobs, both — have done me and the entire city of Milwaukee a favor by agreeing to “read” their “work” tomorrow, Saturday the 20th of July, at Woodland Pattern Book Center (known as the poetry bookstore of the Midwest, just as Perry and Cistulli are known as the poets of the online baseball community).

A 6pm start helps to maximize the leisure time both preceding and following the reading, without which neither of these men would be fit to give their public what it wants, i.e. a hearty and thorough loin-ravaging.

Perry’s chapbook, Drinking With Boileryard Clarke, will be available for purchase for $10. Half of each purchase will be donated to Woodland Pattern, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization; the other half will go toward enabling Mr. Perry.

If you’re within traveling distance of Milwaukee, please join us for what promises to be an event.

If you are Eno Sarris and are planning to attend, be sure to wear a protective dong covering.

Questions, regrets, and excitements can be directed to @RobertJBaumann on Twitter.

For some dumb reason I’m writing another post about COOL scores, a metric that has the exact opposite intentions as NERD. A metric that holds almost no merit, and would hold no merit  had I not figured out how to calculate z-scores in Excel. And yet, this vacuous metric so resonated with a certain Carson Cistulli that he bought me two beers and offered me the chance to write more dumb things for this dumb website. Dumb dumb dumb.

By way of introducing myself I’ll include a relevant and thoroughly disgusting self-portrait that I snapped in the Verona Public Library, just now.

My jungle de bouche is a bit unkempt, but I believe in leaving room for improvement, especially in terms of kemptness. I’ve previously appeared in the commenting section at NotGraphs, albeit rarely, as user Johnny Hummusbeard; I successfully suggested Iago’s Balls in the Nickname Seeks Player series. I own a Pontiac.

On to COOL scores for pitchers! COOL, or the Coefficient Of On-field Lustre, is a useless number shittily designed to approximate how enjoyable a baseball game might be to someone with no interest in baseball. Do you prefer calling your bff’s “chica” and texting solely with emojis? You might be the target audience for COOL. Are you an orthodox nun? COOL’s for you, babe. Are you an undead wight emerging from the depths of a Hopi burial mound? Feast on some COOL. You’re an avocado? Nice, let’s make guaCOOLmole. Etc.

COOL for pitchers (or pCOOL) is another step toward developing a COOL game score. This way you and I can say, “Hey, come view this spectacle!” and actually deliver said spectacle. Remember that pCOOL has no bearing on a pitcher’s actual skill. In fact, some factors that benefit a pitcher’s pCOOL score are harmful to a pitcher’s career. This makes pitchers with high COOL scores something fleeting and disastrous, yet transfixing, like, say, Alexander the Great’s invasion of India. There are more notes on COOL for pitchers, but I’ll cover those below. Let’s just dive in, like kids in a horror movie skinny dipping, and see how gruesome it gets.

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A man, wearing nothing but an unadorned white baseball jersey and a gray mesh baseball cap, careens his Winnebago down a desolate highway in the Arizona desert. In the passenger seat, another man—either passed out or passed beyond—also wears an unmarked baseball jersey, his head on the dashboard. Two bodies, even more likely dead, slide across the RV floor among loose free-weights and other exercise equipment until the vehicle veers into a ditch. The hyperventilating driver, Turk Bass, climbs out, swaps his blank jersey for a vintage Rickey Henderson Oakland A’s jersey that is still on a hanger dangling off the side view mirror (his pants are long since gone), then re-enters the van to retrieve a video camera. He records a cryptic, handheld farewell to his son. “I just want you to know that no matter how it may look, I only had you in my heart.” He turns to face the oncoming sirens.

*

Flashback to the eve of Turk’s birthday, three weeks earlier. At dusk, Turk exercises on a mini-stairmaster in front of a plaque commemorating his contributions to some Nobel Prize worthy research. At breakfast the next morning, his henpecking wife Selma hands him a plate of eggs topped by veggie bacon spelling “50.” Afterwards, Turk drops off Junior—whose arm is in a sling—at a physical rehab clinic before heading to the local high school where he works as an ineffectual chemistry teacher and an assistant coach for the varsity baseball team.

Later that day, one of Turk’s more disrespectful students—also the hotshot shortstop on the varisty team—witnesses him moonlighting at a car wash for additional income. The encounter becomes even more belittling when the student laughingly photographs his teacher wiping down the tires.

A now humiliated Turk returns home where Selma has organized a surprise birthday party for him. Among the guests is Turk’s gregarious brother-in-law, Rog, an investigative lawyer and spokesperson for the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball. Several guests at the party have gathered around the television to watch Rog’s segment on an ESPN broadcast, wherein he defends the validity of the recent suspension of several star players. Rog explains that, should the suspensions be appealed by the MLB Players’ Association, he’ll have two pieces of “knock out” evidence: detailed financial records of the company that supposedly provided steroids to the players in question, and testimony from a recently retired player, who has confided to Rog that he facilitated connections and helped funnel steroids to dozens of players—and also has a major gambling problem.

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