Archive for Uncategorized

Here’s the latest in a series that takes a look at some NotGraphs reader blogs and points you toward some interesting things I find. Read about how this series started in this post.

1. Clean and simple, and a very nice scroll-through, Dante Bichette’s Inferno features pictures of baseball cards and quick factoids. As the Red Sox trade their entire team away… a reminder that hitting coach Dave Magadan’s lifetime .390 OBP ranks #100 all-time.

2. A celebration of the long-term relationship between the Braves and Peter Moylan. Can you name the seven relievers since 2006 who have made more appearances with one team than Moylan? Two are named in the post.

3. An interesting comparison of player height at different positions. Did you know that right fielders are the tallest outfielders?

4. Great headline: Red Sox Decide To Quit Playing Baseball, Might Open a “Laundromat or Something” Say Team Owners. And the post ain’t bad either. “If anyone turns on NESN in the next few days after having avoided the Internet, it will be like watching Scrubs after the show went to ABC, with Turk and JD nowhere to be found.”

5. Also from the blog listed at #4, a link to this interesting Paris Review piece about Rays AAA manager Charlie Montoyo.

6. A post about baseball jargon from 1943. Seriously:

Because the Texas-Leaguer caused such exasperation for fielders, in 1943 if one occurred during a game, sports writers around the nation could describe it as a “Sheeny Mike, banjo, humpback liner, plunker, Japanese liner, drooper, looper, special, leaping Lena or a percentage hit.” Leaving aside the somewhat racist connotations of the “Japanese liner,” and the fact that I have absolutely no idea what half of these phrases mean, they are still undeniably entertaining.

7. Finally, highlights from a radio interview with Lou Gehrig.

News yesterday that Orioles prospect L.J. Hoes will be playing for the Mesa Solar Sox in the Arizona Fall League. That adds another area code to the list of area codes in which the Orioles have assigned L.J. Hoes.

Observe:

As usual, click to embiggen.

Who is this baseball player?

Without using any type of fancy search method, peruse these images and type in your answer at the end, via NotGraphs Advanced Poll Technology (NGAPT™).

Many thanks to my buddy LAC3 for the idea. I didn’t do it justice.

Obviously the one on the left here.

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“@zombeels: @mrlecure you suck.” couldn’t agree more, tonight was not my finest, cost us the game. I’ll do better the next time

— Sam LeCure (@mrLeCure) August 19, 2012

Bob Ross.

Who is he?

Major player in the PBS golden years and landscape painter extraordinaire? Freunde to all who would have him via the tele-waves? Creator of happy little trees, happy little clouds?

Or, Major League Baseball player, pitcher for the Washington Senators in 1950, ’51, and the Philadelphia Phillies in ’56? Purveyor, it seems, of sad little fastballs, sad little curves, plenty many walks, sad few strikeouts?

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Colon Leaves a Black Mark on the Sport

Oakland Gets Mandatory Colonostomy

Roids Found in Swollen Colon

Colon Blown Out in Oakland

Is 50 Games Enough Punishment for A’s Colon?

Dirty Colon Not Fooling Anybody

A’s get caught with a Colon Full of PEDs

and the winner:

Colon Busted by MLB Probe

Inspired by the work of my colleague Patrick Dubuque last Friday, especially by the phrase “cognizant that our identities are really just a collection of our obligations,” I myself would like to much less subtly suggest that our identities are really just a collection of pop cultural associations.

Based on that premise, my identity is probably comprised of equal parts Mrs. Doubtfire and The Diabolical Biz Markie. Here at NotGraphs, we hope that within a generation our readers’ identities will be dictated solely by the sad carnival of GIFs and other art works, memes, “research,” jokes, writing styles, and the alternatively crude/gentlepersonly/apocalyptic sensibility contained here at the site.

With all these things in mind, I would like to present Brandon Phillips doing the “Mudd Foot,” a dance created by the Diabolical Biz himself, in reference to the homophonic Fat Albert character, Mudfoot.

“It’s an animated dance for my employment.”

The GIF will make you ill or send you into seizure, as many things on NotGraphs might do (e.g. many of Carson’s posts). The Bizzy stylings will make you nostalgic for simpler times, when one could get on tha mic and be genuinely weird — as many things at NotGraphs might do. Finally, the image of ol’ Mudfoot will help replace your memories of grandparents’ faces with the image of the Colonel getting served, the memory of their voices with the sound of Bob Uecker’s, the memory of their elderly smells with the imagined smell of Dick Allen’s cigarette smoke wafting up from a dugout.

So, play the YouTube video that’s embedded after the jump, watch Brandon Phillips do the Mudfoot. When you need a break, gaze upon ol’ Mudfoot telling a tale. Let your identity be one with NotGraphs…

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Recently while gazing self-pleasuringly at the Pitch Type leaderboards, I had a spasm of analytical curiosity. (Don’t worry, these don’t last long.) Who sees the fastest fastballs? I asked myself. The simple answer is just a sort away: Jose Bautista, with an FBv of 92.5. There are no fewer than four Yankees in the top eight, led by Alex Rodriguez, who has faced heaters this year averaging 92.4 mph. But this isn’t so remarkable, I realized, as it might look at first. After all, A-Rod & Co. (as well as Joey Bats) happen to inhabit the hardest-throwing division in baseball, with power pitchers like David Price, Matt Moore, and Jon Lester padding those averages. What would this leaderboard look like if we somehow accounted for that?

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Kind sir,

Warmest regards,
Hurricane Superfly

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On Monday, I unveiled Part One of an advanced study. Workingly titled “Cool or Lame? Estimating the Relative Appreciation of Baseball Players,” or something like that, the study sprung from a simple impulse: the craving to know just to whom, in the history of this sport I love, I ought to pledge my fanhood. Although it was a selfish impulse, I have thought, too, of the children. Just as our teenaged selves realized, in the course of our primitive sociopolitical maneuverings, that it might behoove us to spurn (say) Coldplay* in favor of some more exclusive taste, today’s youth surely seek that privileged knowledge that will empower them to transcend their Jeter-jerseyed milieux. Herein, then, I attempt not only to secure that knowledge, but to quantify the sh*t out of it.

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