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I was doing some important R.A. Dickey research when I stumbled across the Amazon page for his autobiography, Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball.

And while the first few screens of “Customers Who Bought This Book Also Bought…” links make good sense, you keep clicking and you get some strange entries:

Justin Halpern’s I Suck At Girls

Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy’s The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity

Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (“Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected also that someone had been blackmailing her. Then, tragically, came the news that she had taken her own life with a drug overdose.”)

Alex Stone’s Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind (“From the back rooms of New York City’s century-old magic societies to cutting-edge psychology labs; three-card monte on Canal Street to glossy Las Vegas casinos; Fooling Houdini recounts Stone’s quest to join the ranks of master magicians.”)

The only sensible conclusion: Amazon thinks R.A. Dickey, dumped and alone, is going to become President of the United States and murder someone with his mind.

One Twomey-ny

Love Grove

Addison And Subtraction

Wacha-Wacha!

Lucas Sims Life

The Royal Tissenbaums
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Baseball America sums up what happened with the 15 draft picks from the first ten rounds who were still unsigned 15 minutes before the deadline this past Friday at 5PM.

This is not an excerpt from that article:

Kevin Gausman (Orioles, first round, No. 4 overall): Finished eating sandwich. Casually picked up his cell phone for the first time in a few weeks. Saw 92 missed calls from the 410 area code. Listened to the voice mails. Checked his watch. 30 seconds left. Called back, and agreed to sign for $4.32 million, apologized for having his phone on silent since June.

Mark Appel (Pirates, first round, No. 8 overall): Read a blog post about Stanford adding a new flavor of soft-serve to its cafeteria for the fall. Added this piece of information to his pros and cons list, and decided this pushed it over the top. So long, $3.8 million. Hello, Advanced Topics in Macroeconomic Theory.

Lucas Giolito (Nationals, first round, No. 16 overall): Carefully reattached the prosthetic arm he has been using since the unfortunate elbow incident, made sure his sleeve was covering the evidence, signed onto Skype, and did a video chat with the Nationals, informing them he was willing to sign for $2,925,000.

From The Boston Globe:

“I’m the only Hall of Famer whose number has not been retired [by the team whose cap is shown on the plaque],” Boggs said. “Fergie [Jenkins] and I were the last two, but now Fergie is in [with the Cubs]. That leaves me. It’s disappointing.”

We called Jeff Idelson, president of the Hall of Fame, to ask whether all living Hall of Famers have had their numbers retired, and the research was ongoing.

Now, I don’t personally feel like doing this research, but surely this can’t be some massive project that takes more than ten minutes. There is a list of all living Hall of Famers. There is a list of all of baseball’s retired numbers.

Okay, you know what? This won’t even take ten minutes. So I’m going to do what apparently the Baseball Hall of Fame is unable to do. I’m going to scroll through the list.

Six minutes later. Uh, Barry Larkin, but maybe he shouldn’t count since he won’t officially be inducted until next week. And– Goose Gossage! Gossage was inducted as a Yankee. His number hasn’t been retired by anyone. At least not according to Wikipedia. So, Goose Gossage, you should write a letter to The Boston Globe (and Wade Boggs) complaining that you’ve been forgotten. Wade Boggs, you shouldn’t really complain, because the Rays retired your number, so, hey, that’s something. And Jeff Idelson of the Baseball Hall of Fame, it took me six minutes to do this research, and I don’t actually work for the Hall of Fame. So I think you (and The Boston Globe’s sports section) are very, very lazy.

In this chapter of Advanced Lipreading, we’re considering some of the difficulties posed to lipreaders by non-native speakers of English. Below are three such real-life examples, with Miami Marlins baseball manager Ozzie Guillen.

Guillen is a native of Venezuela, and, while he’s a fluent speaker of English, has preserved many of the phonological traits of South American Spanish, which can present ambiguities in the labiodental fricative, for example, and the palato-alveolar sibilant — and similar distortions in the corresponding visemes of those sounds.

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Kevin Youkilis, who ain’t too good at grammars, will return to Boston for the first time since being traded to the Chicago White Sox just over three weeks ago.

Well, it’s not exactly the first time. About a week after being traded he flew back to Boston to retrieve some personal items. “Yeah, I forgot to pack underwear, and my best toothbrush was still all in my Boston condo. I had to all feed the fish and stuff.” During this trip, he did not see any of his old teammates, he said, but he did stop for a nice Boston-style frappe at Toscanini’s. “Ain’t nothing like it,” he said, staring wistfully off to the east.

On the day trip in question, Youk enjoyed a double scoop of lemon
pistachio ice cream in a sugar cone in addition to his frappe.

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TV’s latest reality smash pairs modern-day stars of the diamond with their doppelgängers from a bygone era (as determined by Baseball-Reference’s Similarity Scores). Sparks fly and hijinks ensue as these unlikely partners must overcome their off-the-field differences to compete together for prizes galore!

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Sunday, 11AM. “I know, I’ll write a post for tomorrow about the anticipation on Twitter regarding Ben Sheets’s upcoming start for the Braves.”

Sunday, 11:05AM. I type into the Twitter search bar: Ben Sheets. (And, really, I did type it in correctly. Double-checked and everything.)

A few results:

omg im folding my brother’s ben linens and his sheets are like brown but kind of satiny and wow they are pretty pimpin

— americosmo(@kawaiianpizza) July 8, 2012

Top 3 most inconvenient things: painting the nails on your right hand, realizing you have to pee after you’re comfy in bed, & fitted sheets

— DrinkDrankDrunk (@DrunkAtUD) July 15, 2012

80% of all textiles, fabrics, clothes, linen, drapes, bed sheets, etc. were made from #hemp until the Cotton Gin was invented in the 1820s.

— iStrainGuide (@iStrainGuide) July 9, 2012

What kind of Hallmark card says “Sorry I perioded on the bed sheets in your guest room”?

— Amelia Erfart(@Qu4rtKn33) July 9, 2012

Thanks, Twitter.

Readers, I think it comes as no surprise to anyone that this is a dull period in the sporting world. Meaningful baseball hasn’t been played since last weekend, the football preseason is weeks away, and soccer remains to be really stupid. It has gotten so bad in my household, I’ve been ceaselessly checking to see if my local basketball team has signed something called a Nic Batum.

Last night I was re-watching an episode of Hillbilly Handfishin’ on Animal Planet, and wishing desperately that there were baseball games to be seen. It seemed as if I were destined to spend yet another night of despair at the bottom of an absinthe bottle, when I got an idea.

The 2012 All-Star Game was a bit of a snoozer, frankly. Though it is has been historically tough to glean enjoyment out of an All-Star Game in general, this year seemed even worse. I chose to play a reenactment of the game in my head, inserting interesting events where I deemed fit. I was not writing this down at the time, but the following is my best recollection of what transpired.

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When last we checked in with Dale Thayer, he was just about to knock on your door and ask to use your bathroom real quick.

“Dude, you in there? Gotta pee!”

Since then, Dale lost his job as the Padres’ closer and was bumped down to the team’s seventh inning guy, where he’s doing ok, he guesses, but he really wanted to maybe make the All-Star team, get his BBQ groove on in KC.

Alas, Dale ended up having the full four days off, and decided to take a tour of the ballparks that he’s visited as a player, but never seen from a fan’s perspective. First on the list was Milwaukee’s Miller Park.
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