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Last night, Red Sox OF Darnell McDonald made a great catch on a fly ball hit by Blue Jays 2B Kelly Johnson.

It was so good, that it made seven of ten Red Sox fans very happy — if this photo is to be extrapolated from, that is:

Or, there, now it’s ten of ten:

I’ve never seen such a happy fan base. Good job, Darnell.

The ’89 Indians turned out pretty well, for a team that was expressly built for failure. They turned out a lot better than the ’03 Tigers, a team that was presumably designed to win games, but only managed to do so 43 times (oddly enough, right at replacement level — meaning Detroit could have stripped payroll to $10M, rounded up a bunch of scrubs, and given themselves a good chance at a better year). Even the ’03 Tigers, though, were a terrifying baseball juggernaut compared to the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, whose season reads like a screenplay for Major League 4, only without any semblance of a happy ending. The Spiders’ owners shipped all their best players to their other team in St. Louis, replaced them with a bunch of dudes named Crazy Schmit and Highball Wilson and Harry Colliflower, publicly stated their intention to run the club as “a sideshow,” and scheduled 112 games on the road after the rest of the league decided they’d rather put hot coals in their jockstraps than come to Cleveland. Somehow they still managed to win more than a tenth of their games, a testament to the randomness of baseball.

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Dearest NotGraphs,

Best,
A Young Revolutionary

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So this is how it ends. Will McDonald (now ExRoyalsReview on Twitter), longtime mainstay of Royals Review, has decided to call it a day after eight years of blogging about the Royals. During that time, Royals Review grew from just some guy’s blog to a team site on the fledgling SB Nation network to perhaps the most popular Royals blog around.

With the management formerly of Royals Authority taking the helm, things should be in good hands. Still, it is hard for many of us to imagine following the Royals without the incentive of knowing the referents for Will’s next brilliantly-written combination of anger and comedy. How will we get through the season without more Royals Bibliomancy or Mitch Maier’s Letters Home From Baseball Camp, or expressions of irritation over Royals prospect Wil Myers spelling his first name incorrectly.

Will has been a huge inspiration. Don’t hold it against him, but, while I never “worked” at Royals Review, I probably would not be blogging today if it were not for reading Will’s stuff. Will’s posts garnered attention far beyond Royals fandom — I think the first “big break” his blog received was when Keith Law linked to it in one of his ESPN chats. I cannot summarize Will’s work, but that is the nature of all good art. So as a tribute to Will (or “Freneau,” a moniker he adopted in recent times in tribute to a poet from the era of the Revolutionary War) and as a public service, I will briefly go through just a few of McDonald’s best moments of the last few years.

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The well-seasoned NotGraphs aesthete is no doubt aware of Craig Robinson’s site flipflopflyball.com. Mr. Robinson is known (and should be even more well-known) for his insightful and beautiful infographics about our beloved game, amongst other things.

Some time ago, I was looking at the “First and Last” section of the site, which visually represents several players’ initial and final plate appearance in the Major Leagues; I was taken with how perfectly some of them seemed to encapsulate the careers of the players involved. Below are a few of my favorites, with brief commentary:
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Diamondbacks: Willie Bloomquist (who actually has a higher OPS, so, really, it’s a steal).

Braves: Julio Q. Teheran, cousin of prospect Julio A. Teheran.

Cubs: Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer, and PLEASE CAN WE COME BACK TO THE RED SOX? PLEASE?

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Ok, so after a full year of working in my basement office at Woodland Pattern Book Center, I finally noticed this decal on a (possibly nonfunctional) heating unit:

Download, print as stickers, and apply where appropriate.

Of course, I immediately interpreted the phrase with my baseball brain: “The Heater You Can Live With” is a heater (a fastball, and, in my mind, a four-seam fastball, specifically) that is passable, that gets the job but is not overwhelming; a heater that chips in but upon which a pitcher is not overly reliant; a heater that, looks like the average of all heaters in the game, so as not garner attention, but like I said, is still capable of getting an out, or setting up other pitches, or even causing the occasional whiff.
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Now that Youk has been traded to the White Sox, I thought I’d take a look at the other offers that teams had on the table…

Orioles: Bullpen catcher / batting practice pitcher Rudy Arias.

Indians: Charles Nagy.

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Who are these two twins from other mothers?

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