Archive for Unreliable Source

Because I refuse to meditate upon his personal life for even a moment longer than is necessary, I’m unsure as to how the very profligate Dayn Perry not only (a) made his way to a site called Twit Amore — which site encourages visitors to “Discover who they love on Twitter” — but also (b) decided to engage said website in the service of that Discovery.

As the image above indicates, however, Perry did both of those things — and the results, we will say, are really of benefit to no one. If Perry has ever loved the author, he has done so only with the aid of a preposition — which is to say, he has loved on and astride and towards the author, but never just the author himself, in the accusative form of the noun.

Earlier tonight, your foul-smelling scribe wrote a post inspired by a Don Wilson baseball card in which the subject appeared vaguely distressed. I riffed on this in the long-banal manner familiar to those endure me and then moved along. Then I read the first two comments to the post, which can best be described as containing “soft yet earnest outrage.”

“Don Wilson,” I said to myself. “Something awful must have happened to this man.”

So I went to Wikipedia and read, to my mounting chagrin, this passage:

On January 5, 1975, Wilson died at his Fondren Southwest Houston home he shared with his wife, daughter and son. Wilson was found in the passenger seat of his brown Ford Thunderbird inside the garage with the engine running. The garage was attached to the house, which caused his son, Alex, to die also and his daughter and wife to be hospitalized in a coma. The official cause of death states that Wilson’s death was accidental.

Egad. This is a grim bit of baseball history of which I was pathetically ignorant. As such, the harm was not intended.

The post was subsequently removed, not — as has been the case so often in the past — by the administrator, but rather by me. My apologies to all who have witnessed my buffoonery.

This latest incident brings us to tonight’s poll …

If you thought the Yuniesky Betancourt news was huge…

While the pundits may have already handed the National League East crown to Washington or the newly double-Upton’d Atlanta club, the Philadelphia Phillies are not going to go quietly into the night. While Ruben Amaro may not have made the sort of suprise-Cliff-Lee signing splash so far this season, observers knew something was up when he first acquired Rangers Legend Michael Young to play third and Delmon Young, who was a top prospect as recently as some current college seniors were in high school. Seeing the rival club from Georgia taking advantage of brotherly love, well, that was just too much for Amaro to take. There was only one possible course of action. This leaked 2013 promo poster (exclusive to NotGraphs) tells the tale:

Phillies General Manager Ruben Amaro is quite confident:

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We caught up with robot expert, rapper and part-time chicken enthusiast Kool Keith and picked his brain about the robot umpires that are surely on their way to baseball. What follows is a summary of his expertise on the subject, with commentary.

• Voicemail, pagers / These are the things that robots carry

Anything as arcane as pagers is possible in the backwaters of Major League Baseball, although why they would need to carry voicemail is an open question.

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Minneapolis — Considerable speculation has flooded the internet blogs regarding Albert Pujols’s motives for throwing his glove at Angels teammate Erick Aybar following the club’s 6-2 victory over the Twins on Wednesday (box).

In point of fact, the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has learned that the gesture was in response to an ongoing argument the pair have regarding the utility of deconstructionist thought.

“Pujols, he doesn’t recognize the internal contradictions of philosophical discourse,” Aybar said when reached for comment. “The moment we attempt to utilize rhetoric in the service of describing metaphysical reality, we have obscured reality.

Said Pujols in response: “I regard Aybar’s claims only as an attempt to deliberately obscure discourse and nothing else. He argues against language until it no longer exists.

“So how I do refute him? I throw my glove. ‘Deconstruct that,’ I said. Q.E.D.”

Are you wondering what Toronto Blue Jays right-hander Sergio Santos is doing whilst on the Disabled List?

Well, the NotGraphs infamous and dowdy Investigative Reporting Investigation Team has been hot on the trail of the erstwhile closer, and has discovered that Santos is the namesake of the Andrew WK-owned Santos Party House club/venue/lounge in lower Manhattan. During his recovery, Santos been hobnobbing with AWK at various of the club’s events:

“We are your mother-father, we are your final friend…”

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Probably all of my NotGraphs comrades, not to mention you, the erudite reader, have already read The Art of Fielding, a novel by Chad Harbach. The lovely website Poets & Pitchers hosted a reading group for the book when it came out last fall, to which NotGraphs heroes Carson Cistulli and Dayn Perry contributed.

I, a slacker, began reading said just this past weekend. So far (175 pages in), I am most taken with “the book within the book,” a collection of Zen-like adages with the same title as the novel, written by fictitious Hall-of-Fame shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez (who is at least a little bit based on Ozzie Smith). The central mantra of the book within the book, at least for character Henry Skrimshander, seems to be:

26. The shortstop is a source of stillness at the center of the defense. He projects his stillness and his teammates respond.

Of course, similar texts exist in our world:
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The Major League Baseball season is long, and, theoretically, there’s a reason for that even beyond making the league and owners a ton of money: to ensure that the best teams win out in the long run; i.e., to mitigate the effects of short-term luck.

At the same time, Commissioner Bud Selig has recently proposed and pushed through the addition of a second wild card team from each league. The extra spot makes the results of the long season a bit less meaningful, as a team that would have otherwise been an also-ran could have a hot September, nab a wild card, win the one-game playoff, and go all the way with your mom!.

Realizing that he has made a mistake — that only the very best teams should play for the pennants — but also realizing that it’s too late to revoke the second wild card, the Commish has decided to correct this by significantly amending the regular season schedule: he’s borrowed the idea of “running it twice” from the world of high stakes poker.

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The Miami Marlins gave away a “Marlins Commemorative Opening Night Lanyard” (more like lameyard, amirite?) to fans who attended the premier regular season game at Marlins Stadium last night.

In case you were wondering what other teams are giving away in their respective home openers today, NotGraphs has compiled a list:
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Faithful reader Tim Nicodemus has brought our attention to this story about a new Skip Schumaker baseball card featuring a whole lotta squirrel, and very little of Skip Schumaker.

Truth is, the Rally Squirrel card is only the beginning. Here at Notgraphs, we have already received the following sneak preview of the next few cards in this history-making series of “NOT THE FACE”

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