We believe, and by we I mean right-thinking North Americans, that mustaches and spectacles are inherently good. Indeed, one Dayn Perry scours the Internet day and night searching for the finest in spectacle- and mustache-related content. He has made NotGraphs your one-stop shop for spectacles, mustaches, and spectacles plus mustaches. Veritably, this site is the world’s foremost authority on spectacles and mustaches.
But, alas, I am here as the cold shower to your clearly aroused state, regarding said facial accoutrements. As my dear grandmother likes to remind me when I steal her prescription medications, too much of a good thing is bad for you. To wit, I ask…nay, demand…you behold the evolution of one Kenneth Allen Phelps:
I break no news when I tell you that the sign of a successful and vigorous gentleman is a carefully cultivated smoking habit. The modern gentleman does four things daily and with tidal regularity: ties a flawless double-windsor on the first attempt, makes love to ladies, conducts business, and smokes delicious cigarettes.
Given these incontrovertible facts, it should come as no surprise that the mellow, rejuvenating taste of Camel was central to Joe DiMaggio’s lionized hitting streak. Indisputable photographic evidence:
If the reader of these panels is left with the impression that Mr. DiMaggio’s choice in cigarettes had much to with his fame and material uplift, then that’s because Mr. DiMaggio’s choice in cigarettes damn well had much to do with his fame and material uplift.
It strikes me — as it surely will all sensible, right-wise folk — that, so long as we’re in the business of making schoolchildren memorize and recite things like the Pledge of Allegiance and various series of Arabic numerals, the Sons and Daughters of America can surely spare the time and brain space to commit to memory these sacred utterances:
My cigarette is the milder brand with less nicotine in the smoke — Camel. I’ve smoked them for eight years. They always taste great.
Remember, Sons and Daughters of America: You don’t have to smoke Camel, but you do have to smoke. That is, if you want nice things.
I’m not writing, here, about the stat that looks the best on your fantasy team’s roster. I’m writing about the most aesthetically-pleasing number that has ever appeared on the back of a baseball card. And here it is.
See it? I am of course referring to the bold, italicized 2.76 ERA that Jimmy Key led the American League with in 1987. It’s fast. It’s confident, but not arrogant, as if to imply “I know didn’t have to face George Bell and Jesse Barfield this season.” It even sounds good when spoken out loud: “two-seventy-six.”
Got something better? I don’t think a better looking number can be unearthed, but if you think you have one, leave it in the comments.
The most excellent quote comes to us from Seattle’s The News Tribune, via the foul-mouthed, but always informative, Drunk Jays Fans. Here’s another:
Some of those [2011] numbers don’t look so hot, but if you look at the nerd stats, I’m having a pretty good year. I’m not always sure how they come to those conclusions, but I like them.
Again: Me too. Math is crazy. And I can’t help but wonder whether Morrow knows he scores a perfect 10 according to the most recent Pitcher NERD Leaderboards of Pleasure.
I can picture Morrow, though, almost vividly, in his downtown Toronto condo, on his laptop, perusing FanGraphs.com.
“Honey, guess whose FIP is now under 3.00, and good for sixth in the American League? Beast mode! And, whoa, my SIERA’s third in the AL, behind only Verlander and Sabathia. Double beast mode!”
Brandon Morrow is one of those guys with electric “stuff.” Now, I don’t know about you, but I love that the word “stuff,” so banal, is used to describe a pitcher who throws a baseball a remarkable number of which ways, who makes a baseball dance, who strikes out the most batters per nine innings in all of the game. But more than just his “stuff,” Morrow, as evidenced, is a highly educated man. He’s like me, like you, like us. He appreciates advanced baseball statistics. He’s a nerd. Brandon Morrow is the thinking man’s A.J. Burnett.
What follows represents an instance of the genre known as Armchair Sociology. “Neither science, nor literature: it’s Armchair Sociology!”
For a number of reasons — perhaps because of my stylish Latin Teacher glasses or my laissez-faire attitude towards “showering” “regularly” or my constant preference for style to the exclusion, almost entirely, of substance — friend and boss Dave Cameron has made a habit of referring to yours truly as a “hipster.” Nor does it appear as though this practice is isolated to Mr. Cameron. Some cursory googling of the search terms “Cistulli” and “hipster” reveals multiple returns (generally good-natured) within the baseball nerd community.
It’s a problematic word, hipster, insofar as there’s no one who voluntarily identifies as one*. This makes any earnest use of the word suspicious. If some adjectives are flatly descriptive (tall, clear), while others represent judgments of value (generous, jerk-faced), hipster belongs firmly in the latter category, and the connotations are almost all negative.
*Indeed, if such a person exists, he or she should know that a hipster would never call himself a hipster. Catch-22 and all that, innit?
It’s problematic, secondly, when applied to yours truly. For, while the hipster regards himself — in Mark Greif’s words from a pleasantly rigorous piece in the New York Times — as “a natural aristocrat of taste,” it’s the case that I, Carson Cistulli, am just an actual, real-live aristocrat.
I recognize that many Americans have never seen an aristocrat up close, let alone talked with and/or made a study of one. As such, it’s forgivable that people would make such a mistake. It’s only when playing tennis against (and witnessing the fluid topspin groundstrokes of) the aristocrat or gazing through his library — full of Loeb Classics and P.G. Wodehouse novels — that his true nature is revealed.
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Greif provides another definition of hipsters that is relevant to most of the readers who’ve found their way to this site, describing them (i.e. hipsters) as those who “play at being the inventors or first adopters of novelties: pride comes from knowing, and deciding, what’s cool in advance of the rest of the world.”
When it comes to hitting, it’s been night and day for Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton this season — and the reigning American League MVP has a theory as to why.
He has blue eyes.
Under the sun, Hamilton’s numbers are dim. He is batting .122 (6-or-49) with no home runs, four RBIs and eight walks. He also has 17 strikeouts and a .429 OPS.
At night, it’s a different story. Hamilton is hitting .374 (41-for-109) with six home runs, 28 RBIs, seven walks and a 1.076 OPS. And he only has 14 strikeouts while playing under the lights.
“I ask guys all the time,” Hamilton told ESPN 103.3 FM’s Bryan Dolgin when asked if he had any theories to his drastic splits. “Guys with blue eyes, brown eyes, whatever … and guys with blue eyes have a tough time.”
This “blue eyes can’t hit during the day” idea actually confirms part of a theory of mine that I’ve had for a long time: eye color is the new market inefficiency. Pretty soon, I think we can be sure that managers will be implementing as many platoons based on eye color as they do on handedness. Blue-eyed players will sit during day games, and maybe brown-eyed players will sit on days beginning with the letter “T,” and maybe green-eyed players will be benched when the wind is blowing faster than 15 miles per hour. It’s science, after all.
Jack McKeon hasn’t been the boss for a day and the man is already making power moves. In the first official act of his second term as the manager of the Marlins, McKeon benched Hanley Ramirez for last night’s game against the Angels. Benching Hanley Ramirez is, after all, the way for a Marlins manager to declare his arrival, sort of like the new President and First Lady refurnishing the White House.
When asked if there was a particular reason the star shortstop was not in the lineup, McKeon reportedly said, “Yeah, because I didn’t put him in there.”
But team sources told The Post McKeon made the move after Ramirez arrived late for a 3:30pm local time team meeting.
In eighth grade, I had a Spanish teacher named Mr. Ehling. He was a young guy and it was his first year as a teacher. He seemed smart, earnest, and certainly more than capable of conveying the subject matter to thirteen-year-olds, but he had a fatal flaw: he was a nice guy. I think he sincerely believed that he could be friends with every student in the class. Somewhat relatedly, he was a total pushover. Middle and high school students can sense pushovers like a shark does blood in the water, and they strike just as quick.
Heaven and earth are enduring. The reason why heaven and earth can be enduring is that they do not give themselves to life. Hence they are able to be long-lived.
Therefore the sage puts his person last and it comes first,
Treats it as extraneous to himself and it is preserved.
Is it not because he is without thought of self that he is able to accomplish his private ends?
-Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter VII
Modern baseball is made of concrete and paper, glinting with pride and sweat. Earl Weaver is our Ayn Rand, the eternal opportunist: champion of a world where the individual and the society combine, and selfishness mingles with virtue. The victors rise to their rightful place, while the bones of Mark Prior and Dickie Thon gleam in the arid dust.
Gone are the days when the nameless uncarved block is but freedom from desire. We’re ruled by ambition rather than sacrifice, and the bunt earns -0.02 WPA.
And yet if justice truly existed in this world, selflessness would be rewarded. The colors and sounds in the video below would represent something that has actually happens, rather than the flickering of lights against the cave wall.
Happily, I can report that beauty does lie in incongruity and that two men in fact did find the Way. The first of these took place during the All-Star game of 1938. I will leave the story to the great John Lardner:
That seventh frame was most distressing to every loyal American Leaguer. McCormick greeted old Mose with a single. Lippy Leo Durocher laid down a pretty bunt in the direction of James Emory Foxx, the Mauler of Margate, Md., who had shifted from first base to third to make room Louis Gehrig.
Foxx charged in, fielded the ball, and threw it straight at Bob Feller, who was warming up in the American League bullpen, miles away. Nobody knows what Foxx has got against Feller, but he almost beaned him. While joe DiMaggio chased the ball, McCormick scored from first. And when DiMaggio let fly with unerring aim for the National League dugout, Durocher came prancing home.
Astros relief pitcher Brian Williams accomplished something similar to this feat on April 27, 1993, but because John Lardner did not write about it, I will consider this description sufficient.
Perhaps someone will once again find the Way. One can envision Durocher running, his eyes closed, at peace amid the cries and chaos. As Lao Tzu nearly said, the bunt home run is very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice, yet no one in the world can understand it or put it into practice. I know, it doesn’t sound right. But think about it for a while.
It’s hard to imagine Hollis Mason, the first Nite Owl in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Hugo Award winning graphic novel Watchmen, being much of a fan of sabermetrics. He quit the hooded justice industry in order to become a mechanic, and he always did have a soft spot for the traditional values of Montana, where his grandfather learned the values he instilled into the young Mason.
Although the second Nite Owl, Daniel Dreiberg, exhibits a fair amount of similarities to his predecessor, he is less of a fighter and more of a thinker. Nite Owl II relies more on technology and gadgets than on toughness and physical prowess compared to the rest of his masked colleagues. His love for ornithology (the study of birds) is obvious given his bird-themed alter ego — not only is his costume designed to look like an owl, but so is Archimedes, his ship, named for Merlin’s pet owl in The Sword and the Stone.
To that end, Dreiberg contributed a piece called “Blood From The Shoulder of Pallas” to the Journal of the American Ornithological Society. In it, he discusses how scrutinizing over the details of birds can make us miss the beauty of it all.
Is it possible, I wonder, to study a bird so closely, to observe and catalogue its peculiarities in such minute detail, that it becomes invisible? Is it possible that while fastidiously calibrating the span of its wings or the length of its tarsus, we somehow lose sight of its poetry? That in our pedestrian descriptions of a marbled or vermiculated plumage we forfeit a glimpse of living canvases, cascades of carefully toned browns and golds that would shame Kandinsky, misty explosions of color to rival Monet? I believe that we do. I believe that in approaching our subject with the sensibilities of statisticians and dissectionists, we distance ourselves increasingly from the marvelous and spell-binding planet of imagination whose gravity drew us to our studies in the first place.
