Archive for Wisdom

If you’re weary of the usual fare when it comes to broadcaster’s home run calls (i.e., “Back, back, back, gone!” or “Golly toots, a long potato!”), then please do consider encouraging your local mic-wielder to take some of the following suggestions for a test drive.

For instance, when a fair-hit ball clears fencing, the announcer might exclaim …

– “This all-you-can-eat seafood buffet just got pregnant!”

– “Are you ready for some football?!”

– “Go find a new a new grandpa, kid, because the one you know and love just got slaughtered!”

– “RBI, Brandon Phillips!”

– “Torquemada’s biscuits!”

– “King Kong’s ding dong!”

– “Donald Sutherland’s panties!”

– “Last night, I drank alone in the dark, just as my father did!”

– “The vicar died clutching not his rosary, but rather his secrets!”

Or …

– “Hand over your badge and service revolver, O’Boyle. You’re on unpaid leave as of this moment!”

Thank you for your measured consideration.

How and/or why the author has acquired an edition of Expos Magazine from April of 1991 is beyond the scope of the current post. What’s entirely within its scope, however, is the following collection of French phrases found inside the aforementioned periodical — phrases of use in any occasion, as one can see!

One
Ivan Calderon: l’élevage des coqs son passe-tempe préféré.
Ivan Calderon: his hobby is raising roosters.

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I set up an interview with Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo to figure out how much of a Mets fan he was. If you know the story of the band’s name, you know that there’s a link to the team. And there are a few other clues that link the band to the hapless Mets. But every fan has a different level of engagement with the sport.

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It’s not really important how events conspired to have me stumble upon and examine like a jewelry appraiser this seemingly valueless 1990 Fleer Johnny Ray card …

Johnny Damn Ray! Since tradition demands that you can liken a player only to another player of similar ethnic extraction, I’ll point out that Johnny Ray was Ray Durham before there was any such thing as Ray Durham.

But here’s the point of all this. Take a look at the flip-side …

Please do note the “Vital Signs” section at the bottom. That, friends, is OBP and SLG — the good two-thirds of our cherished triple slash! The miracle is that this happened, as implied above, in 1990, when everyone was stupid.

I like to think it was Hermes Fleer himself who insisted on deviating from the de rigueur AVG-HR-RBI trinity that prevailed in his industry.

Click to embiggen, if you get what the author means.

As a Champion of the People, the author has participated in a number of community-service projects that have enriched lives and inspired the leaders of tomorrow. Not for nothing has he (i.e. that same author) been referred to, on more than one occasion, as a “goddamn Johnny Appleseed of human compassion.”

None of the author’s good works, however, has been so rewarding as the present one. Using a combination of wit and just his hands, he’s endeavored to produce the world’s first, or at least best, real-time stats leaderboard for Italian-American and regular Italian major-leaguers.

Click this hyperlink to experience the leaderboard.

Click this more different hyperlink to consult Wikipedia’s list of Italian-Americans in baseball, which the author mostly utilized in the composition of the leaderboard.

Utilize the comments section below to make note of other Italian-American or just regular Italian major-leaguers who ought to be added to the leaderboard.

Not so long ago — last gibbous moon, if memory serves — I availed myself of a Firefox extension that alerts you any time anyone Irish does anything on the Internet. Needless to say, when Mets infielder Justin Turner came to bat earlier this week, my computer grew arms and seized my tailored lapels. I clicked on the relevant Maximum Irish Caution icon, and it took me straightaway to this …

Let’s just say that, upon viewing Mr. Turner’s mien and bearing, I saw to it that the recommended protocols were followed.

No, you aren’t having fun yet.

Anyone whose family, or who he himself, purchased an Apple-brand computer anytime before, say, 1995 will likely have more than a passing knowledge of the genre commonly known as edutainment, a very specific sort of software program that, in striving to provide users with content that is both educational and entertaining, typically provides neither.

That fact having being established, allow the author to announce that, in every relevant way — both in that it is neither very educational nor very entertaining — the present post is a goddamn exemplar of the edutainment genre.

What follows is a collection of five baseball players (most past, one present) whose names most resemble popular Danish ejaculations — at least so far Wiktionary has led the author to believe.

Readers can use this post to both not learn Danish and also learn very little about baseball!

Player: Willie Horton (Profile)
Who He Was: Mostly Tigers outfielder, 1963-1980
Relevant Danish Ejaculation: Hørt! (Real Dictionary Entry)
Meaning: Hear, hear!

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Last Saturday, while I convened with Master Cistulli regarding the Discretionary NERD Scores for that day’s games, the Master — past whom nothing gets — noticed, via an uninvited glance at my desktop, my Largely Unnecessary, Decidedly Large, Neatly Organized, and Fully Computerized Collection of Digital Baseball Images™.

Why?

“Why do you have so many images that, one guesses, might be easily found on the internet at any given time?” Master Cistulli asked, not without the condescension common in those who readily identify themselves as both “raised in the Northeast” and “fond of boarding schools.”

My initial response — “For ease of access” — has become unsatisfactory to me in retrospect, and has caused, of late, something of an existential crisis. It should probably be noted, though, that something as minor as one of my cats sneezing is enough to send me into hours of contemplation and deep feelings of meaninglessness.

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A scene similar to, if not precisely the same as, the one accounted for below.

In the main/only concourse of Beloit’s Pohlman Field, minutes before the first pitch of a Midwest League game between the hometown Snappers and West Michigan Whitecaps, one encounters a group of anxious-looking men holding binders full of Bowman Chrome baseball cards. They’re approaching the Beloit and West Michigan players as they (i.e. those same players) make their way from Pohlman’s rather improvised locker rooms to its only-slightly-less improvised dugouts. They’re asking, with a sense of urgency, for the players (who are, in every case, younger than the men asking) to sign the cards in the binders.

Passing by and through the scene, one thinks, “This is behavior unbecoming of an adult man.”

Simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously, one envies the sense of purpose exhibited by those same autograph-seekers.

Image stolen shameless and without same from Ballparks of the Midwest.

The author — because he studied the relevant martial art as a five-year-old in the basement of a Concord-area* travel agency — knows that the karateka never uses his training to initiate combat, but only to defend himself.

*Concord, New Hampshire (i.e. where all the best dojos are located).

As the footage embedded here suggests, however, that precept has been problematized today by Kansas City shortstop Alcides Escobar — who, as anyone with eyes can see, is very clearly karate-chopping his own self.

Indeed, it’s not outside the realm of the possible that Escobar is making a subtle, if important, point: it is the individual’s own ego, ambition, and desire which are his greatest enemies, not the buffoons of a martial-arts film or evil Cobra Kai sensei John Kreese.