Archive for Wisdom

No one has ever asked me how to become an internet baseball writer. In the event that somebody does do that someday, though, I’ve prepared the following document with a view to minimizing the potential horrors of interacting with a stranger.

1. Find Writers You Care About
This doesn’t necessarily mean other internet baseball writers. In fact, that’s probably precisely what it doesn’t mean. If you have ever said or thought “Reading is boring,” it’s probably because most books are boring and also that the act of reading itself is entirely tedious. When I was younger, I would read just so girls would notice me and then let me do things to them — like, in a sexual way, I mean. Then, as a junior in high school, I discovered the poems of James Tate, Charles Simic, and Kenneth Koch in rather rapid succession. They did things with words that I found very surprising and enjoyable — almost as enjoyable as the things I’d wanted to do to all those ladies.

Read the rest of this entry »

A photo of the author, his loins barely covered.

The Beginning Part, In Which the Author Loses His Hat
The first leg of the author’s present Journey Eastward necessitated that that same author, along with his wife, make a trip via bus from Madison, WI, to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. This is no problem in itself: provided one has enough in the way of internet podcasts downloaded to his informationPhone, the ride is mostly-to-entirely bearable.

This particular trip skewed decidedly harrowing, however, owing to how the author, in his haste to account for the most essential elements of the Journey — baggage, tickets, wife — while alighting from the aforementioned omnibus, accidentally left behind his well-worn Milwaukee Brewers cap.

A Note on the Cap in Question
You can ask anyone: the Brewers cap in question was the very picture of Excellence in Men’s Headwear. It first called to the author from a vendor’s shelf at Miller Park, not unlike how the sex-nymph Calypso called to Odysseus from the sex-island of Ogygia — except that, instead of detaining him for several years from wife and child by dint of unabated lovemaking, the author’s hat merely sat atop his head and didn’t bother anyone.

In most ways that matter the hat in question was not unlike American wordsmith Walt Whitman, in that it both (a) represented the very best of what is possible in this life and (b) wasn’t allowed in nice restaurants, owing to some combination of its appearance and smell.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not a big deal or anything, but last Friday marked my thirty-fourth birthday. I’ve never really been big on birthdays; the cake is fine, but the singing and the attention and the sincere well-wishing of acquaintances I can do without. Even-numbered birthdays are even worse, because you can look back at where your halfway mark was, and watch how it steadily increases. Half my life ago, I was a high school senior, playing four-chord songs on the guitar and sweeping up a hardware store on the weekends. With each passing year, the number of baseball players older than me is dwindling in logarithmic fashion toward Moyerdom.

D’Angelo Jimenez is still older than me. He is a thirty-four year old baseball player. Half his life ago, he was a seventeen year-old baseball player. Between those two endpoints, this happened:

Read the rest of this entry »

Regarding Epicurus’s claim that “real wealth is poverty adjusted to the law of Nature,” Seneca writes in Epistle 1.59 that such an idea “can never be repeated too often, since it can never be learned too well.”

Among the other things of this world in which one couldn’t reasonably immerse him- or herself too deeply, another of them is manifestly Kenley Jansen’s cut fastball — itself captured (once again) in GIF form here, doing to the Laws of Physics what the author only ever dreamed of doing to the girls on his high school’s volleyball team.

If there is one thing Toronto Blue Jays sluggers Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion hate, it’s ingrown hairs.

Reader Ben Rackow alerted the NotGraphs Just the Tip Line (via an email featuring a subject line the same as the title of this post, it should be noted) of these promotional videos — housed at Blue Jay Hunter’s tumblr — for IMD Laser Clinic in Toronto. In case you are at work and can’t watch the linked videos, the ads reveal the following:

• Joey Bats is “always on the run,” “always busy,” and doesn’t “have time to shave”, which is why he came to IMD Laser Clinic

• Bautista, voted “#1 All-Star in the world,” is the Blue Jays’ DH, despite playing only 17 games as DH from 2008-2012 (meanwhile, he played 108 games at 3B, 353 in RF, and even 42 games in LF in that same span)

• discomfort from laser hair-removal from one’s neck is minimal after the first day

• all the people at IMD Laser Clinic were very nice to Edwin Encarnación

• IMD Laser will not turn off the muzak while shooting low quality promo videos with Blue Jays sluggers, even when said muzak obscures what said sluggers are saying to the point of imparsibility

• the process of laser hair removal is totally grody

The grossness of laser hair removal approximated.

In his Discourses, noted Roman Stoic Epictetus proclaims that, to live a life free from anxiety, that each of us must become like a “spiritual athlete.” To that end, NotGraphs presents this exercise, with a view towards helping to tighten and tone the spirits of the readership.

Society is like she-bears; our spiritual health, like small children being eaten by she-bears.

Notes
Consider, this hypothetical scene.

A man announces — in his home, late this morning — a man announces that he’s anticipating, with mounting anticipation, the very enigmatic Max Scherzer’s start in Detroit at 1:05pm ET.

That man’s wife responds by suggesting that, perhaps — owing to how the man hadn’t been there in a couple of days and, due to the imminent arrival of a house guest, was unlikely to go there over the next couple — that perhaps the man in question should, indeed, go the gym with her at 1pm ET, when her yoga class happens to begin.

What should the man do in this entirely hypothetical scenario that didn’t just unfold in a certain, unnamed author’s house about an hour ago in Madison, Wisconsin?

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

While what follows does not apply to Algonquin Roundtable/Bloomsbury Group that is the NotGraphs commenting collective, it does apply to those who inhabit more brutish corners of This Our Internet.

Does that guy’s multiyear contract make you scream at your children? Is the latest outrage outrageous? Do all-caps value judgments make your heart and loins leap? Should pretty much everyone on that team go to jail? Were you serious about what you just said? Would you be able to play through that injury … for free? Can you discern a political morality play in a humpback liner? Do you have racist dreams?

Then this is for you …

After his second Tommy John surgery Tuesday afternoon, Kyle Drabek, still only 24-years-old, has a long road of rehab in front of him. And, let’s be honest, nobody likes rehab. It’s a real drag.

On Tuesday night, Drabek, for one evening at least, was like the rest of us: Watching the game — Blue Jays visiting the Brewers — on TV at home, high on some drugs.

And it was some bloody game. A graph on NotGraphs, if I may:

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, Aramis Ramirez hit a homerun vs. the Blue Jays that was initially called foul ball by third base umpire Paul Nauert. Brewers manager Ron Roenicke contested, the umpire crew agreed review the play, and the new ruling was that it was a homerun. It was a solo shot that gave the Brewers a 7-6 lead in the bottom of the seventh. They would hold on to win by the same score. (Sorry, Navin.)

Given that the Brewers had just blown a five-run lead, capped by a three-run monster mash by Joey Bats, and that this was the first reviewed call at Miller Park this season, it’s understandable the Brewers play-by-play man Brian Anderson was a bit excited. His partner, former Brewers catcher and longtime color man Bill Schroeder, initially said the original ruling probably wouldn’t be overturned with the video provided. Then, Anderson provided this “thing to note”:

Read the rest of this entry »