Archive for Wisdom

March is fantasy baseball season, and in it, most of our evenings and weekends will be filled with drafts and auctions or prepping for said. If you’re just beginning to incorporate a sabermetric bent to your fantasy preparations (i.e. if you haven’t moved on to Fantasy Fantasy Baseball), sorting through the copious stats that are now widely available can be frustrating. You want to know which stats are most predictive of future performance, and which are red herrings, but you don’t know your wOBAs from your U.N.I.T.Y.s.

Fortunately for the beginners out there, I’m here to give you a cheat sheet on which stats are overrated, and to explain, with great clarity and exactitude (not to be confused with “Natitude“) why they are overrated.

Batting Average (AVG)

I’ll just leave this first one to everyone’s sabermatrician, Joe Morgan:

A good hitter makes sure no men are on base when he makes an out — even if that means killing all baserunners before a plate appearance.

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As everyone knows, Tweets — and everything else, really — are better when context is stripped away in the manner of a bodice-ripper’s ripping a bodice. So, without any context whatsoever, here is a rather delightful recent Tweet from James G:

Indeed, who does tell a child something like this? “Do you want to go to the hellscape of America’s Worst State^TM, young, beggared spawn? Perhaps to the bloodless, soul-murdering infinitude of Orlando-based theme parks? Lovely. We’ll go once you get a got-damn retweet or reply from, let’s say, the makers of Jimmy Dean processed meats. No, wait!: The Toronto Blue Jays Baseball Club. Yes, the Blue Jays. Fair enough, jackass?”

So, much like tertiary syphilis needs a chancre, I need your wisdom. Tell me: What kind of a person tells his or her child such a thing?

Although much of the presentation at the Bud Selig Distinguished Lecture Series on Tuesday was about the importance of baseball in Japanese-American culture, those of us who attended also got ourselves an excellent story about how certain white players did not particularly enjoy hearing Spanish on the field.

In a Giants-Reds game, Orlando Cepeda was on second with Matty Alou batting. Cepeda was shouting instructions of some sort to Alou at the plate in Spanish. Reds’ pitcher Joseph Jay wasn’t happy about it, leading to the following exchange:

JAY: Hey, don’t you speak any English?
CEPEDA: I think you’re a cocksucker.

Question answered.

Ok, so this exists:

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There exists a modern analog to the Oracle at Delphi, and that analog is Yahoo! Answers, where wisdom is dispensed like rubbers from a truck-stop vending machine. So what were baseball fans wondering about four years ago? This, natch:

And what sayeth the Oracle? Many things, actually, all of them varying shades of inane. It turns out that the modern analog to the Oracle at Delphi is stupid and unhelpful. What else will disappoint on this hollow, purposeless day?

This is Vic Tayback’s grave:

Pictured above is a fish with a baseball in its mouth. Was it put there to silence his entreaties and complaints? Or is this how the fish catches the baseball?

Or was the ball placed in the fish’s mouth in order to provide a brief amusement — an amusement designed to make someone forget, for a fugitive moment, that he, like the fish, will one day die and that what lies beyond is as unknowable as it is unavoidable and that a nothingness that spans the black balance of forever might constitute … the best for which we can hope?

The fish with a baseball in its mouth is dead. And so we all shall be, probably sooner than we dare to contemplate. Is there meaning to be found in the inexorable misery that is as much a part of us as blood, bones, viscera, and dreams reduced to momentary consolations? It scarcely matters.

This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

Dramatic Irony (n.) – irony that is inherent in speeches or a situation of a drama and is understood by the audience but not grasped by the characters in the play.

Here’s to you and your humanity Mike Bordick.

It’s like that old adage says: “Some days you play the trumpet, whilst other days Jay Johnstone plays you.”

Yu Darvish, like most Great Men of History, is going through a healthful and replenishing divorce. The soon-to-be discarded is a young thespian named Saeko:

As you can see, Saeko, whose name, one assumes, is a homophone to the brand identity of those stylish and durable wrist timepieces, is rather very lovely and possibly even talented. But loveliness cannot overcome a gentleman’s introduction to the world! As Jeff Passan reminds us, Mr. Darvish, insofar as this relationship is concerned, set the proper tone and established the relevant harbingers back in 2007:

Following a victory last season, Yu Darvish, the winning pitcher for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, stood in front of a microphone inside a packed stadium, thanked his teammates and fans for their support, and announced that he had knocked up an actress who he met three months earlier and would marry her to preserve his family’s name.

For too long, we have regarded premarital liturgies as things to woo and reassure. As Mr. Darvish reminds us, they are and should have always been a means to forewarn, harrow and ideally ruin the better, deadlier and more treacherous half.

So, married NotGraphs readers, please go and tell your wives you are leaving forever.

(Shotgun Hat Tip: BTF)

Apropos of nothing, except the author’s own interior examinations, here are some brief and confidently worded remarks on the best and worst months of the year from the point of view of a baseballing enthusiast.

If, at any point, the reader should find himself doubting the veracity of the following remarks, he (i.e. the reader) should draw his attention to how confidently worded they (i.e. the remarks) are and find himself duly staid by same. Should that fail to instill due reverence, then he (i.e. the same reader) should contemplate the embedded image of the Grand Canyon and allow himself to be awed duly by it — or, at least, by the idea of the Grand Canyon — and to retain that sense of awe while entering the following.

Now, those brief remarks, briefly.

The Worst: October
Whoever said “‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all” was misled — first of all, because the “whoever” in question is Alfred Lord Tennyson (i.e. a person that basically everyone agrees was really misled), but also, second, because we very clearly learn from the world’s most successful ethical models that the largest threat to sustained happiness is the excitement of the passions.

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It gets hot in these rhinos.

When one reads the play-by-play transcript of World Series Game 5, one is reminded of some of the finer works of Eugène Ionesco.

This is not an excerpt:

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