I’d like to thank you all for attending this roast of the man of the hour, Brian Wilson. This, of course, is not the Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys — the drug-addled man child who famously spent three years of his life in his bed. We’ve managed to find the Brian Wilson that’s somehow easier to make fun of.

I’d like to thank Brian’s pet weasel for coming, though I would have liked it more if it didn’t spend the whole night on top of Brian’s head.

Seriously, Brian, I’ve made deposits in airport toilets that looked better than that thing. Did you fall asleep while using a Flobee or something?

And let’s not forget that beard. When Brian decided he wanted a new look, he thought about it long and hard and concluded that his inspiration should be a middling pro wrestling personality who was featured in that Cyndi Lauper video about girls masturbating.

People think that Brian uses shoe polish to dye his hair and beard, but that’s simply preposterous. He ‘s got money now, so he uses an expensive brand of hair dye called Just For Assholes. It’s the same kind that dude from Fall Out Boy uses.

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, which is true. If you really get to know Brian, you’ll realize he’s actually a bigger douche nozzle that he appears to be. Which is an accomplishment.

Brian is so annoying to hang out with, that his own ulnar collateral ligament tried to distance itself from him as much as possible. Twice.

The military adopted waterboarding because the old method — having Brian tell prisoners about the best concerts he ever attended — was leading to too many suicides. By the prisoners and the guards.

They call Brian The Beard, a name he adopted because he liked the way it sounded when people called his girlfriend that.

Brian, if you spent as much time on your command as you did on trying to make yourself look interesting, you wouldn’t walk more guys than Francisco Rodriguez.

Giants fans were sad to see Brian go to a rival team, but the people who were saddest to see him leave were San Francisco’s bail bondsmen and magic mushroom dealers.

When you see Brian on TV, the announcers almost always talk about how eccentric he is, but they only say that because they can’t use the word “fuckwad”.

Seriously though, Brian, there’s a rule that we only roast the ones we love. I’m proud to say that we broke that rule tonight.

Please go away, nobody likes you.

(GIF courtesy of @ChadMoriyama)

I’m tired of liking things, and watching other people who like things do those things they like, which is why I was really happy (and then immediately annoyed that I was happy) to read CBS Sports’ Gregg Doyle’s article on why he’s tired of baseball players pouring champagne all over themselves in celebration of winning a thing:

“It takes a lot of planning to make this spontaneous celebration go off just right.

And the players, they do it. They think it’s great. Why do they think it’s great? Because they’re not much on thinking. They’re fully grown kids, is what they are, and they celebrate like children by doing the same thing everyone else has always done. Why? Because everyone else has always done it.”

When my son graduated from kindergarten, we sprayed him with Orange Shasta and I dumped Gatorade over his mother, so I understand where Doyle is coming from. That’s kids stuff (and also a reason why your wife makes you sleep in the garage for a week). Baseball players are supposed to be men.

Men aren’t supposed to have fun and behave like children. We don’t want them to show enthusiasm or “play like a little kid out there.” Because, trust me, I have seen my son’s T-ball games. And I have watched episodes of ABC’s Back in the Game. The dirty little secret the liberals don’t want you to know is that little kids suck at baseball.

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The United States is inarguably a better country from which to follow major-league baseball than France. “For a lot of reasons,” is the answer. “Why, precisely?” is the question.

That said, it would appear as though, so far as consuming postseason baseball is concerned, there’s actually some advantage to living abroad. The reader perhaps already has some notion of why — namely because, while MLB.TV viewers in US and Canada are relegated merely to “companion coverage” of the divisional series and NLCS, international users have unfettered access to the live television feed for every game. The logic of this arrangement is not immediately obvious to the author, although one guesses “cash money” has something to do with it.

Below are five representative screenshots from an international viewer’s experience of MLB.TV’s postseason coverage. (Click any image to embiggen.)

1. Here’s the Media Center page, with notes (circled in red) regarding the options for US/Canada users versus international ones:

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Readers: Feel enabled! Collectively you are a powerful source of knowledge and pageviews. You matter. You really do! See how I’m building you up? You are terrific! You are a glistening prism of ability. You are the balls. The good kind. The life-giving kind. I <3 U.

Do you feel uplifted and capable? Yes? Good. Now: I need something from you right away. I require. I insist. I dessicate your once brimming waters. Importantly, I need you to fill out the following survey so that I can know some things. These things relate to the facial stylings of Major League ballplayers past and present. With the power of this knowledge I will likely produce something of considerable value to mankind. It will most assuredly change everything. Everything! Even your goddamn Subaru Forester. Yes, even something as solid, reliable, and practical as your goddamn Subaru Forester will change. So do this thing so that I don’t have to do as much work  can change the world:
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I never saw hopes quite so high, nor faces quite so bright,
As when Tito led the Tribe to war that fine October night.
Six years had come and gone since they’d played on at season’s end,
And six decades since a title; yet they’d neither shrink nor bend;
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This article about how no one’s been watching the Yankees this season offers this fun factoid:

On Sept. 22, a Sunday afternoon Astros-Indians game on Comcast SportsNet Houston attracted no viewers, at least according to the way Nielsen measures such things.

Of course, this just means that of the 581 Nielsen families that were surveyed, none were tuning into the Astros. What else were they watching during the game? The crack NotGraphs research squad has been unable to find complete Nielsen listings for the Houston area, but I’ve conjured up my own list:

560 families: The Houston Texans football game
10 families: Here Comes Honey Boo Boo
2 families: The episode of The Golden Girls where the ladies buy tickets to an Astros game but ultimately decide not to go because the Astros are so terrible
2 families: The Real Housewives of Dallas
2 families: The Real Housewives of Austin
1 family: The Real Housewives of Corpus Christi
1 family: Sesame Street, with Chris Carter counting strikeouts for an hour, and still not counting all of them.
1 family: Lucas Harrell and Kate Hudson, starring in “How To Lose A Game in 10 Minutes.”
1 family: The Static Channel
1 family: Would have been credited with watching the Astros game, because it was on their TV, but it turned out they were all dead.

As sort of a complement to Greg Rybarczyk’s work at Hit Tracker Online, writer Chris St. John — whose prospect analysis at Beyond the Box Score, incidentally, is also great and will suffice — created, a couple years ago, a metric called Home Run Damage, a tool by means of which St. John is able to identify objectively the most awe-inspiring home runs of any season.

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I had a thought late Wednesdsay night, as I lay awake at three in the morning, exiled to my couch, reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, while thinking of my cold, inevitable death into nothingness:

Delmon Young, only 28 years old, is somebody’s Mr. October.

GIF courtesy the irreplaceable @Kazuto_Yamazaki.

Thought it doesn’t appear — like, at all — to be the quickest route from Tampa Bay, a Google Map has revealed today that, if the Rays have any interest in reaching the World Series Batting Cages located on Woodley Avenue, just south of JFK High School in Granada Hills, California, they’re going to have to go through Cleveland to do it.

Of the unusual driving directions, Google representative Simon Warble had this to say: “This is the single dumbest use I’ve seen of our Maps product, ever — including that time you inquired about public-transit options from a Chuck E. Cheese in Denver all the way to Sierra Leone. You have clearly just looked up one thing with the words world and series next to each other and pretend-mistaken it for Major League Baseball’s championship. Below inane, is how I’d describe it.”

Added Warble: “I feel compelled to add that I’m fictional person you just invented.”

“We’d be happy to have the Rays come by,” said World Series owners Peggy and Lionel Sheephats, “but we’d prefer you not make up weird names for us like Sheephats. Also, we agree with Simon Warble about your use of Google Maps. Seems like a lot of effort for what amounts to maybe one-third of a joke. And that’s being generous.”

Sorry for the late notice, fair NotGraphs readers, but if you are in the vicinity of my truck this evening, I’m hosting an impromptu NotGraphs meetup. See, I planned on watching tonight’s Wild Card game at my house on my TV, but I got in a little bit of a tiff with the old ball and chain about a totally misinterpreted text message from her SECOND cousin. Things got out of hand, as it happens.

But, this will not stop me from enjoying what is promising to be a great pitching matchup and an exciting playoff game. And since my schedule has cleared up quite a bit, I figured I’d invite some of my adoring fans to watch as well. Trust me, this is not some sort of needing-to-be-surrounded-by-people-because-I-shouldn’t-be-alone-right-now situations. I’m doing great, you guys.

We won’t have a TV, but I will have Postseason.TV playing on my iPad. It’s an iPad Mini, so things might get a little tight, but it’s really more about the hang, right guys? Also, I’ve run into a bit of a cash flow problem right now. I need to move some money around, and, at the moment, am fairly cash poor. So if you could supply some beverages, that would be great. Make sure to get there early as space is limited, and the shocks on the truck are kind of shot so there’s a weight restriction as well.

When: 7:00 pm CT.

Where: The back of my 2000 Chevy Silverado

Confirmed attendees:

David Temple (NotGraphs/FanGraphs that one time)

My labradoodle Jeff (He’s hypoallergenic and totally chill)

Whatever belongings I could grab before my wife changed the locks.

Just some beers, buds, and baseball. What could be better?