Five graphs for you. No other information. No hints. Probably easy anyway. Can you guess these graphs?

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I was up on the dance floor, trying my best not to make a fool of myself. I was having a good time, though I wasn’t really connecting with anyone. All  the guys seemed interested in other girls. Then, for some reason, my eyes moved down to the back of club, and I saw you. You were dressed a little plainly — grey pants, black shirt, black hat. You had an impressive upper body.

A group moved in front of you and I lost sight. I waited until the song was done, and made my way to the bar. You came up behind me.

“Buy you a drink?” you asked.

I noticed that you didn’t actually have a huge upper body, but were wearing a chest protector, which I thought was weird.

“I’m CB,” you said. “I couldn’t help but notice you up there. You looked great.”

‘Thanks. I should get back. My friends are still up there.”

“You can stay a few minutes, can’t you? I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t at least try to talk to the prettiest girl in the place.”

Four hours later, we were still talking as the bar closed. I never did make it back to the dance floor.

(tremendous GIF credit goes to probably-real-person Bill Baer).

Not merely some — but, in fact, most — feature-length motion pictures fail to produce as much in the way of pathos as this short video of Jim Leyland does in the wake of Detroit’s division-clinching victory on Wednesday, which video includes: Jim Leyland crying a proud father’s beautiful, faltering tears; Jim Leyland being escorted into the Tiger clubhouse via bear hug by devoted son-figure Torii Hunter; and Jim Leyland performing spontaneously a dance which, for whatever it lacks in technical proficiency, compensates for it by managing to remind the spectator that the first act of human dance, whenever it occurred, must also have been an expression of pure and spontaneous joy.

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Some time this past spring, the author resolved that he would attempt, in these pages, to document for the wide readership this season the bat-flip in all of its different and glorious incarnations.

Like most claims made by someone with a marinara stain on a weird part of his underpants, however, this one wasn’t to be trusted. In point of fact, this site’s coverage of bat flips has appeared only in fits and starts — like the love of a father who expresses his emotions only in fits and starts.

As the alternative is absolutely no coverage of bat flips, however — or no paternal love whatever — one must satisfy him- or herself with what is made available.

Credit to concerned readers JayAre and PronkTwp for bringing the author’s attention to the footage in question.

Courtesy of Baseball Think Factory, the Denver Post writes about a Rockies fan painting a picture of Todd Helton as a centaur.

This, of course, has prompted me to make a few paintings of my own.

GRIFFIN

HOSMERMAID

TROUT

I realize he’s not really in fashion these days, but I still have a soft spot for Ernest Hemingway. His short stories are tremendous, and I love For Whom the Bell Tolls. That probably puts me in the minority.

Of course, his most famous work is also one of his shortest, The Old Man and the Sea, a novel in which a Cuban fisherman hooks a beautiful marlin, and struggles to get it to shore before the sharks rob him of his prize catch. While it’s not, in my opinion, his best work, it does have the weight of a Nobel Prize for Literature behind it, and famously includes some warm words about Joe DiMaggio.

What people do not know is that the first draft was actually much more focused on baseball. One of my former graduate school compatriots has become one of the leading authorities on Hemingway, and she assures me that I did not just make this up this morning before having any caffeine:

“He always thought of the baseball as ‘la pelota’ which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger ballplayers, those who used iPads as ways to review video in between at bats, bought when the home runs had brought much money, spoke of her as ‘el pelota’ which is masculine and not grammatically correct in Spanish. He had learned as, like, a freshman in high school. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought. Then he swung mightily at an Addison Reed slider down and in, and clubbed it well over the wall in right field to win the game and bring joy to the multitudes of Cleveland.  He could die now, alone and happy, in the rain.”

Weirdly prescient:

A new discovery has left Mark DeRosa scratching his head.

After sitting down to eat breakfast on Wednesday morning over the previous night’s edition of MLB.com’s FastCast recap program, Toronto area resident Mark DeRosa was surprised to find not only that Mark DeRosa had produced a pair of key hits in the Blue Jays’ 3-2 extra-inning victory over the Baltimore Orioles the day before, but that Mark DeRosa still played baseball at any level at all, let alone the major-league one.

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The reader has only one choice to make: does he or she like pleasure? If the answer is in the affirmative, clicking the button embedded below is to be advised.

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This has been Prince Fielder Surfing, presented here for the first time. It shall not be the last.