This is the time of the season when, if your team isn’t in the hunt for the pennant (fantasy team, real team, it doesn’t matter), baseball can get a little, well, boring. No close races to really care about yet, just a whole bunch of games already played and quite a few still to go, and, well, can you really blame some players for being bored with the whole thing?
After Eden and beyond Hedonism II, people are supposed to wear their laundry. Generally speaking, clothing-optional is not an option. What is an option, at least if you aren’t Prisoner #30976, is the kind of clothing with which you adorn your form, be it a rhinestone caftan or a CSI: Miami nightshirt, with David Caruso’s sunglasses featured prominently in the area of the sternum.
With regard to baseball, perhaps no figure has celebrated this vestiary freedom with greater panache than former White Sox owner Bill Veeck. Indeed, 38 years ago last Friday, it was Veeck who perpetrated either a) the greatest sartorial misdeed in the annals of modern sports or b) the finest display of stylistic self-rule in the history of all history. On that afternoon in Chicago, in the first game of doubleheader at Comiskey Park, the White Sox took the field in uniforms that gave them the distinct appearance of misbehaving English schoolboys.
Now, in honor of that historic day, Major League Baseball is introducing 10 new uniforms, each an heir to the liberties that the Sox so bravely modeled. It is expected that each team will wear at least one of the uniforms during every homestand in September, and then again at Halloween.
The uniform: a flag-colored Speedo of the type that Mark Spitz wore in the 1972 Summer Olympics, matched with a Molly Hatchet concert T-shirt (Fredericksburg Fairgrounds, May 30, 1983) and a Nehru jacket made of heavy merino tweed. The hat is a traditional Tam o’ Shanter stained with day-old haggis.
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Your friend, my friend, and friend of NotGraphs Max Taylor points out there is in fact possibly the finest baseball film ever and, no surprises here, it comes from the home of the no-nonsense film industry in Japan. It’s called Deadball and this is its trailer:
Some highlights:
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Yes, it’s true. We’re less than 48 seconds away from the InstaGraphs Boston Meetup. For all of the original details, which are still details, read the post that you are currently reading, which is the post that I am currently writing.
Sometimes, we nerds like to go out on the town. One of those towns is the former Incan capital city of Vilcabamba, but because that city was destroyed during the Spanish conquest of Peru in 1572, and also because a trip to Peru would take a lot longer than 48 seconds, we cannot logically schedule an InstaGraphs meetup there.
Sorry, Vilcabamba. Better luck next minute!
Not surprisingly, this year’s Saber SpeedSocializing Seminar will take place within a minute’s time. So, just as we did last minute, we’re going to set up shop at the corner of Shawmut and Berkeley and pass out demitasses full of espresso.
It promises to be a good time, or at least a quick time, and also a caffeinating time. Since the beginning of this posting, other SpeedSocializing luminaries have pledged their brief attendance, but since I a) won’t see all of them due to their tremendous socializing pace and b) am running out of time, you’ll just have to take my word on that. Espresso, baseball and rapidly socializing baseball nerds. It’s a combination just crazy enough to work, and work pretty quickly. Join us, won’t you?
You have approximately 10 seconds.
As I read about the promotion of Tigers prospect pitcher Buck Farmer, I found myself giggling ever so slightly.
“Buck Farmer?” I said to myself. “Now that’s a name. It almost sounds like a job. I’m Steve, I’m a buck farmer.”
I immediately realized that this wouldn’t be a job, as bucks do not really need farming. The forest is the only real buck farmer, when you think of it, which you shouldn’t.
But I made me wonder, with the thousands of players that came through the major leagues, certainly some of them had names that could also be construed as occupations. So I did some digging, and found the four best.
Smith saw time with both Cleveland and Cincinnati, playing mostly shortstop and second base in the late 1930s. Initial research did not find if he indeed came from a family line of metalsmiths, but his great-great grandfather was rumored to have invented the iron pancreas — a device not unlike the iron lung except that it was made for the digestive system and didn’t actually work.
According to reports, Walker got his nickname not for his love of dogs or even an aggressive demeanor, but for his penchant for urinating on things to claim them as his own. In 1982, while serving as a bench bat for the Yankees, Walker was said to have ended the season with eight of his own lockers in the clubhouse. Walker’s career ended in 1991, when a labor dispute kept him out of Spring Training with the Expos, as Montreal demanded he hire his own laundry attendant for the season.
Scribe, coincidentally, did not live in a time when the Internet existed. A glove-first third baseman for the Dodgers and Phillies in the late 60s, Scribe was known as being aloof, often forgetting to come to games and team meetings. He was famous for his telegrams to the team offices with messages such as “Sorry, forgot. Working on it now.” and “Oh, that was today? When’s the latest you need me by?” When Scribe was eventually let go by the Phillies in 1970, he went back to school to obtain a Master’s degree. He lives and works as a waiter in New York.
Tologist’s name doesn’t perfectly match up with an occupation, but this didn’t stop his teammates and visiting fans from making fun of him. A relief pitcher, Tologist retired in 1977 with a 3.87 ERA, 38 wins, and 14 court-mandated anger management classes. Tologist had a penetrating fastball, which left his opponents wincing. Along with his long-time friend, Phil McCrackin, Tologist started a very successful latex manufacturer in Butte, Montana.
In the first inning of the 3,543rd regular season baseball game of the 2014 season, two of the three billion birds on earth settled onto the infield grass at Comerica Park.
“Everybody’s acting like this is normal,” muses the announcer as men in brightly colored clothes and high socks stand watching a man throw a ball at another man, while another man holds a stick and swats at it.
In a sequence of events designed to illustrate that life isn’t entirely a festival of awfulest sorrows, left-handed Texas prospect Alexander Claudio, celebrated in electronic print earlier today by the present author, made his major-league debut minutes ago — during the course of which he threw the above pitch, his signature and very slow changeup, captured here in even slower motion.
The Washington Nationals received a substantial setback today, as it was revealed that star hominid Jayson Werth has been diagnosed with the rare disorder quinquagintaquinquitis. The condition is popularly known as “Sammy Hagar’s disease” after the singer who immortalized it in 1984.
According to NotGraphs medical experts who have examined the above photograph, obtained from the Virginia Highway Patrol, Werth is likely in the “advanced stages” of the disease. The experts say that the outfielder may require the multi-stage treatment known as ATJ (for “All That Jive”), which could sideline him indefinitely.
(h/t to determined reader Nathan Hoff)
KANSAS CITY—You see it on the highlights, even if you don’t quite hear it: Player A, afflicted by a long-term power drought, at last hits a home run, yet upon returning to the dugout he is greeted with what experts call “the silent treatment.”
For the baseballing Royals of the city of Kansas City, the tradition has presented a challenge. As of this writing the Royals rank “dead-ass last,” as those same experts call it, in team home runs, but with a playoff berth in sight, the players are expecting a team-wide surge of adrenalin to quickly increase their power numbers and create an immediate need for well-crafted expressions of noiselessness.
The problem, players say, is one of silent-treatment inexperience.
“First, we’re just not trained in the silent treatment,” third baseman Mike Moustakas shouted above the sounds of a poetry slam on Tuesday. “Even in Spring Training, we don’t do a lot of drills. Sure, we do this one drill called ‘Stunned Silence,’ where Ned (manager Ned Yost) tells us he’s pregnant, but beyond that, we’re always joking and laughing and talking about the weather, which is typically warm and dry. We’ll say things like, ‘The weather is warm and dry, which is typical.’
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