Yangervis and Odrisamer are:

(a) The two most popular styles of coffee table at IKEA.
(b) Two newly-discovered native tribes of Papua New Guinea.
(c) The top two Icelandic banks, as ranked by deposits.
(d) Two mountains in the Ural range.
(e) Two types of heirloom apples, neither with any significant market penetration as of yet.
(f) Acronyms for top-secret government programs.
(g) A comedy duo popular in northern Estonia.
(h) Two deadly infections spread by small rodents.
(i) The newest sitcoms on German television, both surprising hits thus far in the young season.
(j) Twin Caribbean resorts now deeply discounted on Hotels.com.
(k) Styles of dance from the 1780s.
(l) Two different types of flourless chocolate tortes, one with walnuts and one without.
(m) The botanical names of two colorful purple flowers.
(n) Unheralded colors of the rainbow.
(o) The top two wheelchair manufacturers in Finland, sorted by market share.
(p) Bees who share the spotlight in the new Pixar film, “Bees!”
(q) Seaweeds found off the New Zealand coast.
(r) Baby toe-curling reflexes that disappear by age three.
(s) The co-recipients of this year’s Fields Medal.
(t) Characters in Michael Chabon’s new graphic novel.
(u) Slang terms for “testicles” in the Haitian Creole language.
(v) Two Republican candidates for governor of Wyoming.
(w) Technical terms for the two different sizes of ash that are produced when a body is cremated.
(x) The latest new flavors of Lay’s Potato Chips.
(y) Rejected economic theories of Cold War Russia.
(z) None of the above.

One of the things we tend to love about baseball is when the game breaks, and a player ends up doing something they’re not supposed to be doing. Don Mattingly playing second base to finish off the Pine Tar Game, Randy Johnson manning left field on a double switch, Skip Schumaker firing fastballs that would make Tommy Milone jealous: these are the images of incongruity and improvisation that stick to us. We wait for the situations not because we want our heroes to fail, necessarily, but because throwing them out of their element makes them resemble us, just for a moment.

But why wait for the planets to align in real life, when we can simulate our dreams right now?

Thus I began this mad, stupid experiment. The premise is simple: using everyone’s favorite realistic baseball simulation, Out of the Park 2015, I created teams of baseball players by cloning a single player until they filled the active roster, and set them against each other in 162 games of gory combat. The results exceeded my wildest expectations.

The four teams in the CBL (Clone Baseball League) are:
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All, or nearly all, of the big philosophers you’ll hear about take pains to note that the correlation between one’s own actions and the events (good or bad) which befall that same one — that the correlation between the two is weak.

Indeed, Pirates right-hander and also contemporary philosopher Edinson Volquez took pains to illustrate that same thing tonight in the first inning against Detroit. With runners on first and third, and a run already in, Volquez conceded a ground ball up the middle that likely would have scored a second run while producing zero outs. What actually happened, though, was Volquez flailed wildly his right arm and somehow fielded the ball, eventually catching Ian Kinsler between third base and home. Out: recorded. The reality that our mistakes are sometimes rewarded, and vice versa: confirmed.

Ebola: No baseball player has yet been diagnosed with Ebola. There are no reported cases of Ebola at major or minor league ballparks. Checking your fantasy stats cannot give you Ebola, nor can participating in your fantasy baseball auction, assuming the auction is online. Ebola is not the cause of your favorite team’s poor season, or the reason why more moves weren’t made at the trading deadline. There is no correlation between OPS+ and Ebola, and the E in Ebola does not stand for Error. Alex Rodriguez is suspended from baseball, but not because he has Ebola.

Iraq: There is no major or minor league baseball affiliate in Iraq. Contrary to rumor, the Expos did not move there when they left Canada. IRAQ is not the same as WHIP. You have a very low chance of being hit by a missile while you watch a baseball game, whether in person or on TV. We are not at war with the American League, nor the National League. Our military activities in Iraq should not affect your fantasy team.

Gaza: Sam Fuld is Jewish.

Robin Williams: Robin Williams is not related to Ted Williams, Mitch Williams, Bernie Williams, Mike Williams, Gerald Williams, Billy Williams, Dick Williams, Jerome Williams, Jimy Williams, Matt Williams, Woody Williams, Scott Williamson, Robin Ventura, Robin Roberts, or Robin Yount.

At the end of last week, the author introduced not merely to the readers of this site, but also to citizens of the entire world, a new genre of artistic expression — namely, terrible photos of ballparks from the interstate.

To say that enthusiasm has abounded with regard to these poorly conceived images would be to repeat a lie that I told my parents just a few hours ago in response to their suggestion that my life is little more than a collection of poor decisions, one after the other, not unlike soldiers on the front lines marching to their certain, respective deaths.

Whatever the case, it does appear as though more than zero other people had already been participating in this practice of hastily photographing ballparks while in transit — even without recognizing the possible implications of that practice to art history. What follows is the work of one such reader, Ms. Rachel Monroe.

O.co Coliseum
O.co Coliseum is located in Oakland, California, and serves as home to the Oakland Athletics. Here’s a terrible photo of it from (what is presumably) the interstate the nearby BART station, BART itself often being referred to as “an interstate on rails”:

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Tom Powers writes an astute article about the Twins losing a lot of games over the past few years because they have too many players who are psychologically healthy. In his piece, “Twins need fewer smiles, more snarls,” he argues that the Twins have too many nice guys, and not enough angry jerks. A compelling argument, supported by an impressive pile of evidence as large as the world’s largest unicorn, but I think Powers misses one key insight:

It’s not that the Twins don’t have enough snarls, it’s that the snarls aren’t coming in clutch situations. They’re wasting their snarls on two-out, nobody-on situations, or late in the game when it’s already a blowout, or they’re spreading them out instead of stacking them for maximum effect. I know they say that there’s no such thing as a clutch snarler, but, having done at least as much research as Powers, I can stand behind three — no, four — airtight conclusions about the game of baseball and about snarling:

1. A lone snarl is as useless as a walk. You can’t win with one snarl at a time, just like baserunners don’t mean anything unless they arrived at first via a headfirst slide.

2. Your best snarler needs to bat 6th in the lineup. Whoever says lineup order doesn’t matter has his head buried in a pile of meticulously-analyzed records. Batting order counts, and snarls need to come 6th. That’s all there is to it.

3. If a lefty snarls, and then a righty snarls, the two snarls cancel each other out. That’s why you need to have all your snarls come from the same side.

4. If your Clutch Snarl Index Ratio falls below 64, you will not make the playoffs.

That’s right– taking every team in history and running them through my proprietary Clutch Snarl Index Ratio formula (which I cannot reveal due to my upcoming book, Clutch Snarl Index Ratio For Real Dummies, You Dummy), I’ve found that no team has ever reached the playoffs with a Clutch Snarl Index Ratio below 64. It was a shocking insight, especially since the Clutch Snarl Index Ratio operates on a scale that runs between 65 and 147.

Of course, so much more research must be done before I could even think about publishing an article about this in an actual newspaper. They have standards, y’know?

As is amply documented, Brian McCann’s job as Chief of Fun Police has made him a busy man for the past several thousand years. Somewhat less attention has been given by historians to the role of Yasiel Puig. That is now changing, as ongoing scholarship reveals the Cuban sensation to have been present for a surprisingly large number of momentous events. Take heart, Albert Pujols: you are merely the latest to have faced, and ultimately overcome, the Wag of Puig.

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It is important to note, for the sake of both historical accuracy and literary theme, that when Mark Twain wrote, “There is no such thing as a new idea,” he was stealing from the biblical Solomon, who, despite enjoying the ministrations of 700 wives and 300 concubines, had conceived a similar and ultimately Ecclesiastical maxim, namely, that there is nothing new under the sun.

Of course, the proof of Twain’s assertion is less in his choice of words than in his decision to use them. That he thought it was nothing new; that he said it was something old. Among writers, the search for new ideas is a truth as old as time, if not somehow older. When facing writer’s block or “thinker’s void,” we must often turn to other sources for inspiration or “plagiarism.”

It is in the spirit of all these things – literature, theft, things being under the sun – that I present this post, inspired by C. Cistulli’s award-craving series, eBay’s Five Most Marvelous and Currently Available Ballcaps.

To repeat: eBay’s 5 Most Marvelous and Currently Unavailable Ballcaps:

Anderson Felons New Era Hat (Missing Link)

Style: Fitted (7 3/8), probably
Time Left: Pretty much all you want, as the cap remains unavailable
Cost: The time it takes to read this post, or this part of this post

The Felons, according to Baseball Indirect Reference, were an Anderson-based Dependent League team that belonged, first, to the Anderson-Area Correctional Institute and then, after that, the Anderson-Area Correctional Institute And Good-Times FunDrinkery. I have it on good, if not great, authority that anyone who wears this hat is automatically confused by the goals of the institution – fun? good times? retribution via killer hangover? – and ultimately confined to the institution, just in time for happy hour.

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Today, the author and his wife completed the first leg of a two-day journey in a U-Haul truck from the north of Michigan to an undisclosed location in New Hampshire that will serve as our new home.

Generating weblog content whilst driving a 17-foot truck presents some challenges. For all their virtues, wives are decidedly intolerant of husbands who attempt to perform internet work from within the confines of a driver’s seat. Fortunately, certain ballclubs have done everyone the total solid of constructing ballparks close enough to Interstate 90 so that absurd men with limited ambitions — like the present author, for example — can parlay that into writing of no consequence.

With that in mind, I present the following — which is to say, probably all the ballparks you can see from the stretch of I-90 between Toledo and Buffalo.

All Pro Freight Stadium
All Pro Freight Stadium is located in Avon, Ohio, and serves as home to the Lake Erie Crushers of the independent Frontier League. Here’s a terrible photo of it from the interstate:

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