As many of you know, over the past week, we at the NotGraphs Convalescent Home and Headquarters engaged in a thought exercise. Our goal: to build a team of avatars representing the NotGraphs aesthetic. Our results: more glorious than our collective and somewhat hyperbolic expectations. And now, urbane and attractive readership, it’s your turn to voice your opinions and witty rebuttals.

First, for the sake of reference, here are all of the authorial rationalizations for their picks:

Bradley Woodrum
Carson Cistulli
Robert J. Baumann
Jeremy Blachman
David G. Temple
Michael Bates
Patrick Dubuque
Navin Vaswani
Eno Sarris

Beneath the cut is a breakdown of the draft (fictional player denoted with asterisk):
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The Columbia Guide to Standard American English continues to regard — or regarded in 1993, at least — the word alot as a “substandard” form of the adverbial construction a lot. The author has utilized it in the title of this post, however, as an important reminder that nearly everything in life is substandard. Like the chair, for example, in which the author is presently sitting. And like this body, for example, in which the author is trapped for life.

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A common sight at Safeco Field.

Central to the enjoyment of baseball for many of that sport’s fans is the cultivation and maintenance of a team allegiance. Below, apropos of little, are four pleasures derived from same.

Family Tradition
Frequently, children inherit the team allegiances of their parents and, before them, grandparents. There’s a certain pleasure to be derived from this continuity within a family. Our bodies seem predisposed to derive pleasure from the passing down of rituals from one generation to the next. One remembers, for example, being taken at a young age to Fenway Park, and looks forward, perhaps, to taking his or her own child to Fenway Park.

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Reading Jon Bois’s recent article on the collapse of Andruw Jones’s career reminded me of two things:

1. I’ve wasted my life. (Jon Bois is three years younger than me. Jon Bois is awesome, and I am fine with awesome people being younger than me, but I had been assuming that, because he is so awesome, that Jon Bois was older than me, and I was overcome with existential dread, until I remembered that being overcome with existential dread is meaningless.)
2. Mistranslated things are often very amusing.

If you don’t want to click on the link to Bois’s article (and you really should: it’s a very good read), I’ll tell you what the title and lead-in reveal: Andruw Jones has a tattoo on his neck of Chinese characters that were supposed to mean “Bull” but instead translate more closely (and perhaps more appropriately, as Bois points out) as “Beef Animal.”

So, I set out to see what other baseball nicknames I might hilariously mistranslate using Bing Translator — you know, just in case other players might want to get more appropriately [mis]translated tattoos of their own.

Let us meme!

[Important Amendment: El Oso Blanco]

Pronk (Project Donkey)

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Match the player to his AAA stat line.

(a) .408/.508/.592, with a 10:7 BB:K ratio.
(b) .393/.475/.714, with 13 extra-base hits, including 6 homers, in 84 at-bats.
(c) .302/.381/.523.

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Of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s widely celebrated 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, critic William Kennedy wrote in the New York Times Book Review that it’s “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Approximately 460 years before Marquez’s novel, noted Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch finished his stirring triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Regarding both Marquez and Bosch, it’s probably fair to say that their respective legacies and influence will outlast Dodgers rookie Yasiel Puig’s. That said, it’s also fair to say that neither has hit four home runs in his last five games — especially not Bosch, who was inconveniently dead for over 300 years even before our sport was even invented.

In any case, Puig has clearly been influenced both by Marquez and by Bosch, as the following three animated GIF files illustrate.

Like this one, for example, of Paul Maholm’s first pitch to Puig in the latter’s third plate appearance tonight — on which Puig gestured as though to bunt:

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Today, we launched a beer website, a family member for FanGraphs: BeerGraphs. On that site, we hope to ruin beer with spreadsheets much like FanGraphs ruined baseball. But we hope to celebrate beer, like NotGraphs celebrates baseball.

And so my NotGraphantasy club is full of players that made me think of beers. Delightfully delicious beers. Some all hops, and smack you in the face, and some all about balance and poise.

C: Sal Fasano

What beer tastes like mustache and smells like the funk Sal Fasano put out there on a semi-regular basis? Maybe Jolly Pumpkin’s Bam Noire. That beer is made with Brett yeast — some says it smells like goat — and has a sour aspect that could make you screw up your face like you just got a face full of Fasano crotch on a play at the plate on a 90-degree August afternoon. The Bam Noire is worth a full negative four beer wins, but then again, Fasano’s not for everyone either.

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As one might suppose, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter drive considerable traffic both to FanGraphs and its subsidiaries. Also important, of course, are the page views generated by searches made on Google and elsewhere. Below are the seven searches which mostly commonly brought readers to NotGraphs this week.

babkdoor cutter
A popular pitch type in Polish Baseball League, one assumes.

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On Wednesday, I promised to explain to you little muffins my love of Malachi Kittridge, the turn-of-the-20^th-century catcher, refugee from Children of the Corn, and briefly turned manager of the Washington Senators. He was a terrible player, and I love him for that too, but we’ll focus on the managing here.

Tom Loftus had been the Senators’ second skipper, guiding the club to sixth and eighth place finishes in 1902 and 1903 respectively. Nevertheless, he was expected to manage the club in 1904 up until April 12, when he abruptly quit. I haven’t been able to find any documentation about why he quit, but it’s a good bet it had something to do with his boss, “Business Manager” Dwyer (I can’t find his first name anywhere), who the Senators’ minority owners were trying to have removed. Kittridge was appointed the interim manager with the team “in a chaotic state.”

The season started two days later, and Kittridge’s Senators were blown out by Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics. By the end of April, Washington still hadn’t won a game (they had tied in their second game of the year). It would have been payday on May 1, as the Senators left for New York City to start their series against the Highlanders. Dwyer paid third baseman Bill Coughlin his entire salary, around $200, entirely in one dollar bills

“that had swelled like a damp sponge. The bundle was so large and thick Bill couldn’t bend it. He carried his slary under one arm like a loaf of Dutch bread. While transferring from the ferryboat to an L train in New York Coughlin hid the musty wealth beneath his coat. Even then he expected the thugs to bounce a piece of cheese or similar blunt instrument on his head.”

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There’s little from history to recommend naked appeals to the sordid, teeming masses. Former Louisiana governor Huey Long, for example, was decidedly populist in nature and ended up all assassinated in his own state capitol building. More recently, Italian media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi — no stranger to the absolutely lowest common denominator — has been forced to serve as that ridiculous country’s prime minister on no fewer than three occasions. “Very unappealing,” one says with regard to that.

And yet, even with those cautionary tales having been well established, what the author has done here is to capture video of Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig’s hitting his third home run in four games — a grand slam in the eighth inning, no less, to secure victory for the home team — and render it into GIF form.

“Cynical!” says one sort of reader. “Exciting and easy to consume!” says another. And what does the author say? “Nothing,” is the answer — because it’s after midnight locally, and he’s all alone in the house, typing these vain, needless words.