Previously: Trey Michalczewski.

NEW YORK — Ike Davis, who recently claimed he “can’t do any worse,” did worse last night, as he went 0-6 with 9 strikeouts and 21 strikeout-assists, where he ran up to the plate and literally grabbed the bat from his teammates’ hands. Said Lucas Duda, “that was not cool, Ike.” Said Ruben Tejada, “whatever, I was going to get myself out anyway.” Davis also made 19 errors in the game, including twice getting confused about how many outs there were, and walking off the field while the ball was still in play.

In the bottom of the 4th inning, Davis walked over to second base and broke Daniel Murphy’s arm, further hampering the team’s attempt to win the game. In the top of the 8th, Davis spit on three umpires, but, unfortunately for the team, was not ejected from the game. In fact, the umpires ruled that he should be forced to play, as that would be worse punishment for the Mets. Before the game, Davis quietly informed Dillon Gee, the night’s starting pitcher, that his entire family had been killed in a bear attack. This distracted Gee and led to him giving up 16 runs in just a third of an inning. Actually, it was 6 runs, but Davis reprogrammed the scoreboard to give the Mets’ opponents a 10-run head start.

After the Mets’ loss, Davis inadvertently added a powdered laxative to the food in the post-game spread, which will hamper the team’s attempt to stem the losing streak tomorrow. He also switched the lineup card with a joke version that places 4 members of the starting rotation in the infield, and invited a twelve-year-old fan to play catcher. Davis was found clumsily corking David Wright’s bat and tainting Matt Harvey’s urine for Harvey’s routine drug test. He also pretended to be Sandy Alderson and traded Zach Wheeler for a bucket of Dippin’ Dots, which he neglected to place in the freezer.

So when Ike Davis says he can’t do any worse…

Roy Howell is oral tradition.

If you are of a certain age, then you may believe you have seen Roy Howell play our baseball. You did not because he did not.

If your grandfather tells you of seeing Roy Howell kick the third-base bag to dislodge the loam from spikes after smiting a triple, then call your grandfather the liar he is.

For Roy Howell is the boy asking what the graveyard is as the car whisks past it and he is the mother driving the car who aches for quiet and he is the dead stevedore buried in that graveyard and he is the dosage of gruel spooned into his mouth each night at assisted living before he wound up in the graveyard that the boy is asking about.

You did not see Roy Howell play our baseball. If you are a dried old river, you may have read of Roy Howell in the etchings upon the basalt, but you did not see Roy Howell play our baseball. Do not call him spectral. You may call him the moment the specter was created, but don’t you know he is not even that. If you are a limestone cave, then the stalactites and the slow raindrops that made them may have told you about seeing Roy Howell play, but they are as empty of truth as any grandfather who said he saw Roy Howell play.

For Roy Howell played only in stories. Once the stories stop, Roy Howell will go on playing our baseball, but then only the stories will tell stories. Roy Howell is the words squaws used to soothe their children. The roaming trappers stole those words and gave them to brute soldiers who told them to their sons who had sons of their own who became stevedores buried in graves yoked to the seasons by the roadside. And every word they used was about not having seen Roy Howell play our baseball.

For Roy Howell is oral tradition.

It’s no use concealing the fact, reader, that your life is a series of failures, each more disappointing than the last.

Rather than trying in vain to improve your own station in life, however — which course of action is likely to end only in even greater embarrassment — consider regarding the brief victories of other, more able-bodied and -minded humans. Like this changeup by Ross Wolf, for example, from earlier today — with which pitch Wolf struck out contact-oriented Oakland catcher John Jaso.

Regard the footage until its enchantment wears off. Then proceed to another area of the internet and repeat.

1. A Home Run
2. A Stolen Base
3. An Umpire
4. A Good Catch
5. A Team Lose
6. A Bunt
7. A Manager Get Ejected
8. An Infield
9. A Team Win
10. A Pitcher
11. A Double Play
12. A Baseball
13. A Baseball Bat
14. A Batter

The Scout feature of MLB.com’s Gameday service is generally regarded as innocuous, if sometimes less than helpful, by the Baseballing Public.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, however, a recent strikeout by A.J. Burnett of opposing pitcher Felix Hernandez prompted the Scout in question to inspect the poorly constructed foundation on which his own assumptions of the world are perilously built.

As the reader will note, the initial comment bears considerable resemblance to the Scout’s usual sort of analysis:

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Dear NotGraphs,

–Ambiorix Ouellette

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Pictured Above: Old-Timey Basestealing

Today, a public service. This, dear readers, is a baseball player named Rickey Henderson. You probably haven’t heard of him. He was a fairly well known player prior to the turn of the century, so you could hardly be expected to remember him, and he was elected to the Hall of Fame, where he’s enshrined with other great stars of yesteryear like Ed Delahanty, Amos Rusie, and Tommy McCarthy. He has faded into relative historical obscurity.

But that’s not very fair to a man who was, by all accounts, one of the better out fielders of his day. So I’m going to dedicate this post to maintaining his memory and to spreading the word. Based on painstaking research, here are a dozen (mostly) true facts about Rickey Henderson:

1) Rickey Henderson is the all time leader in runs (2295), stolen bases (1406), and caught stealing (335). The modern record holders are Albert Pujols (1399), Juan Pierre (597), and Juan Pierre (193). It was a different game back then.

2) This story is probably apocryphal, its origins lost to the mists of time. But Rickey signed as a free agent with the New York Metropolitans in 1999. During Spring Training, he noticed John Olerud was playing 1B with a batting helmet on. Rickey walked over to him and said, “Hey, I used to play with a guy in Toronto who used to do that.” Olerud said, “Rickey, you’ve got an amazing memory to be able to remember that far back.” “I know,” Rickey said. “My teammates are more important to me than anything in the world.”

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There are two ways to deliver a sponsor catch-phrase. There is the way the ad-agency toadies believe to be the most effective based on focus groups and free associations scrawled on a dry-erase board, and then there is the way that Cardinals Radio Man Mike Shannon knows to be the best because he knows a thing or two about a thing or two. And the Mike Shannon way is to pitch the product like you’re talking up some hubba-hubba dame in the buffet car.

Take Scott’s Turf-Builder, for instance. Here’s the actor they hired to deliver the words upon which the the lives of their children and shareholders depend …

And now here’s Mike Damn Shannon, who, as you can imagine, was through with it before you or anyone else not named Artie Shaw knew what to do with it …

Allow me to answer for you: You prefer Mike Shannon’s golden throat and pitches to whatever that Gaelic beast was trying to perpetrate.

I’ve collected baseball cards since I was a kid. When I use the word “collect,” I really mean that I don’t throw away the ones I have. I’m not the sort of person who can justify a heavy investment in luxury items like baseball cards, lottery tickets, bottled beer, or plus-rated gasoline.

For someone who grew up at the rise of the junk wax era, my collection is and was pretty decent. When one of my father’s co-workers gave me a crumbling December 1987 Beckett Magazine, I sorted through my card and found that I owned the rookie card of a guy named Tony Gwynn. I took it to church to show my friends, and lost it. Later, I traded a ton of cards for a 1963 Carl Yastrzemski, which I always found difficult to look at because of the patch of sunlight on the tip of his nose, and which made him look like an elf. The card was worth $75 at the time. I took it to a card show, and had it stolen. Later on, in 1992, I pulled some fancy insert rookie card of Shaquille O’Neal, and it, too, was stolen. That one is hard to feel upset about now, given that it’s probably worth 20 cents. Still, I was a pretty stupid kid.

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