“Cistulli,” I said. “How do you like my new Hiroshima Carp fashion t-shirt?”

“Bah,” sniffed Cistulli. “I am a proud and relentless Occidental. I care not for those at the poo end of the spice-trade routes. They are beneath me. Literally. For look at this elderly Japanese man ‘neath my boot-heel.”

I noticed that there was indeed a elderly Japanese man struggling and purpling over underneath Cistulli’s awful stilettos.

“But Cistulli,” I said. “The Japanese play a unique and compelling brand of baseball. Surely you would agree that, considering our game’s global reach, talents from the Pacific Rim will continue to enrich the U.S. major leagues.”

“For God and country,” he whispered as he increased the pressure on the windpipe of the elderly Japanese man to the point of death and then beyond that point. “Now, that’s better.”

“Cistulli,” I said. “Look at the Carp’s logo. Is it not pleasing whimsy? Is it not prepossessing in its use of fractals?”

“To piping-hot hell with the lot of them,” sniffed Cistulli. “Foreordination favors those who look like brawny and alabaster me!”

Then he ravished me.

The baseball landscape is littered with harmonic carcasses of side projects gone bad. Baseball players — perhaps out of boredom or ill-advised thought — have made numerous attempts at expressing themselves through music.

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“…and welcome back to the, uh, next half of an inning here at the stadium this, uh, time of day, where both teams are trying their best to score some runs. Stepping up to the plate, there’s a number on his jersey, and, uh, hold on a second here… oh, wait, he’s not there anymore. Checking his number, and he just did something, and so now we move on to the next player, who’s definitely been up already in this game. He steps in, having quite a season so far, and the pitch is, yep, just as I expected. Here comes the next one, and it’s hit to the… yeah, he’s on a base now, definitely on a base. Before the game, he said he was going to try to do everything he could to help his team win, and he’s absolutely doing that. Just like he’s done his entire career. You know, he’s been talking a lot about this team’s chances, and told me before the game that when all is said and done, he thinks this team is going to have been one of the teams on which he’s played. Strong words from a proven member of the team’s roster. And now he’s on base– and we all know that when he’s on base, anything can happen, especially things involving baserunners. All of this brings us to today’s trivia question, sponsored by the friendly folks at one of our favorite sponsors. Who did… three times? I think I know the answer, and my producer is telling me… yes, I’ve got it. Maybe you do too. Noodle on that for a little while and we’ll get back to it in the top of the inning, if there are any innings left to go. And the guy standing at the plate takes that one, and does what he’s supposed to do next. Bringing the other guy to the plate, and he has had quite a series, both at the plate and in the field. He’s living up to everything we expected him to be, and shows no signs of doing anything but what he’s able to do. A real treat to watch this portion of his career. And… someone’s doing something, so that means we’ll take a quick break. Back next inning with a guy wearing a microphone, who will tell you all about what it’s like to be on that field, and take part in the exciting action. One team’s winning, or at least they will be by the time the game is over. We’ll be right back.”

Yesterday, my friend and fellow NotGraphs content-vomiter David Temple wrote about his utter and complete failure to finish a work of children’s fiction, The Kid Who Only Hit Homers. Finish reading it, I mean. It goes without saying that all of us at NotGraphs are frustrated failed novelists of some stripe or another, with at least one unfinished semi-autobiographical manuscript floating around on our hard drives, but Temple’s aborted attempt to read 130 pages of shockingly simplistic prose will go down as one of the more embarrassing literary admissions to grace these digital pages (the most embarrassing of which is still, by quite a large margin, the cover of Cistulli’s book).

But maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on David. With his weak will, he’ll never make it as a Green Lantern, but at least he was attempting to read a book that wasn’t about angsty sparkly vampires who ruin the game of baseball, an increasingly rare effort in what is passing for our culture in 2013. He could have, instead, simply waited around until this Fall, when he could have watched the television equivalent on ABC:

Let us dissect:

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The following GIF depicts the Gwinnett Braves not understanding baseball. It comes to you from indispensable friend-to-NotGraphs Well-Beered Englishman.

The following tune comes to you from the Harlem Globetrotters, by ways of YouTube, by ways of a website that rips YouTube audio and turns it into MP3s that you download. To me, the Globetrotter’s theme has always been especially evocative of the embarrassment they dole out to their opponents, of the unpreparedness or haplessness of said opponents.

This has been “A GIF and a Tune”. It is a Tuesday.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Walt Whitman thrust himself into the literary scene, challenging us to distill the vitality within us, the truly American. Since then, we as a people (and particularly our high school English teachers) have sought the Great American novel. Moby Dick? Too ponderous. Gatsby? Too shiny. Grapes of Wrath? Too many tortoises.

But it turns out that our quest is in vain, simply because it’s already completed. We have the text that encapsulates our youth, our dynamism, our hope. We have Matt Christopher’s The Kid Who Only Hit Homers.

In Sylvester Coddmyer III, the titular hero, we have a mixture of Ragged Dick and Nicholas Nickleby, a boy with humility and heart, who tackles his difficulties with pluck and moxie. Unlike the modern brooding hero, Sylvester is a boy of action rather than words. He’s a self-made kid, one who gets out of bed each morning pulling handfuls of bootstrap. He doesn’t make excuses; he only hits home runs.

But by no means is Sylvester a flat character. He’s an everyman; to describe him too precisely would rob the young reader an opportunity to find common ground with the character, just as every teenage girl in 2009 imagined herself as Bella. No, Sylvester has weaknesses, and ones we can all understand. He likes pie too much, for example. Christopher gives a subtle nod to The Natural by having Christopher overeat pies and miss a game. We’ve all been there!

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Recently, I invited some of my favorite baseball writers onto my award-eligible podcast to discuss some of their favorite baseball books. Fellow NotGraphs writer/Internet rabble-rouser Mike Bates chimed in with The Kid Who Could Only Hit Homers by Matt Christopher (note: my memory fails me. Bates chose a different Christopher novel, only mentioning this book in passing). It’s a children’s book — in that it’s written for children, not by them. Patrick Dubuque, another NotGraphs writer/digital sad person offered an idea: perhaps the both of us should read said book and give our take on it on these electronic pages. As I’m always desperate for article ideas, I agreed. My thoughts are below.

The Kid Who Could Only Hit Homers revolves around the titular character Sylvester Coddmyer III, a boy who stinks at baseball. We know he stinks at baseball, because the author spends upwards of two and half whole pages explaining this. He’s all bummed about it, and decides to quit the team. The next day, he’s visited by a creepy old man, George Baruth, some sort of specter of Babe Ruth, who starts training with the kid. The next day — THE NEXT DAY — this kid is belting hits all over the field, and is patrolling the outfield with the grace of Willie Mays. A few warmup games are played, and then it’s time for the season.

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On the one hand, Josh Hamilton’s enthusiasm for swinging — documented in some depth recently by FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron — has very likely hurt his ability to produce at a high level offensively. On the other, it allows one to make amusing constellations from the pitches at which Hamilton has swung.

Yesterday, we considered just such a constellation — in that case, of what appears to be an ugly fedora — from all of Josh Hamilton’s swings against Chicago White Sox pitchers this past Saturday.

Here, now, we see another entry to what may or may not become an ongoing series — in this case, informed by data from Hamilton’s May 8th game against Bud Norris, Jose Veras, and the Houston Astros (box). The constellation here bears more than a passing resemblance to the alien spacecraft from Disney’s 1986 film Flight of the Navigator, just tilted on its side a little. The ship, voiced by Paul Reubens, identifies itself as a Trimaxian Drone Ship from the planet Phaelon — which ship the Navigator in question (played by a young Joey Cramer) nicknames “Max.”

Credit to Texas Leaguers for the strikezone plot.

Y’all take it from here.

Carson recently directed Hopeless Joe to the Baseball Hall of Fame’s scouting reports site, where you can waste an afternoon reading the original scouting reports on all of your favorite scrubs and stars, mostly from the late 1960s through the late 1990s. Did you know that scouts recognized that Kevin McReynolds was past his peak in 1994? Now you do.

Inspired by this site, Hopeless Joe decided to dig back into his own archives for some scouting reports of his own. And, there, buried in a drawer, between the half-empty bottle of Listerine that he takes a swig from when he just needs to feel some kind of feeling, and the stack of rejection slips from agents who were not so enamored with his short story collection, “Hopeless Joe’s Hopeless Tales of Hopeless Children in Hopeless Situations,” he came across the report he filed this spring on B.J. Upton, just before the Braves kicked him out of Champion Stadium for sitting in the center field camera’s shot line and holding up signs telling television viewers that one-third of all baseball spectators will one day get some form of cancer, and they should really turn the game off and go see a doctor.

In any case, Hopeless Joe’s Scouting Report: B.J. Upton.