The Leaders of Tomorrow work hard and play harder and smile hardest.

Because both (a) life is a cavalcade of miseries and (b) alcohol famously offers consequence-free relief from said miseries, it follows that (c) no further incentives need exist for its (i.e. alcohol’s) consumption.

And yet, it is not uncommon to find — in particular, among the Leaders of Tomorrow — to find games designed to facilitate and make more amusing the consumption of alcoholic beverages.

Below are eight examples of real baseball-related drinking games discovered by the present site’s Investigative Reporting Investigation Team and not actually just invented right now by the author, sitting at his dumb writing table.

1. Take a small sip of chablis for every infield fly hit by Joey Votto. (Note: for light drinkers.)

2. Drink a beer for every mention of FanGraphs on a Cubs television broadcast.

3. During a Dodgers home broadcast, take a sip every time you secretly wish Vin Scully would hold you and whisper that everything is okay before commencing a meaningful anecdote about Sandy Koufax.

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Sometimes, people who are wise in your life will tell you that “Practice makes perfect.” Sometimes, a cat with a good sense of humor and who also happens to speak English with some measure of fluency will tell you that “Practice makes purr-fect.”

In either case, what we learn is that, for anyone who has an interest in acquiring some measure of expertise in this or that skill, what’s necessary is to develop that skill over a long period of time and by virtue of considerable repetition.

As the footage here demonstrates, at least one person in the Dodgers organization understands that. Outfield prospect Yasiel Puig has exhibited considerable promise in the art and science of bat-flipping. Those fledgling efforts haven’t compelled him to miss the forest for the trees, however — in which metaphor the forest is the potential for future bats to be flipped ever more beautifully and the trees are probably individual bats that were flipped well, but not enough to make a whole forest, probably.

Credit to Kiley McDaniel for video and Nick Piecoro for drawing author’s attention to same.

Gil Hodges’ large hands probably helped him to become a pretty good baseball player. The first-baseman hit 370 HR and had a career WAR of 41.8.

Those same hands might have made him good at murder, too.

Sure, Gil Hodges would be happy to crush your skull for you!

It’s easy to find several photographs of Hodges that highlight the size of his hands. Apparently, their size distracted both photographers and the public from the fact that Hodges always very literally had blood on his hands.

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Recall former major league catcher Charlie O’Brien, backstop for eleven Cy Young Award winners, personal catcher to Greg Maddux, inventor of hockey-style catcher’s mask.

And, in his retirement, deer odor salesperson.

That’s right, I have stumbled across Charlie O’Products, O’Brien’s unique (or maybe not!) line of sprays, creams, and beads that will make deer come closer to your guns so you can shoot them. Actual text on web site:

WARNING: Animals may be prone to attack you while using this product.

So, yeah, that seems like a great idea. But I guess if you’re wearing a hockey-style catcher’s mask while the deer mauls you, at least your face will be protected.

O’Brien is apparently also a member of the cast of Deer Thugs, a television program on the I REALLY NEED TO STOP WATCHING TV BECAUSE IT IS ROTTING MY BRAIN television network.

Deer hunters among you, feel free to explain in the comments why it makes good sense to rub yourself with perfume that makes deer think they should mate with you. I have all sorts of frustrations about living in New York City — construction noise, garbage, the high cost of living, subway cars that smell like urine — but at least I don’t have to worry that a deer is going to try and mate with me.

The Dodgers 1970 scouting report of Dick Allen:

Dick Allen doesn’t need a country. Doesn’t need a position. His country is his steely gaze. His position is that you should go to hell with your judgments.

He’ll fill those holes in his bat when he God-damn feels like it. Dick Allen is tired of you reporting on his potential, too. Go to the next man, see if he cares. (Author’s note: Allen was traded to the Dodgers the year after this report was written.)

You don’t win Rookie of the Year and become an All-Star by pushing cars downhill, dickweed. Cars need to go up. Dick Allen is the man to make that happen.

(Report provided by the National Baseball Hall of Fame.)

When you bounded into Sutter’s arms,
It now seems the very instant of an ascension
Of a man who brushed his burst fingers against the endurable
Only when he was ashamed.

You can do this, we know, this hitting, catching, running.
But it’s the after — the plenteous and undetailed after,
The quiet after
That you’ll always belong to.

If you could only see us seeing you, urging you
On before the hot lights and champagne,
Your words as simple as you could never hope to be.
Your words, like your swing, quavering on the hinges of a pinfold.

Come back to this game and be cloaked again,
You and that lunging, halting, hoping swing —
That motel Gideon’s Bible of a swing.
Just be anything but Sugar Creek dead.

See us. See us with
Each lens less a lens than a deep-water amphitheater
That harbored a sunken eye,
That conspired to let no one quite know

What it all looked like to Darrell Ray.

Hopefully, dear reader, the weather where you are is nicer than the weather where I am. Should that be the case, mayhap you are gearing up to patio-grill some foodstuffs for dinner this evening — delicious flank steaks or cheesy broccoli in foil packets or build-your-own kebabs.

Before doing so, however, please consider abandoning your fancy foodtsuffs and your weak-ass grill in favor of building yourself a new Baseball Monster Grill using the following schematic.

The grill is portable, so that you can easily wheel it around your cul-de-sac, frightening neighborhood child and suburban rodent alike (who would likely try to steal your grill-things as you cooked them!). Use the Grill to clear the area of such pests before proceeding with preparation of the food. The wheels and handles also facilitate travel by airplane or motorbus, or a quick, evasive maneuver into an alleyway (zero turn-radius).

You might be compelled to ask, upon viewing this schematic, “Why would a baseball have a bat in its mouth?” It does not. Instead, that is a fifth of whiskey, built to the scale of the baseball’s face, fueling it with the menace necessary to frighten the aforementioned children and rodents. The whiskey also fuels the brain-flames of the Baseball Monster Grill.

Also please notice in the schematic: the Drunken Baseball Monster Grill is meant to grill in-can Chef Boyardee products and loose potato chips ONLY. Attempting to grill anything else will result in annihilative mutiny on the part of the Grill Monster. Should you bring that fresh tuna steak from Whole Foods within five feet of it, it will turn on you the way you previously turned it on the pests of the neighborhood.

This has been Your Friday Grill.

As for your Friday Bill, please allow me to (re)introduce more horror into your lives, readers: Billy Koch, a talented relief pitcher, you’ll remember, had his career ended early (at age 29) by the mysterious Morgellons disease.

This has been a very-appetizing-indeed Friday Grill & Bill.

When he wakes up…
Yea he knows he’s going to be, he’s going to be that man who makes that catch for you
When he goes out…
Yea he knows he’s going to look, he’s going to look damn sexy making that catch too

When he jumps up
Yea he knows he’s going to keep, he’s going to keep Martinez from going for two
And if you’re worried
Well you know that Robbie G, that Robbie G will have no problem pulling through

But he would run 500 miles
And he would run 500 more
Just to ram his face against the outfield fence to help preserve the score

ROBBIE GROSSMAN!
(ROBBIE GROSSMAN!)
ROBBIE GROSSMAN!
(ROBBIE GROSSMAN!)
ROBBIE GROSSMAN ROBBIE GROSSMAN LA LA LA!

ROBBIE GROSSMAN!
(ROBBIE GROSSMAN!)
ROBBIE GROSSMAN!
(ROBBIE GROSSMAN!)
ROBBIE GROSSMAN ROBBIE GROSSMAN LA LA LA!

Promising Dodgers outfield prospect Yasiel Puig made an impression on the Teeming Masses this spring with his bat-flipping exploits — a practice he appears to have begun (as the previous hyperlink reveals) as a member of the Cuban National Team, if not earlier.

Puig brought his enthusiasm for the craft with him to Double-A Chattanooga, for whom he homered during that club’s second game of the season — and, in the wake of which home run, he proceeded to toss his bat much closer to third base than is generally the custom. NotGraphs, as a journalistic organ with its finger on the throbbing pulse of Beauty, provided due coverage of this episode, as well.

With May having arrived, the reader might find him-/herself asking — especially if he/she has precisely the same lexicon and speaking cadence and general life concerns as the author — “With regard to Yasiel Puig, I wonder if he’s been flipping his bat at all of late?”

The answer to which question is available here in the form of words: “Yes, he has.”

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FEATURED GAME

New York Highlanders @ Philadelphia Athletics
Matchup: Bob “the Gob” Shawkey vs. Raymond “Rube” Bressler

Shawkey, man of “mystifying hooks and fast ball,” makes his return to Philadelphia after moving to the Bronx last season. Handsome young southpaw Bressler, “among the most accomplished work-shirkers that ever adorned a manager’s bench,” tends to be “a marvel one day and a poor excuse for a pitcher the next.” Nonetheless, he is handsome. “[T]hey do say that the pink teas and the soirees and the bridge fights and the receptions likewise reek and drip with the shape of Heinie Groh’s legs, and guesses as to whether or no the handsome Rube Bressler is engaged…and so forth and so forth ad lib.”

OTHER GAMES

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