Earlier tonight, your foul-smelling scribe wrote a post inspired by a Don Wilson baseball card in which the subject appeared vaguely distressed. I riffed on this in the long-banal manner familiar to those endure me and then moved along. Then I read the first two comments to the post, which can best be described as containing “soft yet earnest outrage.”

“Don Wilson,” I said to myself. “Something awful must have happened to this man.”

So I went to Wikipedia and read, to my mounting chagrin, this passage:

On January 5, 1975, Wilson died at his Fondren Southwest Houston home he shared with his wife, daughter and son. Wilson was found in the passenger seat of his brown Ford Thunderbird inside the garage with the engine running. The garage was attached to the house, which caused his son, Alex, to die also and his daughter and wife to be hospitalized in a coma. The official cause of death states that Wilson’s death was accidental.

Egad. This is a grim bit of baseball history of which I was pathetically ignorant. As such, the harm was not intended.

The post was subsequently removed, not — as has been the case so often in the past — by the administrator, but rather by me. My apologies to all who have witnessed my buffoonery.

This latest incident brings us to tonight’s poll …

It’s a matter of public record that Boileryard Clarke was conceived at New York’s Auburn State Prison during a terrifying 12-minute conjugal visit on Valentine’s Day of 1868, raised by a ornery bull terrier named Dom behind a lower Manhattan tenement house, and experienced compassion just once in his life — but would never divulge why or for whom.

What Boileryard Clarke never cared for — likely because he never was one himself — was children. And as these real and not-fake images demonstrate, Boileryard Clarke continues to terrify them even in spectral form.

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By my best estimation, I have never spent more than nine consecutive days not in the Midwest. It is where I was born. It is where I live. It is a thing that forms who I am as a person. The sadness of this statement is not lost on me.

But there are small windows in a Midwesterner’s life where they get to escape the vapid tundra they inhabit and make a pilgrimage south. Some go to relax, some go to imbibe excessively, others have ideas of gambling or swimming with dangerous and/or cute ocean creatures. But we baseball fans, we have a different guise in which we venture toward more habitable climates. There is meaningless baseball that needs to be observed first-hand. But do not let the inviting warmth of the sun act as a false security blanket. Traveling, even for baseballing purposes, can be treacherous. Allow me to submit some tips on what to seek and avoid while dragging your frozen ass to Spring Training.

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Dayn Perry and I are recording his clearly absurd (and now, it appears, semi-weekly) podcast appearance at 1pm ET tomorrow (Wednesday).

Feel free to submit questions for Perry — whose days on Earth on very clearly numbered — in the comment section below.

Today is February 12th, the birthday of Don Stanhouse. That fact, and the fact that I have created the GIF below should be enough to declare today the next NotGraphs Feast Day — the Feast of Stanhouse the Very Orange.

To celebrate, a brief hymn:

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Spring training = clean shaven and lots of baby powder. Johnson and Johnson’s stock just went up.

— Tony Maccani (@TMaccani) February 12, 2013

Let him have his spring trainingwithout his wife having to come and police every move he makes. #lethimplayball

— Baseball Pants (@Urbaseballpants) February 12, 2013

Alex Cobb’s dog looks to make the Rays out of Spring Training atmlb.com/12tH27Q via @cut4 @shawtyt20

— Al Tyson (@AlTyson2) February 12, 2013

#springtraining is finally here. So excited. Remember to get ur #tbraysboobs pics out. #boobment #tbrays

— TB Rays Boobs (@TBRaysBoobs) February 12, 2013

Ppl taking the piss abt #BellLetsTalk are not funny. Wanting to go to spring training is NOT a mental illness. You’re not helping the cause

— Paulyne (@CanasianMe) February 12, 2013

At the Giants Media day, I ran into Barry Zito as he was wrapping up an interview. He had C.S. Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain” sitting on his bar table.

Eno Sarris: I’m really interested in what people read on the road. That’s… not Narnia! [laughing]

Barry Zito: No. [Not laughing, but maybe smiling] No it’s not. This is my third one, but I haven’t done Narnia yet.

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New York Met outfielders are entirely candid about their prospects for the 2013 season, it appears — as the following (and necessarily) censored tweet reveals:

In soccer, the Dutch are famous for having re-invented the game in the early 1970s by means of what has become known as “Total Football” — a strategy devised by Ajax and Dutch national-team coach Rinus Michels, which demanded technical ability from every position and emphasized a fluidity of play.

As the graphic here suggests, there’s reason to believe that Hensley Meulens, manager of the Netherlands’ entry in the forthcoming WBC tournament, is about to do for baseball what Michels did for world football 40 years ago. Faced with a roster featuring four young and talented shortstops — Xander Bogaerts (Red Sox), Jurickson Profar (Rangers), Jonathan Schoop (Orioles), and Andrelton Simmons (Braves) — Muelens has turned lemons into delicious and Zeitgeist-defining lemonade, choosing to deploy all four of the aforementioned players at shortstop at the same time.

“How fine is the line between genius and madness?” Muelens appears to be asking. Except in Dutch, probably. Or in Papiamentu, maybe, too — i.e. the other official language of Muelens’ native Curaçao.

Image thanks to Andy Gray at SI Vault.

Damn, Earl Weaver, you knew how to walk the line — though often, you crossed it. Thrown out at least 91 times, even today you might be thrown to the wolves for your lack of small balls. Big balls only, you always said; sport coats and ties. But Schlitzes, Marlboros, too, in their time. You knew how to walk that line.

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