Breaking down MLB.com’s recently released list…

HUMAN… 94
ALIEN… 6

GENETICALLY MALE… 92
GENETICALLY FEMALE… 8

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Imagine two Kodiak bears, each walking alone through the forest. Strong, powerful, furry. They have no fear, no predators from which to run, and seemingly no enemies. Then, a twig snaps, and one bear looks up to find himself within 20 yards of the other. They growl at each other. They stand on their hind legs, they bare their teeth, and they roar menacingly. When these two bears meet in the woods, it is a scientific fact that they will fight, the fight will be epic, and that one of them will limp off to die alone.*

*Do not look this up.

I had never seen two bears walking through the forest until last weekend, when at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome for TwinsFest. You are skeptical, obviously. How could a bear even make it into the Twin Cities, let alone into a pressurized, domed stadium with revolving doors? “Chillax,” I say. “These are metaphorical bears.” These are bears in the form of circa 1973 Luis Tiant and Willie Horton, whose baseball cards I located glaring across from one another in a binder at the largest baseball card show in the Upper Midwest on the Metrodome field, their forced colocation adding to what was already a tense scene. Feel it:

Those are some intense staredowns and some very intimidating mustaches. As Tiant and Horton stared each other down from across the book, I worried for what would happen if they faced each other any longer, so I purchased one of them and David Temple, oft of this space, also purchased one and we separated them before any damage was done to the surrounding cards.

But we never resolved the question of which bear would have won the inevitable conflict. And as gentlemen of science and fine breeding, coming to a satisfactory conclusion was compulsory. Thankfully, we know that Tiant pitched against Horton’s Tigers five times in 1973, and Horton played in three of those games.  And so it was when Willie Horton dug in against Luis Tiant in 1973 that we learned who was Ursa Major, and who was Ursa Minor, for here are the results of their struggle: Read the rest of this entry »

Home-run legend and current Dodgers hitting coach Mark McGwire will sign anything, it appears — as the following (and necessarily) censored tweet suggests:

Periodically, in these pages, we have considered the blinking habits of the guests of MLB Network program Clubhouse Confidential, hosted by the robustly coiffed Brian Kenny. Dave Cameron’s own blinking habits have been considered with no little enthusiasm in these electronic pages — as have those of other, notable members of the sabermetric community.

Recently, godfather of sabermetrics himself Bill James appeared alongside Kenny. Below is the data concerning his blinking patterns.

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RIP, Nick Johnson’s career. Mourn ya ’till I join ya.

Three score and seventeen years ago, on this very date, the first group of inductees to the Baseball Hall of Fame were announced. You all know those five names, and you’d recognize most of the ballot: of the 47 guys who got votes, 40 of them eventually wound up in the Hall (and one of the other seven is Joe Jackson). This post is about one of the guys who didn’t. Norman Elberfeld got a single vote that year, and dropped off the Cooperstown radar altogether after picking up two votes in 1945.

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I don’t know why I liked reading this as much as I did:

When the Washington Nationals agreed to terms with one of the top prizes of the MLB offseason, signing closer Rafael Soriano to a two-year deal, it caught nearly everyone in the baseball world by surprise.

…

Storen saw the news online and immediately called his good friend and roommate, Tyler Clippard, who happens to be the other closer the team already had in the fold.

“I just saw it on Twitter and I called him and I said, ‘have you seen this?’ We were like, ‘what?’”

The conversation was short and speculative as neither player really had a lot of information about the signing, they knew as much as anyone else.
(Source)

I mean, it’s easy to forget that baseball players are real people. But stuff like this is a reminder that, sure, they are. You read some crazy news on Twitter that impacts your life, you totally pick up the phone and call a friend. I have no larger point to make, just that reading this makes me like Storen and Clippard. That is all.

Those concerned about creeping Maoism will recall that Four Loko — the drink that helpfully combined restorative caffeine with mind-clearing alcohol — was banned by the meddlesome crypto-Etruscans at the FDA. After all, taking our guns away is easier when we’re neither awake nor drunk.

Anyhow, base-ball-ing legend Boileryard Clarke, who has for years sustained himself on a diet of nothing more than hooch and punched-out constables, has entered the fray and wielded his celebrity like a sword that looks like a dick.

So please do drink deeply of first the following paid advertisement and then a high-reaching pour of Four Loko …

Play better base ball and beat back tertiary syphilis with Four Loko.

Bill Baer of Crashburn Alley has dedicated at least a portion of his evening to reminding us, the tired surfers of the internet, that Carlos Ruiz one time conspicuously mastered his opponent (in this case, Atlanta left-hander Eric O’Flaherty) in May of 2012.

What the present author has considered — and asks below in the form of a rather late quiz — is how much Carlos Ruiz actually cares about what just happened in the GIF embedded here.

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The author had occasion Sunday — during the Milwaukee Brewers’ On Deck fanfest event — to ask occasionally mustachioed and always Canadian John Axford three questions of considerable import. Below is an audio record of Axford’s answers — and a more or less accurate transcript of same.

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