From The Miami Herald (via Baseball Think Factory):

In popularity poll, Miami Marlins’ Jeffrey Loria ekes out a win over Fidel Castro

Only 23 of the respondents (6 percent) had a “favorable’’ opinion of Loria, and a third of those were people who said they personally know him. The only public figure who might lose a popularity contest to Loria in South Florida right now is Fidel Castro (who has a favorability rating of rating of about 1 percent, says pollster Fernand Amandi).

A majority of the season-ticket holders surveyed said they would favor a boycott if it led to Loria selling the team.

Full rankings from the poll:

1. Ozzie Guillen
2. Heath Bell
3. Jill Kelley
4. Bernie Madoff
5. OJ Simpson
6. Casey Anthony
7. Jeffrey Loria
8. Fidel Castro

Good luck. This one’s tough.

[You have to connect the dots on one of the pictures. And don’t blame me, it’s not my fault. Well, blame me for the stupid post, but not the conditions that created it.]

Brad Lincoln is hunched in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, world-weary and rain-soaked. Outside, rain falls steadily. Lincoln is approached by two children who, to his surprise, know who he is. They begin to recite his high school and college statistics, his multiple awards won at those levels. Lincoln takes it in with an embarrassed smile, signs their baseball cards that bear his likeness, tells them how smart and generous they are.

After the children depart, summoned by their mother, an older gentleman, whom we know (thanks to convenient subtitles) to be Dr. James Andrews, approaches, his shadow in the shape of a crooked elbow preceding him.

“It’s time now, Mr. Lincoln,” Dr. Andrews says. Lincoln rises from his seat follows behind Andrews, putting one foot down fully before picking up the other. The gap between them grows until Dr. Andrews passes through a door and Lincoln is left alone in a hallway, a dim light directly above him. Lincoln hesitates for a moment and looks to his left, almost over his shoulder, at us.

***

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It’s November 26, and that means that the holiday season is upon us. Black Friday has passed, Cyber Monday is already in its twilight, and Sign a Former Rockies Starter Wednesday is just around the corner, which means that those of you who haven’t arranged your seasonal festivities had best put your lives in order. The helpful staff at NotGraphs, naturally, are here to help you with your baseball-oriented commercial/spiritual/socially-required Christmas shopping. Today, our focus lies in that outdated, impersonal, yet time-consuming art, the Christmas card.

Christmas cards contain the sole function of sharing unwanted information about yourself to people you would rather avoid communicating with directly. And despite the fact that said task is now completely fulfilled by Facebook, you may find yourself in need of an expensive piece of cardstock to convey the emotions you wish to appear to have. This can be a daunting task! Empathizing with other people is always a rigorous and demanding affair, even with people you know well and care something about. Fortunately, baseball is recognized for its ability to being people together and give them a common bond without providing any regrettably personal or intimate contact with your fellow man.

In this spirit, then, the marriage of personalized greeting card with the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball is long overdue. Simply click on these virtual samples below to read the heartfelt messages inside!

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An experiment.

Chapter One: Odd Man Out

It had been a long week for Alex Anthopoulos, the 35-year-old general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays and native Canadian, accustomed to cold winters and french fries topped with gravy and cheese curds. Not only had Alex pulled off a mega-trade with the Miami Marlins, turning offensive eye-black wearer Yunel Escobar, strikeout-shy Henderson Alvarez, decent relief pitcher Jeff Mathis, and four prospects into a potential superstar core of the next championship Blue Jays team, but he’d also begun to feel, well, “a little strange,” or at least that’s how he put it to his wife, Cristina, over a plate of her homemade caribou stew drowned in maple syrup.

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Our intrepid translator of all matters Japanese baseball, Gen Sueyoshi, passes along this bit of news: The Hanshin Tigers GM — Katsuhiro Nakamura — knows they need a few whites guys if they want to slap any RBIs this coming season:

GM Katsuhiro Nakamura is hoping [Brooks Conrad] will be able to drive in anywhere between ninety and a hundred runs. Source: Sanspo 11/26/2012

Said Nakamura, via Nikkan Sports, “I think [Conrad] understands as well as anyone that we are in need of power. I do not want to put too much pressure on him, but what we need are RBIs. I think foreign players are for RBIs. Ninety to one hundred RBIs. And to get there, home runs are also needed.”

(Emphasis NotGraphs’)

There are non-white foreign players, you say? Well here’s a look at the Tigers’ current outlay of foreign talent:
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The nominal ace of the Burlington Aristocrats, Pedro Garces.

It is typically the practice of the present author to perform, at some point ante meridiem, a sort of bastard version of what’s known as Lectio Divina — that is, to dedicate about an hour or two to some combination of reading and writing with a view to letting the mind enjoy itself. Contemplation in various forms has been shown by capital-S Science to have beneficial effects on the brain. In my experience, my own practice nurtures a certain flexibility of thought and also cultivates a healthy perspective on some cares and worries that might otherwise have taken a more prominent place in my life.

Over the last two days, I’ve sat down each morning with the intention of performing this morning ritual. In each case, I’ve taken a place at my in-laws’ dining-room table with a cup of coffee, the sort of green-papered and narrow-ruled notebook for which I particularly care, and a pair of improving texts (in this case, Daniil Kharms’ Today I Wrote Nothing and Nancy McPhee’s The Book of Insults) for further consideration. Instead of diving headlong into Pure Thought, however, what I’ve moreso done is to reach for my iPhone and to spend the time previously designated for Careful Introspection — to spend it acquainting myself with a team of fictional baseball players of which I’ve recently become, after the surrender of 25 decidedly non-fictional dollars, the general manager.

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Most teams have 6 to 8 starting pitchers listed on their official depth charts at this early point in the 2013 MLB offseason, but few teams list one player as a starter at three locations on the field. And that is because few teams — only one, as far as league records show — have Ben Zobrist on their roster:

Here is the team’s projected lineup:
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It’s Thanksgiving Day here in Americaworld, a day to pause, reflect, and listen to people complain about the football game everyone else is enjoying. Here in Seattle, being thankful is a particularly simple task, considering that Mariners GM Jack Zduriencek gave the city the gift of Figginslessness this year. Yesterday, the sun even broke through the clouds for the first time in weeks, proving that nature herself can be a little heavy-handed at times.

It would be all to easy to heap additional scorn onto our diminutive disappointment. Instead, I’m going to do the opposite. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want to thank Chone Figgins.

I want to thank his bleary, myopic, failure-soaked eyes, eyes that looked past us and saw only the visualization of future success.

I want to thank his crumbling, bloodstained contract. He earned and will continue to earn nine million dollars per year, the equivalent of two or two and a half wins. He fell somewhat short of these benchmarks, to put it charitably. His ineptitude became the symbol for a franchise that seemed to do almost everything right and have it come out wrong.

The Mariners have not been three wins a season from contending. The issues have been manifold: Ichiro’s inevitable decline, the bloated corpse of Ken Griffey, Jr., Franklin Gutierrez’s extended episode of House. It was a bleakness that was different than the usual Mariners bleakness, because there was never any real target for blame: it wasn’t a spendthrift owner or a helplessly unqualified general manager to point fingers at. The moves looked good on paper. But we always had Chone Figgins.

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