The following table documents the author’s present debt, broken down by category:

I would be willing to play Major League Baseball in 2013 at the minimum salary in order to pay off this debt, but let’s assume I am lazy and that I would “retire” as soon this debt was paid off. How long would I have to play in order to do this?

The minimum Major League salary was $480,000 in 2012. My total debt — let’s round it up to $90,000 for any interest that might accrue — is about 18.75% of that salary. If we translate that to Games, it’s only about 31 games, so I should be able to retire from baseball in early May 2013. That sounds pretty good. I could be the fifth starting pitcher for some team and I might not even have to play at all if the April off days align just right. If, by chance, a fifth starter was needed, I would have a knuckleball ready, or I would dance a rain dance, or I would just kill myself, in which case the team could collect insurance, maybe, and my debt would vanish so it’d be win-win!

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If there’s a weakness among the otherwise entirely useful body of work produced by the baseball community regarding prospects, it’s a preoccupation with “facts” — as opposed, that is, to estimates regarding what pleasures this or that prospect might be capable of eliciting in the mind, say, of a bespectacled and extravagantly educated 32-year-old sitting in his apartment in Madison, Wisconsin.

With a view towards filling this vacuum in the literature, NotGraphs utilizes what German filmmaker and relentless ubermensch Werner Herzog has called “ecstatic truth” — a term which defies easy explanation, but which Herzog has described as “a searching for truth beyond the facts and much deeper than facts.”

What follows is an ecstatic-truth prospect report on San Francisco Giants middle-infield prospect Joe Panik.

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Fan and Fannie are the Base Ball Twins. They have heads shaped like baseballs, and torsos shaped like baseballs. They associate with tiny baseball-shaped clones, an ungendered baseball-shaped African-American, and his or her goat. They speak mostly in cryptic questions and unsettling innuendo. They will henceforth haunt your dreams, spring unbidden to your thoughts, and bring you profound existential discomfort. Otherwise, I cannot tell you anything at all about Fan and Fannie.

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1. Willie Mays
2. Willie Mays Hayes
3. George W. Bush
4. Al Gore
5. George H.W. Bush
6. Mitt Romney*
7. Mark Grace
8. Manny Acta
9. Bobby Valentine
10. Daisuke Matsuzaka

*If he does not receive a qualified offer tomorrow.

The name on Young Ryan Theriot’s fake ID reads, “Fraternity Paddle Made Man.”

“Are you the quarterback?” Angel Boudreux once asked Young Ryan Theriot. No, I play baseball, Young Ryan Theriot started to say. But he stopped himself. “Yes, I am the quarterback,” Young Ryan Theriot uttered instead. “I am the quarterback of your panties.” This simple statement of unassailable fact is now carved into courthouse edifices all over Louisiana.

Every time Young Ryan Theriot makes a band geek cry — usually by frog-punching him until he voluntarily climbs into the dumpster outside the cafeteria — his Eddie Bauer rugby grows a new stripe.

If Young Ryan Theriot isn’t under the bra by the fourth track of Better Than Ezra’s “Deluxe” LP, then Young Ryan Theriot knows he needs to try something different.

Young Ryan Theriot is not most alive when playing baseball. No, Young Ryan Theriot is most alive when he’s at the wheel of his Bronco II with a Bud Light freshly shoved into his Señor Frog’s coozie and doing donuts in some poindexter’s front yard.

Young Ryan Theriot derives momentary uplift from chucking his empties onto the stretch of highway that, in the service of avoiding double-secret probation, pledges have been volunteered to clean up for the remainder of history.

Young Ryan Theriot’s buddies know better than to mention that night on South Padre. If they do, he’ll frog the shit out of them.

At the outset of any party, Young Ryan Theriot picks out the exact patch of drywall that he will later punch when Melissa Arsenault’s Catholic boundaries prove stronger than his rituals of dirty suasion.

Every five weeks or so, Young Ryan Theriot goes to the Regis Salon at the mall. Once there, Young Ryan Theriot surveys the stylist’s rack, slackens himself into the chair and says, “Make me look like conformity veneered with trouble.” She does. She does because he is.

(HT: Our boy Kyle)

“Let’s start with pins,” Adam Smith says.

“You want pins? The little metal things? Cost a couple of cents each? Sure. But let’s say you can’t go to the store. Let’s say there is no store, so you’ve got to make them yourself. Let’s say you have all the metal you need. How many pins could you make in a day? One? Five or ten, once you got good at it? But they’d be awful. You’d make really awful pins. You don’t even know how bad you are at pin-making, because you’ve never tried, but trust me, you’re even worse.

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In 2013, the Houston Astros will be switching from the NL Central to the AL West. While time has eroded most of the differences between the two leagues, there are still some customs and rules particular to the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs with which Houston will have to ingratiate themselves.

1. The Designated Hitter

 Established in 1973, the DH rule allows a team to replace their pitcher in the batting order with a more formidable hitter. Well, the “formidable” part is just a friendly suggestion by the author, and may not be feasible for the 2013 Astros. Perhaps they should just keep allowing their pitcher to hit, as part of a year-long Turn Back the Clock promotion. These promotions usually don’t turn the clock back only a single year, but the Astros don’t do most things like most baseball clubs.

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All Hallows Eve’ afforded the NotGraphs Séance & Conjuring Committee of Creeps & Twerps the opportunity to commune with baseball spirits past. The Committee summoned the Cubs’ famous double play combo of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance by chanting “Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance” while burning pipe tobacco as incense and circling around a raw chicken, blessing it with an Old Style-infused miter.

The spirits obliged; this is the resulting exchange:

NotGraphs Séance & Conjuring Committee of Creeps & Twerps: What is it like, being dead?

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So the poetry has an underlying wistfulness, a sort of musing nostalgia for something that we cannot possess, yet something with which we feel so deeply in tune. Even the gentle yet strong colors speak of this ambivalence: the figures have an unmistakable presence and weight as they stand before us, moving in the slowest of rhythms. Yet they also seem insubstantial, a dream of what might be rather than a sight of what is.

This longing, this hauntingly intangible sadness is even more visible in the lovely face of Cespedes as he is wafted to our dark shores by the winds, and the garment, rich though it is, waits ready to cover up his sweet and naked body. We cannot look upon love unclothed, says The Birth of Yoenis; we are too weak, maybe too polluted, to bear the beauty.¹

¹ Sister Wendy Beckett, “Botticelli: Lyrical Precision“