I bought a t-shirt today …

“Mr. Roberto Clemente!” I said upon purchase. “One must certainly respect the great Mr. Roberto Clemente!”

“One must certainly not,” sniffed Cistulli, who, unbeknownst to me, had been lurking behind a potted palm the entire time. “And his name is not ‘Mr. Clemente.’ His name is ‘Bobo Clementines.’ The honorific is reserved for men of honor. Bobo Clementines is a mewling baby coward.”

“How can you say such things?” I gasped.

“Charity is vice,” sniffed Cistulli. “Death is weakness. I do not respect Bobo Clementines.”

Then he ravished me.

Last week, I shared a new statistic, called FAME, that measured the amount of acclaim that a player received during his career. The purpose of this endeavor was to compare the established greatness of players with the recognition of their accomplishments, and it produced a few minor revelations, namely that Yogi Berra was incredibly overrated in his time, and that Tony Phillips may not have actually existed at all, and was created as a psychological experiment by professors at Stanford who posted flyers on Oakland telephone poles reading “Tony Phillips Has a Posse”.

Yogi won three MVP awards, tied for the second most of all-time, yet never actually led the league in WAR. His FAME score, more than any other player, dwarfs his actual numbers. This led me to ask: what if the BBWAA were, retroactively, to cast off their intangibles and surrender to the droning hive-mind of the baseball accountancy? What if the MVP were awarded to the player who provided the most value to their team, regardless of context, over the hypothetical replacement player? What if John Larroquette were to be considered the greatest television actor of his generation?

As it turns out, the MVP in its current form is a perfect example of the inherent conflict between precision and suspense. Here, for the purposes of comparison, is a list of all players who won three or more MVP awards in their career:

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Tougher one this time:

This San Francisco Chronicle article discusses the A’s refusing to remove the tarps from the upper deck stadium seats, even for the playoffs, leaving 20,878 of O.co Coliseum’s 55,945 seats covered and unable to be sold.

From the article:

Longtime sports marketer Paul Siri of Redwood City, a former executive with IMG, said he’d never seen an owner say “no” to the chance to sell more tickets, hot dogs, beer, T-shirts and other merchandise at a high-profile game that’s sure to sell out.

The move makes sense only if Wolff is trying to convince Major League Baseball he can’t build a successful team in Oakland, Siri said.

“Looking at this from his point of view, this is the worst thing that could happen,” Siri said. “His team wins, media exposure increases, the stadium sells out, and suddenly he loses his leverage to move. It kills his argument. … I don’t blame the fans for being upset.”

Not from the article:

In further attempts to keep fans away, and convince MLB that the A’s must move, Wolff has refused to make any attempts to capture the thousands of bees that have found a home in O.co Coliseum. Wolff denies releasing the bees into the stadium in the first place, and emphatically denies spending a long September night covering all stadium armrests with honey, produced locally (in San Jose).

Or it may just be that the two people they found to quote in the article are the only two people who think anyone will buy the extra tickets. This thread at Baseball Think Factory makes the point that there likely is no demand for the seats anyway.

(But how much could they get for the tarps on eBay?)

The author has not verified, but is willing to state with some authority, that all five of the men in the image embedded here were close, personal friends of late Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio and would be entirely capable of telling a story about same Yankees legend that begins with — or, at least, contains — the words “So I says to Joe, I says…”

As you may have gathered from my previous post, I had pretty well narrowed down my imaginary ballot for American League MVP to two players. I hadn’t seen either of them play much, but everyone kept talking about them, so I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Sure, the choices were kind of uninspiring. The one guy, from what I understand, just comes up with the bases loaded all the time, grounds into a zillion double plays and every so often drives dudes in by accident. The other guy, from what I understand, can’t do any normal things very well and is kind of miserable to watch, but for whatever reason the numbers add up to make him look like a freaking superhero. Still, I figured I’d have to suck it up and vote for one of the other. And because I am a reasonable man, I decided to base my vote on which one had the best highlights mix.

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Tom Tango posted his request for fans’ scouting reports of player fielding back on September 11th. I looked at the results today for the first time, given that there was a reminder to FanGraphs readers to do ratings today.

It’s sorta involved: “For any player that you’ve seen play in at least 10 games in 2012, I want you to judge his performance in 7 specific fielding categories.” (Emphasis mine.) This favors the fan who attends over ten live games a year, as Tango also advises,

“If you don’t have an opinion on a particular characteristic of that player, then go on to the next characteristic for that player. This applies especially for you TV watchers, and [sic] you can’t tell how well Peter Bourjos can read the ball off the bat.”

In other words, you need to be a serious fan to qualify, though it’s really just an honor system. That said, it takes a serious enough fan to read FanGraphs, or to visit Tango’s site, and especially to sit down and do this, however incompletely. (I’m not going to participate even though I went to at least a dozen Brewers games this season — I’m a very observant fan, but I tend to watch the pitcher and catcher very closely to the exclusion of noticing defensive alignments, first steps by the fielders, etc.)

I am, however, interested in the results — not the how the fans rate the players, necessarily, though I will look at those results, too, after the project ends. No, right now I’m far more interested in which teams have been most thoroughly addressed by the fans.

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Q: Mike Moustakas: Did he hit 20 home runs?

A: Yes. Exactly.

Q: Who do you think led the league in saves?

A: Jim Johnson. Hold me to it.

Q: Adam Dunn: Good bounce-back candidate?

A: Definitely. He was. Guaranteed.

Q: Was Gio Gonzalez a good pickup now that he was in the National League?

A: Without a doubt. I’d stake my reputation on it.

Q: Will Travis Snider have been traded as of the end of the season?

A: Yes, to the Pirates. So if you were in an AL-only league, you should have watched out.

Q: Can Jake Peavy really have been a useful starter for a whole season?

A: Indeed! I will make the bold prediction that he was have been would be is!

Q: Tim Lincecum: big dropoff, or bigger dropoff?

A: Big dropoff.

Q: Can I have won with Josh Beckett and Jacoby Ellsbury leading my team?

A: Probably not.

Q: Sleeper picks of the year?

A: Mike Trout. He would have been my number one pick, if the 2012 draft was today.

Q: What do you predict for 2011?

A: Much better season for Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee, among others.

Q: Any long-term projections?

A: Take Maris in ’61.

In the upper reaches of a multipurpose stadium,
Thunder has been set afire.

In these distant perches,
In this nest of a hawk tent revival,
Cheap of the dollar, rich of the possible,
I am ransacking you with my 1972 mouth and my 5,000 B.C. cock.

Baseball is below us.
Baseball is about us.
Joe Rudi is working in a quarry.

The horizon is a waterbed.
Oakland is a dance move.
And we are fighter-fuckers.

On this stunted firmament,
Your teeth and blue damn jeans
Taste scared to death.

I am kissing you with my bad neighborhood.

Amid the the wild conclusion of the 2012 MLB regular season, you — dear reader — will be forgiven for having not noticed an equally important race, that of the quite dead, large-headed presidents of these United States (those United States for foreign readers).

Yes, ol’ train-lassoing Teddy Roosevelt, who charged the San Juan hill, who earned the presidency via assissination, who got his mug carved into a mountain and who liberated the Cubans and Filipinos from the dangers of freedom finally got his due:

Well done done Teddy. Maybe someday you can win without the help of the Philly Frenetic.

The bitter tone of this piece was brought to you by John Sayles’ epic Spanish War novel A Moment in the Sun. Read it and then watch as your already unimpressive opinions of 1800s America sink to even more crushing lows.

SIDE NOTE: Yo, check it out. Listen to how Teddy sounded.

People talked differently, right? They also used bigger words — presumably because they had no intent of speaking to the lower class persons.