Maybe despair gives life to hopes. Maybe three years of just abject, terrifyingly painful existence somehow injects enough power into your flagging dreams that, at least for one shining moment, you can will a thing into being. At least, that’s what I have decided happened Sunday, when Jason Bay hit a grand slam and pushed the ball out with nothing but pure want.

That play, Manny Machado to Mark Reynolds, Monday afternoon in Toronto, was one of the many manifestations of Orioles Magic. I saw it. I felt it. Our Investigative Reporting Investigation Team confirmed it: “Yep, that’s what Orioles Magic looks like,” they reported. Something — someone — kept Reynolds’ toe on the bag.

It’s obvious, especially after Mississippi Matt Smith’s excellent post, I Cannot Use This Website to Explain the Baltimore Orioles, that there’s a higher power at work here. Something greater than all of us. Something we’ll never understand. Jesus, probably. And now that I’ve thought about it, He’s leading us — all of us — to a greater common good, to something that brings all of us together, united in baseball: a potential defeat of the New York Yankees. (Except if it’s the Red Sox who beat them. Then we all lose. Well, except Boston. You see my point.)

It’s not that I’m rooting for the Orioles. I’m too shocked, jealous, and bitter about their random success to root for them. But if the Blue Jays can’t win, I’d rather the Yankees didn’t. That’s just the way I live my life. So the Orioles have become a means to an end.

My point is: That was a fantastic play by Machado and Reynolds. Believe.

GIF credit: Professional GIFmaker @SAJagfire.

In USA today, many of us will slack off as we celebrate the historically important labor of others. It’s a nice detail — considering that this is a site that covers (mostly) Major League Baseball — that the American Labor Day was probably inspired by an annual labour festival in Toronto.

And as we celebrate labor by farting in bed, our laptops searing our thighs, our favorite MLB teams and players will be toiling away for our pleasure. Why not honor the players that have done the most work this season by perusing the following Leaderboards of Labor? There’s no good reason not to — save meat stupor. Meat stupor is the perfect reason to not be able to see straight enough to read these leaderboards.

Those pitchers who have labored most, as measured by Pitches Thrown, Innings Pitched, and Total Batters Faced
This first Leaderboard of Labor (which is sortable) shows the top 20 pitchers in terms of Pitches thrown. It also mostly contains the top 20 pitchers in terms of Total Batters Faced and Innings Pitched. However, pitchers like Homer Bailey and Ricky Romero have faced a lot of batters without cracking the top 20 in terms of IP or Pitches thrown; so, they’re not on this leaderboard.

You can check out the entire leaderboard if you like.

Note: This post was composed on Friday; the numbers have changed since then, and quite possibly for the worse.

I just wanted to take a minute to talk about this. I’ve spent some time on this website, looking at the many numbers. I’m no number-reading expert or anything, but I’m pretty sure that according to this website, the Baltimore Orioles are bad at baseball.

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Here’s an image — following Jason Bay’s first-inning grand slam during last night’s Mets-Marlins game — an image of right-handed pitcher Chris Young next to the aforementioned Bay, a regular-sized person (click to embiggen):

Late in the evening sometimes, when the moon is high and the echoes of my wife’s indie music have been soaked into the drywall, I will make an effort to Better myself as a Person and open, with no small hesitation, Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. For those readers who are unaware or are not masochistic, People’s History is America as seen by the working class, the men and women who worked eighteen hours a day while dying of cancer and mercury poisoning simultaneously, who were thrown in jail for whispering and were regularly beaten for wearing denim.

In other words, People’s History is not what people in the marketing business call a “light read”. It almost explains why, after eighteen months, I have finished 54.7% of the book. I am not good with the concept of sadness.

But I wouldn’t have made it even that far without Matt Alexander:

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Nick Punto inexplicably dives headfirst into first base on a routine groundout to the shortstop

— Mark Saxon (@markasaxon) August 31, 2012

“You can’t reason with grit,” Nick Punto told NotGraphs’ Investigative Reporting Investigation Team. And who are we to argue with Nick Punto?

The nomination process, which involved sturdy building materials, sinew and poo, is complete. Now you may select from the 10 names that follow. The desperate question before us: Who, because he he could punch out a Sequoia, should be nicknamed “Actual, Literal Brick Shithouse”?

Thank you for exercising the franchise.

It takes a big man – and I’m speaking in terms of metaphors, not junk size – to admit when he needs help. You see, I’ll be taking a trip tomorrow to the very small town of Suring, WI for a family reunion. How small of a town is Suring, WI? Well, the image below is a recent one of the downtown area of Suring, WI.

I’m not worried about the town in and of itself, however. I’m worried more about the fact that a large portion of my family (father’s side) will be occupying this town at one time. Moreover, I’m worried about conversing with this group of people. Not to go all Doc Hollywood on you, but I live a different life than most of my kin. My day consists of things like public transit, sidewalks, smartphones, and black people. These are things to which my brethren are not very accustomed.

Though it may sound as if I’m making value judgments, I am not. I am merely trying to set the scene for what I will be dealing with tomorrow. I haven’t seen many of these people since my wedding and some even prior to that. As with any meeting of long lost family, there will be the normal barrage of questions pertaining to my life, of what it consists, and what I’m doing with it. My wife will not be joining me, though my parents should be able to vouch for her existence. I can talk about my home and my dogs, which will be just fine, but the conversation will eventually turn to my occupation. My day job, as it were, is fairly easy to explain. I fix computer systems for an insurance company. Boom. However, my parents will undoubtedly bring up my other venture, baseball writing, much of which appears on this very site. This is where the wicket gets sticky.

To most of my relatives, saying I write about baseball on the Internet sounds completely made up. I may as well say I am an underground astronaut or a unicorn rancher. Despite my numerous requests, I have still not received my NotGraphs business cards, so providing proof will be difficult. Assuming we can get past that, another set of questions will arise:

“Do you get to travel with a team?”
“What’s a clubhouse like?”
“Have you met Ted Williams?”

This is where I need help. I need to try and explain my position here at NotGraphs to a group of people unfamiliar with things like GIFs, Twitter, advanced statistics, blogs, irony, and the Internet in general. Since I am in a bit of a drought right now in the way of friends and positive influences, I turn to you, fair NotGraphs reader.

You’d be doing me a huge solid if you could provide a succinct, one-sentence answer explaining NotGraphs that can be understood by a more, let’s say rural, audience. Some of you will attempt to be clever (and will most certainly fail), but I know there are some out there who can assist me in my conundrum.

Help me, baseball nerds. You’re my only hope.

Reports out of Los Angeles suggest that life, in fact, isn’t all rainbows. Rather, it appears to be — tonight, at least — both rainbows and human legend Vin Scully.

To wit:

Image purloined surreptitiously from Whitney Holtzman.