A year ago, I shared with you the prospect of the baseballing robot in all of its unicycling glory. It was a future full of action, intrigue, and strangely conservative grass fields. It was a future in which warfare was no longer merely a metaphor for the national pastime: it was the pastime itself. This, ladies and gentlemen, was the era of the Base Wars.

Today, however, allow me to transport you to an entirely different era: forward from the Nintendo Entertainment System of the late 80s to the superlative version of the early 90s, and backward from the 24th century to our own. Thanks to Japan and through the magic of video games, we can now imagine what baseball will be like when Prince Fielder’s contract expires. Witness: Super Baseball 2020.

Robots have, you may be surprised to learn, already infiltrated the sport, though their barrel-shaped design is neither sleek nor sexy. Robots are, naturally, stronger and more sure than their fleshy companions, but they’re also more erratic, wearing out and exploding after four to six innings, without even being shot by a laser.

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I told readers in a recent post that if you followed me on Twitter, I’d check out your blog. Here’s the latest in a series that takes a look at some NotGraphs reader blogs and points you toward some interesting things I find. If you’d like to potentially be included in a future post, it’s easy.

1. Here’s a fun book review of Curious George at the Baseball Game. Are there other children’s books about baseball that could benefit from a sabermetrically-minded analysis? That could be a fun series for someone to write.

2. Here’s a very nicely Photoshopped collection of MLB catchers with goat hands, which makes (slightly) more sense if you read the post.

3. Six weeks too late, but this “do I have the ball?” trick played by Ryan Zimmerman to catch Carlos Gonzalez off third base is pretty cool, and a nicely done GIF.

4. Some solid-looking analysis of whether Nick Swisher ought to remain a Yankee next season.

What precedes is (as one will find out if they click to embiggen) a map of the area codes in which the Baltimore Orioles have assigned outfield prospect Jerome O’Bryan “L.J.” Hoes. The detailed list:

941

Gulf Coast League Orioles (Sarasota, FL)

410

Delmarva Shorebirds (Salisbury, MD)
Aberdeen Iron Birds (Aberdeen, MD)

301

Frederick Keys (Frederick, MD)
Bowie Baysox (Bowie, MD)

757

Norfolk Tides (Norfolk, VA)

It pales to the amount of area codes in which Ludacris claims to have regular hoes, but that’s some impressive work by the Orioles and Mr. Hoes nonetheless.

12 Jul 1980: Craig Swan (right) and coach Joe Pignatano tend their vegetable patch in the bullpen at Shea Stadium (Image by © Bettmann/Corbis)

With the Mets bullpen so putrid right now, the jokes are tempting — “I see a lot of hoes out there;” “For once they could just lettuce be surprised by a good performance;” “Can they grow a decent arm without illegal fertilizer?” or “They certainly got enough cabbage to be so terrible;” — but that’s just piling on. Instead, let’s use this as inspiration.

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The following tweet is entirely and in-no-way altered from the original (click to embiggen):

As Eno Sarris pointed out a few weeks ago, hugs are on the rise among MLB players this year.

Yesterday, during the Phillies-Brewers matchup at Miller Park, there was an exciting new development in #MLBHugs:

That’s right. Hugdowns.

You see, normally #MLBHugs happen between current teammates — when something dramatic happens — or, as per the very existence of the twitter entity MLB_HugRumors, between recently ex’d teammates — when freshly traded players were being hugged goodbye in dugouts, midgame.

But this new sub-species of #MLBHug is between opponents. While they are competing.

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As any of my fellow NotGraphs contributors will proudly attest, our primary purpose here is to advance the state of baseball knowledge through cutting-edge research. To that end, I now submit to you the results of a study designed to resolve a question of vital interest. Namely: which players, in the history of this sport, have been the most overappreciated and underappreciated? Or, stated in the vernacular: of which players is it coolest, and lamest, to be a fan? You might think that such a subjective question would thwart all empirical investigation. But you would be severely underestimating the resources (and the wits) at our disposal here at the NotLabs. Among those resources is a series of measurements that provide a precise and infallible index of what we may casually term “fame”: the number of backlinks to every ballplayer’s Wikipedia page.* Players who are more famous, we postulate, will have more Wikipedia pages linking to their own page. By plotting a player’s backlink count against his career WAR, we may generate a regression line that predicts fame based on value, and then measure deviations from that line. In our first application of this methodology (to hitters only), we obtain the following. Discuss.

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From the New York Daily News:

In a bizarre attempt to avoid a 50-game drug suspension, San Francisco Giants star Melky Cabrera created a fictitious website and a nonexistent product designed to prove he inadvertently took the banned substance that caused a positive test under Major League Baseball’s drug program.

Cabrera associate Juan Nunez, described by the player’s agents, Seth and Sam Levinson, as a “paid consultant” of their firm but not an “employee,” is alleged to have paid $10,000 to acquire the phony website. The idea, apparently, was to lay a trail of digital breadcrumbs suggesting Cabrera had ordered a supplement that ended up causing the positive test, and to rely on a clause in the collectively bargained drug program that allows a player who has tested positive to attempt to prove he ingested a banned substance through no fault of his own.

1. Where’s the link? I want to see this website.

2. Why can’t I get $10,000 to create phony websites? I have actual experience in this department! Attention, baseball players: If you want to pay $10,000 for a phony website, I am available for hire. Bulk discount if you need sites for multiple illegal products.

The nomination process, which ran afoul of just about every directive found in Leviticus, is complete and now you may select from the 10 men to follow — men who have been painstakingly drawn and quartered by the forces of Heaven and Hell. Who among these men should be known forevermore as “Man vs. Bible”?

Thank you for exercising the franchise.

Jackie Robinson has got a new movie — 42 — about him
coming out in 2013. Who else needs one?

After two exhausting rounds of voting — in which I had to write over 1000 words per post — we have finally reached the final vote, where we will determine the single more deserving baseball personality, the fella worth a quality Hollywood movie.

Here’s the poll. I encourage you not to vote for just the names you recognize, but the stories you think move-worth.

And follow the jump for the brief explanations of the players/personalities in case you missed them in the previous rounds.
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