From The Boston Globe:

“I’m the only Hall of Famer whose number has not been retired [by the team whose cap is shown on the plaque],” Boggs said. “Fergie [Jenkins] and I were the last two, but now Fergie is in [with the Cubs]. That leaves me. It’s disappointing.”

We called Jeff Idelson, president of the Hall of Fame, to ask whether all living Hall of Famers have had their numbers retired, and the research was ongoing.

Now, I don’t personally feel like doing this research, but surely this can’t be some massive project that takes more than ten minutes. There is a list of all living Hall of Famers. There is a list of all of baseball’s retired numbers.

Okay, you know what? This won’t even take ten minutes. So I’m going to do what apparently the Baseball Hall of Fame is unable to do. I’m going to scroll through the list.

Six minutes later. Uh, Barry Larkin, but maybe he shouldn’t count since he won’t officially be inducted until next week. And– Goose Gossage! Gossage was inducted as a Yankee. His number hasn’t been retired by anyone. At least not according to Wikipedia. So, Goose Gossage, you should write a letter to The Boston Globe (and Wade Boggs) complaining that you’ve been forgotten. Wade Boggs, you shouldn’t really complain, because the Rays retired your number, so, hey, that’s something. And Jeff Idelson of the Baseball Hall of Fame, it took me six minutes to do this research, and I don’t actually work for the Hall of Fame. So I think you (and The Boston Globe’s sports section) are very, very lazy.

The category “Men Surrounded by Things” — known colloquially and widely as “The People’s Category” — returns today with the nearly great Urban Shocker surrounded by things both urban and of a shocking nature …

This has been “Urban Shocker Surrounded by Urban Shockers.” This has been “Men Surrounded by Things.” This has been my toil.

Depending on your goals, Dodger Stadium is either a boom or a bust from a beer perspective.

If you are looking to alter your experience through the use of a society-approved liquid drug, then the stadium is ready to provide. Their prices and sizes are very pocket-friendly: you can get a 24-ounce ‘tall boy’ domestic draft beer for $10.25, which is better value than most stadiums provide. These are large beers for a good price.

If your aim is to drink the best-tasting beer that you might want to drink while facing the pitch, well then Chavez Ravine might have the worst beer selection in the bigs.

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Posting this because of the look on Ben Revere’s face as he dives and makes one absolutely splendid catch. You can actually see his eyeballs track the baseball as it lands in his glove!

Never in doubt. And, no, there’s nothing quite like a diving catch — fully outstretched — made on the run. It’s my favorite.

H/T: @SAJagfire. His Twitter bio says, “I make GIFs.” It’s the truth.

Ahem (click to embiggen):

Via thief of hearts Yirmiyahu comes urgent breaking news regarding the stat line of Red Sox 18th-round draft choice Shaq Green-Thompson. Mr. Green-Thompson is currently plying his trade in the rookie-level Gulf Coast League, and his bestowals to date defy belief, explanation and one’s capability to impart basic facts:

Woo, shit. Look at that.

We are doughy. Often — disconcertingly often — our flatulence is so severe that we require a nap in order to prepare ourselves for our regular nap. We have lost weight just twice in our lives: once when we got food poisoning after eating Gaines Burgers at the movies and once when we slept for 96 straight hours after walking up the street to Baskin-Robbins and back. We are barely ambulatory. We manage to combine scarcely prehensile hot-dog fingers with wrists as reedy as reeds. We are not athletes, unless drawing 30 wheezy, loaded-chili-cheese-fries breaths per minute while taking up the entire sofa counts as a jockish endeavor.

So this brings us to a necessary and urgent query: Could we, in such foul-smelling disrepair, replicate Mr. Green-Thompson’s performance to date? That is, could dumb, ugly we strike out 25 times in 26 at-bats, ground out weakly once and back into five walks? Or would we fare even worse?

Call-to-action Internet poll!

Thank you for exercising the franchise. Also, thank you for yelling for your wife to come downstairs and hand you the remote.

Nerds shall inherit the earth. But first, Safeco Field.

Saturday was the somewhat-annual USS Mariner and Lookout Landing trip to Safeco to watch the Mariners, and I was in attendance. Needless to say, when a bunch of us nerds get together, things are going to get weird. With that in mind, here’s some things of note about Nerds at a Baseball Game, 2012.

• Even though it was a group of nerds, I was the only one wearing a FanGraphs t-shirt. I mean, I know it’s a Mariners game and people want to show their team spirit, but some teams are more important.

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In this chapter of Advanced Lipreading, we’re considering some of the difficulties posed to lipreaders by non-native speakers of English. Below are three such real-life examples, with Miami Marlins baseball manager Ozzie Guillen.

Guillen is a native of Venezuela, and, while he’s a fluent speaker of English, has preserved many of the phonological traits of South American Spanish, which can present ambiguities in the labiodental fricative, for example, and the palato-alveolar sibilant — and similar distortions in the corresponding visemes of those sounds.

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Kevin Youkilis, who ain’t too good at grammars, will return to Boston for the first time since being traded to the Chicago White Sox just over three weeks ago.

Well, it’s not exactly the first time. About a week after being traded he flew back to Boston to retrieve some personal items. “Yeah, I forgot to pack underwear, and my best toothbrush was still all in my Boston condo. I had to all feed the fish and stuff.” During this trip, he did not see any of his old teammates, he said, but he did stop for a nice Boston-style frappe at Toscanini’s. “Ain’t nothing like it,” he said, staring wistfully off to the east.

On the day trip in question, Youk enjoyed a double scoop of lemon
pistachio ice cream in a sugar cone in addition to his frappe.

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TV’s latest reality smash pairs modern-day stars of the diamond with their doppelgängers from a bygone era (as determined by Baseball-Reference’s Similarity Scores). Sparks fly and hijinks ensue as these unlikely partners must overcome their off-the-field differences to compete together for prizes galore!

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