One of two such headlines the author happened to find in his aggregator.
It should be noted that, by the word study in the title of this post, what the author actually means is “passing observation” — and that, by the prepositional phrase rife with, what the author really means, in this case, is “two MLB.com articles that recently appeared in his RSS reader.”
With the reconstituted Melkman dominating 2012’s first half, winning All-Star Game MVP honors, and driving shrapnel further into the bowels of Yankees, Braves, and Royals fans everywhere, I thought this might be an opportune time to revisit Mr. Cabrera’s eventful biography. Fortunately, ace reporter and adult performer Mary Carey has asked the hard questions already.
Patience. The subtle sense is higher than desire and will.
— Travis Snider (@Lunchboxhero45) July 5, 2012
He’s batting .316/.396/.557 in AAA. What more do the Blue Jays want?
(I have a soft spot for Travis Snider, since he was on my Scoresheet team for the past few seasons– threw him back before the draft this year with much regret… although part of that regret was having turned down a Snider-for-Nelson Cruz one-for-one offer a couple of years ago….)
Von Hayes has a LinkedIn profile. I went ahead and made it a little more robust — he wasn’t taking full advantage of all the skills and languages he learned while in the game, it seemed.
BUSYTOWN, U.S.A. — When Mayor Fox of Busytown was merely Young Fox, he frequented the old-line immigrant swim clubs in the Busy Hill section of the since-industrialized Northeast Side. The story, still told in taverns with the whiff of the apocryphal but the essence of truth, is that Young Fox, debauched yet aspirational, was once set upon by a roving gang of Bulgarians. He was beaten savagely and left half-naked in the gathering cold.
Mottled with blood bruises and still hypothermic, Young Fox showed up back at the club the next day, as he had been warned not to, and strode with purpose to the same ruffians who had brutalized him the day before. “I’ll not forget what happened,” he said. “And you don’t forget this: there is more of me than there are of you.”
They laughed. “But there is only one of you,” one of them said.
“And now you understand,” Young Fox told his new enemies.
This is but one page from a wildly entertaining bit of merchandise I purchased while in Minneapolis for SABR 42: a 1990 Milwaukee Brewers game program. It’s a fluff piece on then-new commissioner of baseball Fay Vincent. I’m sure many similar pieces appeared in programs across the league and across the country, but I found it interesting for one paragraph in particular:
Many say that he is a perfect blend of former commissioners Peter Ueberroth and Bart Giamatti. If that is the case, then Francis T. “Fay” Vincent, baseball’s eighth commissioner, will help lead the game into a new era of prosperity this decade — a decade in which the business of the sport will be greater than ever before.”
Vincent would receive an 18-9 vote of no confidence from the owners in 1992 and resign his post to current commissioner and then-Brewers owner Bud Selig. 1994, of course, saw the strike, and many would argue that baseball wasn’t fully revived until the 1998 home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. And, of course, this was the beginning of that whole “steroids era” thing. A great new era of prosperity this decade indeed.
Whoops!
I found this really cute picture of Matt Cain and his kid from the Home Run Derby. Sweet dreams, NotGraphers of my heart!
Dear Thought Catalog,
Woke up this morning, made a couple of egg sandwiches, took a pic of my cat. Sat down with my egg sammies and my laptop, started a Third Eye Blind playlist in iTunes, opened Twitter. Saw a Buster Olney tweet about second-half story lines.
Went to the NotGraphs WordPress dashboard, checked to see if any NotGraphers had “second half story line” posts scheduled for today or tomorrow; they didn’t; started this post.
Started by typing the title and “nonstory lines” just popped in there. Googled “nonstory”, saw this
and thought, “Hey, this is a journalism term. I’m supposed to be doing ‘journalism.’ I can write a nonstory. I can write a bunch of nonstories!”
Thought about how exclamation marks should be used sparingly to never in journalism. Thought, “Balls.” Set to work on the following nonstory lines for MLB’s second half:
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been a married gentleman longer than I care to remember. My ankles were ensnared long ago by my metaphorical ball and chain, to whom I am destined and legally obligated to love.
But this in no way means that I do not remember the life of a gallivanting bachelor. Vivid are my recollections of “cruising for chicks,” if you will. These were, indeed, dark times. It is within our human nature to find a companion, someone with which to share our greatest accomplishments and most demoralizing defeats. We yearn for a person of substance, a person with whom we can connect on a higher plane of consciousness. This proves to be a difficult task. I speak not only of the prototypical shut-ins and nonentities. There are people out there of a presumably-normal intelligence and hygiene level that need to make this connection. Some of them are baseball fans.
I took to the Missed Connections section of Craigslist in search of stories from such people. I searched in every city that hosts a major-league stadium, and have hand-picked the most heart-wrenching stories of love found and subsequently lost. I submit them to you, fair NotGraphs reader. I give you permission to weep.
Of all the annoying things about public transit listening to girls talk about their problems has to take the cake
— Max Scherzer (@Max_Scherzer) May 25, 2012
Alternatively:
Of all the annoying things about public transit, seeing Max Scherzer eavesdropping on our conversation and tweeting about it has to take the cake
— Girls (@Girls)
