The North Shore Navigators are a baseball team from Lynn, MA playing in the Futures Collegiate Baseball League. They use wooden bats. Cistulli knows a lot about them, I’d guess. Other facts about the Navigators can be found on their Wikipedia page, but those facts are trivial compared to the content of this here web page. Because what Wikipedia can’t tell you about the Navigators, is that they are in love. The relevant screenshot, below:

You’ll notice the players who’ve moved on to professional baseball are listed as Coming Soon! Evident in this picture is that this might apply to one Navigator “sooner!” than the others.

Take in the following three images while listening to the Twin Peaks Soundtrack. 

And understand The Love of the Navigators.

Guests file into the Iroquois room at the Downtown Marriott while a man playing an electric piano finishes a Bach toccata. There is an urn on a handcrafted oak table at the far end of the room. The music stops and the crowd quiets. A man begins to speak.

“Good morning, everyone. I’m Mr. Temple’s lawyer. Mr. Temple requested that I head the proceedings today in the event that his original choice for emcee, Tom Hanks, was unavailable. As Mr. Hanks has also passed, here I am.”

“I’ve been instructed to keep this very short, and I will try my best to do so. I’m sure many of you have some things you would like to say about the deceased, but Mr. Temple laid out very specific instructions about how this ceremony should proceed, and none of them include others sharing their feelings. Mr. Temple did express an interest in having Tom Waits perform the song ‘Young at Heart’, as Mr. Temple was certain he would die before Tom Waits. This is not the case however. He also asked that I simply read this prepared statement and play the accompanying video presentation.”

The lawyer clears his throat and opens a piece of paper.

“‘Dear people who came to see me dead; there is a very good chance that you and I had a strong bond — an important relationship. I never really found the time or the interest to get close to people, so the fact that you knew me well enough to attend this event points to the fact that you were one of the few special people in my life. I want you all to know that all the special times we had — all the indelible memories we created — pale to this.'”

A screen raises from behind the urn. A video plays.

The lawyer continues.

“‘The fact that I love this more than I love any of you is more my fault than yours, but that’s the way it goes. And now, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Tom Waits.'”

The lawyer trails off on the last sentence, clears his throat, then folds the piece of paper nervously. He nods to the piano player.

“Thank you all for coming.”

The piano player begins singing “Young at Heart”. It’s not as good as Tom Waits.

On behalf of the Upper Deck Company LLC, we at NotGraphs would like to apologize for the harmful influence of its 1990 edition of baseball cards. At a time when America was already enthralled by the siren songs of Wilson Phillips, and being told that King’s Quest V was a really good video game, our nation’s youth was already reeling on the edge of credulity. Then came these images, undoing three decades of helpful short films about how to act, groom, and play baseball, forever sealing off any hope of universal truth or beauty. One might protest that it was Crystal Pepsi that killed the last spark of resistance and laid an entire generation prostrate before the towering menace of American propaganda, and one may be correct. There are no simple answers. For now, we can only offer this meager apologia to the long-vacant souls of our generation.

Delinquent as this notice may be, we would like to offer the following corrections, in hopes that those affected might salvage a fraction of the lesser years of their lives.

This is not how to bat.

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Mets second baseman and sports’-only-parental-role-model Daniel Murphy was in the news in April when he missed the first two games of the season to be with his wife for the birth of their son (who was unfortunately born a Mets fan, a condition that will make it difficult for him to function normally).

This week, Murphy was a guest at the White House for a discussion about working dads.

Readers might recall that, at the time Murphy took his leave, Boomer Esiason suggested Murphy’s wife should have had a C-section before the season. Interestingly enough, Esiason scheduled his own lobotomy to occur right before he made that remark.

I have one and only one problem with baseball players taking paternity leave to be there for the births of their children:

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From ESPN:

MINNEAPOLIS — “Why not us?”

That was the response from Twins general manager Terry Ryan on Sunday when informed the decision to sign free-agent Kendrys Morales to a one-year, $7.6 million deal was, well, very un-Twins like.

“Why not us? We’re a baseball team. We have players. We sign contracts. We have people at every position, just like all of the other teams. And we’re trying to win games. Sort of. I mean, we’re putting players on the field, and I’m sure they’re doing their very best, and sometimes the laws of random chance come out on our side and, odds be damned, we win a game or two. We’ve had success before with players we’ve signed. Ricky Nolasco, for example. Okay, not a great example. But an example nonetheless. Jason Kubel. Okay, again, not a great example. Well, we have some really up-and-coming talent here. Aaron Hicks. Okay, I’m going to stop with the examples. We have superstar Joe Mauer, having a, uh, having a year. That’s what everyone on the team is doing. Having a year. And maybe our years will somehow turn out to be better than enough people’s years that we accidentally end up in the playoffs. That’s why Kendrys is a fit. Because if we sneak into the playoffs, maybe by then he will be in playing shape and can lead us in a big celebration at home plate if we manage to ever score a run, and he can break his foot again, and then we’ll have the flexibility to call up anyone we want to replace him on the roster. So you ask why us? Because. Because why not us, and why shouldn’t we have as much of a right to sign a player of questionable value and no true position who hasn’t played in months and was probably going to be of negligible value anyway, especially since we already have Josh Willingham. That’s why us. And if he can pitch, too, then that’s even better, because Ricky Nolasco is not terribly good, and is mostly goodly terrible.”

The animated GIF embedded here depicts a changeup thrown by Stephen Strasburg to Mitch Moreland from a whole week ago – so, unlike many other media files which will have appeared on the internet today, it lacks timeliness.

Fortunately, what it lacks in timeliness, it makes up for with timelessness — insofar, that is, as Moreland plays the part here of anyone dumb enough to have been born and Strasburg’s changeup plays the part of that which one might desire and Moreland’s errant swing represents the futility of human endeavor, obviously.

It is on rare and happy occasions, perhaps akin to a white buffalo riding Halley’s Comet into a quiet Christopher Russo, or a loud Christopher Russo accepting his fate as the victim of the same cometary bovine, that that we hear analysts speak of players who “do things the right way.” This way of doing things correctly, or at least not incorrectly, is an achievement so exceptional, so absolutely white-buffalo-riding-Halley’s-Comet-into-a-blissful-dream uncommon, that fans might go years or even decades without hearing an expert place it squarely atop the scale of things as they have now been done. Yes? But have you ever stopped to consider – I mean really stopped, like at a crosswalk – how things are best done the wrong way?

Right way: Pitcher pitches ball, follows through, assumes defensive position.

Wrong way: Pitcher pitches ball, follows through, stimulates parieto-occipital junction to achieve lucid dreaming, in which state he becomes – and is aware that he becomes – a rabid hyena in the wilds of the Serengeti, whereupon he eats the shortstop before snarling at a group of hungry umps whose runt he quickly devours.

Right way: Batter hits ball, drops bat, runs toward first base.
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The year was 1991, and Americans needed more sports cards. They’d ripped open all the Upper Deck foil they could find, pressed down on the translucent plastic of the Score packaging to read the faint name of the bottom card of each pack. They filled three-ring binders with Jeff George’s mustache and Dikembe Mutombo’s teeth, and even attempted to figure out what a Pavel Bure was.

Still, it wasn’t enough. Impatient to sell the next big rookie card, companies followed the concept to its natural limit and invented the pre-rookie. They released thousand-card sets full of players no one had ever heard of. The process had been distilled to the point where a collector need only buy a pack of unrecognizable players, put them in the closet, and wait. It’s no small irony that an increasingly cynical hobby turned to youth for its speculation.

In truth, there have always been minor league cards. These were generally confined to the merchandise booths of the local team stadium or the local gas station, a stack of grainy photographs sold as team sets. They were little more than a glorified program that kids could play with after they got sick of the game four innings in. It was one such set I found a while back, in an old familiar thrift store baggy, memorializing the nearby 1991 Everett Giants.

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The Houston Astros’ first pick in the 2014 draft, and the first overall pick of said draft, was left-handed pitcher Brady Aiken. This is a picture of Brady Aiken.

Since Brady Aiken is 17 years old, and since this is a picture of Brady Aiken, it stands to reason that this is a picture of a 17-year-old. For reasons of comparison, here is an approximation of what this author looked like at 17:

His “golf club salesman at Dick’s Sporting Goods” look aside, Aiken is indeed a child. But 17 is just a number. Perhaps we should use the measuring stick of popular culture to help us reason with just how young 17 is.

Brady Aiken was born in August of 1996, meaning he was conceived toward the end of 1995. Leveraging this information along with information gleaned about popular music in 1995, here are songs that Brady Aiken’s parents MIGHT have been listening to whilst making — unbeknownst to them — a future millionaire. I have ranked these in order of likelihood — least to most — in the attempt to make this even more creepy.

Possibility 1:

Possibility 2:

Possibility 3:

Possibility 4:

Possibility 5:

The 2014 amateur draft begins tonight at 6pm ET tonight — and, while there’s some uncertainty regarding the specific order in which they’ll be selected, there’s less mystery about which pitchers are the draft’s best.

To better acquaint the reader with those pitchers, below are images of their respective arms, accompanied by analysis of same.

Brady Aiken, LHP, Cathedral Catholic HS (Calif.)
This arm is positioned a little bit behind the pitcher’s body.

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