Ok, so after a full year of working in my basement office at Woodland Pattern Book Center, I finally noticed this decal on a (possibly nonfunctional) heating unit:

Download, print as stickers, and apply where appropriate.

Of course, I immediately interpreted the phrase with my baseball brain: “The Heater You Can Live With” is a heater (a fastball, and, in my mind, a four-seam fastball, specifically) that is passable, that gets the job but is not overwhelming; a heater that chips in but upon which a pitcher is not overly reliant; a heater that, looks like the average of all heaters in the game, so as not garner attention, but like I said, is still capable of getting an out, or setting up other pitches, or even causing the occasional whiff.
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Omar Vizquel’s dancing is chock full o’ life lessons:
– Don’t let rainy days get you down.
– Don’t let your age get in the way of living your dreams.
– Never be afraid of making a fool of yourself.
– Only boring people get bored.
– You can always fall back on “raising the roof” when you run out of other dance movies.

A video:

And an animated gif:

Gif courtesy reddit.

When FanGraphs founder and CEO and muscled champion David Appelman announced yesterday the launch of FanGraphs Q&A, it’s very possible that the reader — the reader of Important Internet Weblog™ NotGraphs — did not suppose that it (i.e. the launch of FanGraphs Q&A) would shake the very foundations of our society. Indeed, even the present author suspected nothing of the sort.

However, yesterday, in the course of my daily practice, I was visited by a light — not unlike that which visited Paul on the Damascene Road — a light accompanied by a voice which said, “Carson! Carson! Ask Appelman to add a category — namely, Ephemera — to that new FanGraphs Q&A page. Forsooth, it will amuse at least three or four people. Ask him politely, of course, lest he remove your testicles from your person and send them to opposite ends of the world.”

Upon the completion of said vision, I hurriedly composed an email requesting the addition of Ephemera as a category. And Appelman, sometime not too long after that, added Ephemera as a category. And now it can be said — without much in the way of hyperbole — that the very foundations of our society are decidedly atremble.

Even now, less than 24 hours later, one can find all manner of thought-provoking question.

Spelling questions, like:

Appelman or Appleman?

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Now that Youk has been traded to the White Sox, I thought I’d take a look at the other offers that teams had on the table…

Orioles: Bullpen catcher / batting practice pitcher Rudy Arias.

Indians: Charles Nagy.

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Just when I thought I couldn’t love President Obama any more than I already do, he goes and does that. After those in attendance shelled out $250 to be there, and after Boston contributed over $3 million to Obama’s re-election campaign.

The point is: You have to represent your team, no matter the time, or the place.

Four more years, yo.

H/T: Amanda Maher.

Frank Deford, a legend of sportswriting at Sports Illustrated for over half a century, was awarded the Red Smith Award for outstanding contributions to sports journalism last Friday. In his acceptance speech, he touches on the direction of sportswriting. One sentence in particularly speaks directly to what we at FanGraphs (and much of the “new sports media”) write.

I don’t want to see sportswriting be overwhelmed by statistics. I want to read about the heart and blood of athletes and their stories, which has made sportswriting so special.

Deford is absolutely right. Sportswriting needs the feature stories that allow us to see the stories of these athletes. We need Molly Knight on Matt Kemp. We need Chris Ballard on Tim Duncan. We need Jimmy Breslin on Joe Namath.

Seriously, if you haven’t read that Breslin story, drop everything and read it now.

The best feature writers make us feel like we’re in the room with our favorite athletes; like we can somehow identify with them as they perform absurd, superhuman acts on the field of play. It adds an immeasurable and necessary amount to our sports experience.

But I also think there are immeasurable stories to be told about the game itself. How it is won or lost, over the course of a season or a game or an inning or even one single play. I want — and surely Deford does as well — good, quality writing about both the players and the game they play for us.

I care about the guy putting up MVP numbers for his team, but I also care about what it means for his team and how it helps them win. I’m interested in the man who hits the walk-off home run, but I also want to see how and why it happened. Statistics — sport’s silent historians — are our vessel to that end.

Deford is right in another fashion: sportswriting, even when it comes to dissecting the game itself, cannot be listing numbers off a page. There is always more to it — some nuance, some insight that brings us above simply what happened and starts answering questions. Why? How? Answering these questions can move us too.

So yes, Mr. Deford, let’s not overwhelm the word of sportswriting with statistics. Let’s just allow them to do their part.

Who are these two twins from other mothers?

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I know little about basketball. You throw a ball — much like every American sport — and there is jumping and falling and whistling. And they have steals too, but you actually get something for the steal (a ball). Keeping the stolen ball after the game, I am told, is bad form, though.

Anyway, it turns out there was a recent championship contest, and since the Bulls of Chicago were not involved, I had already cast the sport into a waste bin titled “No Derrick Rose makes me sad” — but my decision may have been premature. Tom Tango passes along this viral video, in which we see an advanced analysis owner — Mark Cuban — clobber most cruelly an old-school television sensationalist — Skip Bayless — during the post-championship live analysis.

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“Maybe the world is blind / Or just a little unkind”: these lines — posited originally by Gary Portnoy, composer of the theme song for TV’s Punky Brewster — seem perhaps like the aimless lamentations of the peculiarly sensitive. Upon further inspection, however, Portnoy’s (ahem) complaint appears to be as relevant today as when Punky Brewster’s mother abandoned her at a Chicago, Illinois, shopping center in 1984.

Indeed, if Brian MacPherson of the Providence Journal is to be believed, recently acquired utility man Brent Lillibridge is trapped in Kevin Youkilis’s old locker and nobody cares.

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Yesterday, with two out in the top of the ninth inning, in a tie game between the Brewers and White Sox at US Cellular Field, Nyjer Morgan was caught attempting to steal third — what he was thinking, however, every Brewers fan (and probably every other member of the Brewers organization) would like to know. (Sorry: for some reason MLB video didn’t offer the option to embed this clip.)

To make this NotGraphs-eligible, I’ve creatively recreated this play in my office at work:

The wind-up circus bear here represents the spirit that possessed Morgan on the play. The circus bear is an unpredictable soul, aware that it is display for the amusement of the masses, sometimes prepared to awe, sometimes lashing out against his own best interest. Such has been the dramatic career of Nyjer Morgan.