What we have done is assign cool nicknames to players rather than perpetuate the tired, lamewad practice of assigning cool players nicknames. This is the last time we shall do this. Why, multitudes ask? Because we shall soon introduce a new, equally insipid series called “Nickname Seeks Former Player.”

First, though, another glance at our Hall of Honouur, which is so stately, so regal, so much itself a celebration of the Norman Conquest, that an extra British-English unstressed “u” is required for proper spelling …

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Hey, cheer up, R.A. Dickey! Sure, you crashed back to earth on Sunday night*. But not before you went off on a HISTORIC RUN OF DOMINANCE!** Brush off those pesky Yanks — it’ll turn around for you soon. And listen, so long as you’re just sitting around waiting for your “violent, weird, fickle” mistress, you should totally check out this mix I put together for you.

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“Great players don’t need a psychiatrist,” [Ozzie] Guillen said. “I didn’t see Pete Rose talking with any psychiatrist, Paul Molitor or all those guys.”

“I was from an era in baseball when Budweiser and vodka took care of the psychiatric things.” … “You fail, you get drunk and you come back the next day to see how good it feels. The psycho guys—the doctors—they never played this game. They never wore the uniform. They never came out of a slump. They’re not used to it, so how are they going to help?”

— Sporting News, 6/23/12

You know who else doesn’t need a doctor? Pitchers with torn ligaments. Great players don’t need orthopedic surgeons. I didn’t see Walter Johnson talking with any orthopedic surgeon, Christy Mathewson, Satchel Paige, any of those guys.

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Longtime readers of NotGraphs — and also anyone who’s visited NotGraphs even just once in their entire life — will know that, if the present site were to have something in the way of a patron saint, then the leading candidates for that role would be Dick Allen and Bob Uecker, the former because he’s a leisured gentleman; the latter, because he’s an equally leisured gentleman.

Indeed, it should surprise zero of us to learn not only that Allen and Uecker were teammates (for the 1966 and 1967 Phillies), but that they were also (a) close friends, (b) the authors, together, of no little merriment, and (c) the recipients, together, of multiple fines.

The pair reunited on air Sunday, with Allen in Chicago as part of a celebration of the 1972 White Sox (with which team and in which season he won the AL MVP award) and Uecker in Chicago in his capacity as the Brewers’ radio voice.

To say that Allen and Uecker burst into song during the former’s 5th inning appearance on WTMJ Radio would both (a) sound like a flight of whimsy on the part of the author and (b) be an accurate description of what actually happened.

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When the Tampa Bay Rays revealed their “throwback” uniforms for a time in which they did not exist, a rip in the time-space continuum occurred, creating an alternate universe in which the Rays did in fact play in 1979. In a NotGraphs exclusive, a peek at some of the members of the 1979 Tampa Bay Rays:

A time-travelling Joe Maddon

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What we have been doing is assigning cool nicknames to players rather than perpetuating the tired, lamewad practice of assigning cool players nicknames. We will soon stop doing this because all things — even things like this which are hopelessly played out and have been driven remorselessly into the ground — must come to an end. But not before one last dance, my love!

First, though, another glance at our Hall of Honouur, which is so stately, so regal, so much itself a celebration of the Norman Conquest, that an extra British-English unstressed “u” is required for proper spelling …

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Shout-out to Dayn Perry.

In which the Royal We insert Dick Allen’s name into various works representative of the Western Canon, thus adding to those various works the patina of blessedness.

Today’s episode: In the afterword of Rohinton Mistry’s brilliant first novel, Such A Long Journey, Alberto Manguel writes, “Dick Allen is a creature doomed.” Aren’t we all?

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Readers of a certain age will remember the righteous indignation they felt when so-called “sensei” John Kreese of the Cobra Kai dojo ordered star pupil Johnny Lawrence to “sweep the leg” of already injured protagonist Daniel LaRusso in the denoument of 1984’s Karate Kid. Those same readers will remember the overwhelming sense of justice they experienced just moments later when LaRusso performed the crane-kick maneuver captured in GIF-form above to win first place in the All Valley Karate Tournament.

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Rangers baseball pitcher Derek Holland seems like a lovely young man. Part of that loveliness — a necessary part, I would submit — is that his Twitter predilections are as nude of airs and fronts as something that is just … nude, with silly, floppy genitals brandished like … something silly and floppy that has been brandished.

Witness:

You know who follows McDonald’s on Twitter? Yes, exactly: a gentleman secure in his tastes and station. Now let us McD.L.T.

“Slow news day.”

Along with my Starting Lineup figurines, I also salvaged these mini helmets from my mother’s latest rummage pile.

Taking advantage of my GF’s clean desk.

I used to get these for a quarter a piece from vending machines at grocery stores.

Once I had enough of them, I would play out entire seasons, the schedules scratched out in notebooks, each game decided by a coin flip. (I was never able to get all of the teams, so I just used duplicates to stand in for the missing teams, putting a tiny scrap of masking tape over the logo on the duplicate and initialing the tape to represent the missing team.) For the playoffs, I would do a coin flip per inning and keep track of the “score.” I sorta wish I still had those notebooks now. It was a life’s work, really.

In an effort to meld the past and the present, I decided to assign each of the helmets to an object/being in my current house. I made some effort to align some aspect of the team with the object/being it got placed with — but don’t read too much into that. Or do. There are some duplicates.
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