Doorbell rings

Me: Ummmm, Mr. Selig, hi. What are you doi…

Selig enters the house and begins to look around.

Me: Yes, please come in. Can I get you something to…

Selig: This is a nice little place you have here.

Me: Thank you, sir.

Selig: I really like the decor. And please, call me “Commissioner.”

Me: Certainly, Commissioner. Thank you.

Selig continues to make his way through the house, snooping around.

Selig: What’s this?

Me: Oh that. That’s just my baseball card collection.

Selig: Baseball cards! I love baseball cards. Mind if I take a look?

Me: No sir, uh, Commissioner. Go ahead.

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Rollie Fingers will be 66-years-old in August. He threw his last pitch 27 years ago. But he’s still got the best mustache in baseball.

And, yes, I know, the resemblance to Robert De Niro is frigging uncanny.

H/T: My man, and Deadspin night editor, Erik Malinowski. Follow him. He won’t do you wrong.

Whereas Big League Chew was useful to the lad with a future in cavities and tobacco use, Big League Liniment …

… is mighty good and handy for the low-bred toiler with a fussy mule or a case of “trench loins” or a craggy-faced, Dust-Bowl wife about to die in childbirth.

Remember, suffering bastards of the world, if the catarrh doesn’t get you, then a mining disaster will. Or war. So rub some Big League Liniment on your pulverized spine!

Big League Liniment: “Got damn, it hurts!”

Daniel Bard was sitting at the breakfast table, considering his spring-training performance with some anxiety.

“More walks than strikeouts?” he said to no one — as no one was there. “How is that even possible? I’m Daniel Bard. I’m noted for possessing what scouts and demi-scouts refer to as ‘easy velocity.’ I’m open-minded as regards the application of quantitaive analysis to baseball. Werner Herzog once used footage of my two-seam fastball as a metaphor for the destructive forces extant in nature, I think he said it was. I was recently featured as a centerfold in the New England Journal of Medicine, which I’m pretty sure is a unique honor. Many of Aesop’s fables are taken directly from my life — obliquely, if not explicitly. Though I was previously unfamiliar with the word, I intuited the definition of necromancy given its roots from the Ancient Greek nekrós (meaning ‘dead body’) and manteía (‘prophecy’ or ‘divination’). Recently, as a challenge to myself, I conducted a conversation with trainer Rick Jameyson entirely in iambic pentameter without him noticing…”

He continued in this manner for some time. When he stopped, he found that he was no longer at the breakfast table, but rather sitting in front of his locker… having already pitched four innings in that day’s game!

It’s at this point that the reader will ask, “Were they successful innings?” Ha! That’s a good one, guy! As if success were a real entity!

Table of Contents

Here’s the table of contents for Daily Dotes, March 20th edition, in which there is some serious dotage in the “to bestow excessive love or fondness on” sense.

1. Everyone’s New Favorite Jack Kerouac, Evan Gattis
2. Everyone’s Favorite Nick Offerman Fan, Brandon McCarthy
3. Everyone’s Favorite Gnome, Vincent Belnome

Everyone’s New Favorite Jack Kerouac, Evan Gattis

Gattis will begin the year at Class AA Mississippi. (Photo: Tony Farlow/MiLB.com)

I was pretty stoked when my copy of Baseball America’s Prospect Handbook 2012 arrived in the mail in February. I was probably more stoked when, two weeks later, I read the entry on Atlanta Braves catching prospect Evan Gattis.

Though a lowly #27 on the team’s Top 30 list, Gattis posted a .427 wOBA with Atlanta’s Class A affiliate in 2011 by crushing 48 XBH (22 HR) in just 377 PA. That, of course, becomes much less impressive when you notice that 2011 was his age 24 season.

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Yo momma’s so cheap, she didn’t even want to pay $35 for Troy Tulowitzki.

Yo momma’s so old, she remembers when Jamie Moyer was in his thirties.

Yo momma’s so poor, she can’t even afford fake auction money.

Yo momma’s so stupid, she thinks Jordan Zimmermann’s last name only has one N.

Yo momma’s so lazy, she didn’t make her own spreadsheet.

Yo momma’s so ugly, she made this awesome real-time-updated draft board I set up to work on my TV set crack in half.

Yo momma’s so fat, I couldn’t even see behind her, and notice you were holding up your hand to bid on Asdrubal Cabrera. So he went for $10 to someone else. Sorry. There are other decent shortstops available, though.

Somehow this one slipped between the cracks — C.J. Wilson pranked Mike Napoli… by putting the catcher’s phone number on twitter. He wasn’t particularly contrite about it afterwards either:

Perhaps “Nap Nap Weiner” will take an item off of this list of suggested revenge pranks?

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Review: Complete.

Hat tip, glove slap, and furtive glance to Steve Slowinski for pointing this out to me.

Onions, indeed.

As we enter the 2012 season, many broadcasters will undoubtedly be looking — like the players whose actions they’ll be narrating — will be looking to bring their A game, give 110%, and leave it all out on the field (or, in the press box, as the case may be).

It goes without saying that the most expedient means by which a broadcaster might scale the heights of his profession is to author a truly memorable home-run call.

To that end, NotGraphs’ Highly Reputable and Totally Really Think Tank has produced the following — a list of 15 home-run calls that have never been used on any known broadcast. For reasons that are too obvious to explain, the calls here are divided into two categories — metaphorical and ejaculatory — and are freely available to America’s Broadcasters.

To wit:

Metaphorical
These are calls that depend on an allusion to a text or event.

• Much as Zeus, disguised as a giant swan, had his way with Leda, so does [batter’s name] have his way with that [pitch type or “(count) pitch”] from [pitcher’s name]!

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Table of Contents

Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Dotes.

1. “Dote” Defined
2. Santorum takes his cuts.
3. Garfoosian Wisdom

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