This is one of my favorite keepsakes: “Old Timer’s [sic] Baseball Photo Album”, published by JKW Sports Publications in 1961, collecting photographs from the private collections of Robert A. Cutter and William N. Jacobellis. I was flipping through it searching for inspiration for a post when I saw an image that immediately seared itself onto my eyeballs. I will never be the same… To the jump if you dare.
Presenting Fantasy Fantasy Baseball: Because you’re more than an expert!
Fantasy baseball getting boring? Too easy? Feel like you’ve mastered the strategy and if only the players would stop getting injured… well, look, we’re all with you, and we know it’s time for an even bigger challenge. Presenting Fantasy Fantasy Baseball, the game where you manage an imaginary roster of other people’s fantasy baseball teams and compete against opponents to see who can best predict the performance of other fantasy players.
That’s right: you and your fellow owners each draft eight fantasy teams, following these strict positional requirements:
As you can see, courtesy of WEEI.com’s Full Count blog, not only does Bobby Valentine “get down,” but Bobby Valentine “gets down” while wearing the pinkest pink shirt that’s ever existed. (Do not look directly at it.) That’s just how he rolls. And I have to admit, I dig it.
And then, just when I thought I couldn’t possibly respect Valentine any more, I found what you’re about to enjoy, below: Bobby Valentine dancing his ass off in a Japanese music video:
Oh, those Japanese. Now, I still don’t know what the hell to make of that, what we just saw, but what I do know is that, even though I hate the Boston Red Sox with an incredible passion, I’m glad Bobby V’s back on this side of the pond, and in the spotlight. Valentine’s riling up the Yankees, Jeter and A-Rod, and taking shots at Tito; ask yourself: are you not entertained? It’s going to be a wild ride in Boston, and I can’t wait. May Valentine forever dance, and forever manage, as if nobody’s watching.
Matt Moore, LHP, Tampa Bay Rays
Moore has plus-plus make-up, which means he should be ready to fill the Guy Smiley void in MLB that has gone unfilled for too long now. Most scouts believe that his days of pouting like a toddler are over, and he’s now committed to his teammates, as evidenced by his pledge to keep David Price’s car safe from hobo urine.
To point is one thing; to laugh, another. Sometimes, however, there are occasions that call for the combination of the two, such that one finds oneself both pointing and laughing.
While I, an avid drinker of the milk of human kindness, hardly condone such behavior, a number of respondents to our call for GIF-worthy footage are not so reserved in their capacity for finding joy in the weakness of others.
Said respondents pointed the author to the above footage, of a gentleman — a gentleman “tanked” to the “gills” — falling out of the stands while attempting to retrieve a foul ball at the Red Sox’ jetBlue Park in Fort Myers, Florida during a Sunday afternoon game.
Making the sequence more amusing — for Red Sox fans, a least — is likely the fact that said tanked gentleman is, like many devotees of late Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, a Yankees fan.
From ESPN:
When Manny Banuelos showed up in the Tampa clubhouse, he looked a little lost. The Yankee locker room is sort of set up like a high school lunch room with the cool kids in certain corners and the others relegated to the middle island of lockers. So the 5-foot-9, 20-year-old Banuelos wandered around, peering up, trying to find his new stall.
Coming soon to MLB Network… a sitcom about what happens when a 5-foot-9, 20-year-old minor league pitcher, hoping for stardom, tries to become one of the cool kids.
And it’s animated.
BANUELOS!
Starring Wilmer Valderrama as Manny Banuelos
With Cedric The Entertainer as C.C. Sabathia, Ed Harris as Joe Girardi, Nick Swisher as Nick Swisher, and Anna Faris as the new second baseman who’s about to steal Manny’s heart.
And Max von Sydow as Bud Selig.
We know that Braves catcher Brian McCann is good at baseball, but now comes evidence — evidence that the stern and jowly judge will allow so long as counsel is going somewhere with this — that he is also adept at falling on his sword:
“The most I ever sat and pondered over a season since I started playing baseball,” McCann said.
After deep contemplation — along with plenty of offseason golf and vacations to Las Vegas and the Bahamas — he was sure he had arrived at the root cause of the Braves’ epic September belly-flop. By the time he came south, he was prepared to sling a little blame.
It was him.
Not the hurricane in New York that broke the team’s momentum. Not the injuries to starters Tommy Hanson and Jair Jurrjens. Not the sapping of the bullpen.
All him. He’s Spartacus.
“I truly felt if I played up to my standards, the Cardinals don’t get in the postseason,” McCann said.
In Boston, where the collapse was equally as tragicomic, there were other culprits — three of them, to be precise. McCann, because he is a McMan, is willing to be those three things. Bless this magnificent bastard …
There is a world of forms, readers. Of algorithms, percentages, maneuvers and protocols, ticking and whirring in glorious rarefaction. And then there is a world of grass and leather and sweat and rosin, the things with which we fell in love. There are times, and there will be times, when the scales encrust our eyes and even the truest among us lose sight of that latter world. At those times, I submit, we could do worse than to take a moment to regard and cherish that most intimate of baseball transactions: the delicate pas de deux of cowhide and cartilage. (Click to embiggen)
I felt left out of all the fun they’re having on RotoGraphs.
1. The Nationals will break 1.000 this season, winning more games than they play. Led by Bryce Harper’s 74 home runs and 75 ejections, and Stephen Strasburg destroying every ligament in his body on the way to a 200-K season, the Nats will be the surprise winners of all six NL wild card spots, and go on to victory in the World Series.
2. Giancarlo (Mike) Stanton will change his name again, this time to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and will donate $1,000 after every home run to supporting the fight for women’s suffrage.
