Following up on yesterday’s post, I thought I’d look for the most unappealing pictures I could find on Twitter of the Rangers’ two-foot long, $26 hot dog. This was easy.

#Boomstick pic.twitter.com/lwDrn6Ih5u

— Cadillac Guillen (@OhShootItsChris) May 21, 2014

This happened…. #boomstick pic.twitter.com/13pA5GwkgK

— Pussy Willow Rose (@Manny0208) May 18, 2013

The "we don't negotiate with terrorists" brisket-loaded, nacho hot dog #AMERICA #boomstick finished @MattyLiite pic.twitter.com/dxuBwnyOn8

— Dustin Potter (@dustinpotter115) April 20, 2013

And the winner:

Baseball has a heavy tendency to fall into certain rhythms. A new game may start, but we have some pretty good guesses as to what’s going to happen. There will probably be some hits, some strikeouts, and maybe even a home run. There probably won’t be, however, a walk-off balk.

This oddity has merit in its own right. But it offers Ryan Raburn something more. Raburn is used to being a batter — a man in charge of both his and his team’s momentary destiny. He is used to being a spectator — watching things happen on the field that will affect the outcome of the game. This very moment, the moment the umpire points out the balk, is a moment rarely experienced by baseballers. He is the tiniest of moments past being the man responsible for his team’s fate and the tiniest of moments from watching his team secure a victory. Moments. Fractions of moments. The further you break it down, the further you whittle away the trace edges of these moments, they start to become one in the same — to the point where there exists a single plane in which Raburn is in charge of winning a game that is already won. He is the hero, the goat, and the happy teammate all at once.

Cheer, cringe, and cheer again, Ryan Raburn. You have achieved ultimate enlightenment.

Dayn Perry and the present author are recording an Answer Time edition of FanGraphs Audio late tomorrow (Thursday) morning — a thing (i.e. Answer Time) not unlike Question Time, but also the exact opposite.

The reader is invited to submit an answer for Perry — who hasn’t made his bed, but is already preparing to lie in it — in the comment section below.

The coldest winter I ever spent was the last five minutes of a basketball game. What does this mean, exactly? I’m not sure. My brain can be very weird. You should see it sometime. Seriously. It’s here on the desk beside me, next to my cup of chicory. It’s wearing a pair of Captain Morgan souvenir sunglasses – the brain, I mean, not the chicory – and one of the lenses is missing. This gives it a kind of “crazed” look, but I would say it’s really more “demented” than crazed, or that the sun is in one of its eyes.

But let me tell you, basketball games last forever, if by “games” you mean those last five minutes and if by “forever” you mean, like, forever. Why, just the other night, I watched the last five minutes of an NBA playoff game and in the meantime began to enjoy the musical stylings of Lawrence Welk. I also found Angela Lansbury to be a handsome woman. In addition, I began to fart without intending to do so.*

*If you still haven’t caught on to what I’m saying, please consider: I also began reading AARP publications, not for the articles but for the pictures.

Anyhoo, nobody seems concerned about the length of basketball games. Why? Because those last five minutes come with commercials through whose content we might learn that beer is best enjoyed “cold.” But baseball games? Jiminy Cricket, people have been moaning about their length for-EH-verrrrrrrr, as if baseball games were Ming Dynasties or Phish jams, or Phish Jams whose themes, coincidentally, are Ming Dynasties.

To that end – ha! – I hereby offer these proposals for accelerating the game:
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m quite sure I’m not alone in this: I see some square things as baseball diamonds. This concrete slab with small rocks at each corner on a bed of gravel is in the front yard of my mate’s house in London, England.

You know the score: clickbig.

Building on yesterday’s post about Hopeless Joe’s Shake Shack Adventure, this post was originally going to be about baseball’s longest hot dogs, perhaps a ranking of them. But it turns out that there is not much of a contest. It’s the 24-inch-long BOOMSTICK down in Texas — originally a tribute to Nelson Cruz, but it became so popular that they kept it even after Cruz was gone. (And the stadium’s concessionaire has brought it to other ballparks for trial runs.) It has even inspired a whole 24-inch-themed concession stand in the ballpark, where the Rangers have offered obscenely unhealthy items like the Murphadilla (after David Murphy), a 24-inch quesadilla, the Rossome Nacho (after Robbie Ross), a BOOMSTICK topped with nacho ingredients, and the Beltre Buster, a 2800-calorie, 1-pound hamburger.

This year, they introduced the Choomongous, a two-foot-long Korean barbecue sandwich.

Clearly, the Rangers believe that their stadium seats are well-constructed and will not collapse under the weight of their fans.

I propose a few new Rangers-player-themed concessions to add to the menu:

1. The ALEX RIOShootthat’sagiantpastramisandwich, a two-foot-long pastrami sandwich topped with mustard, sauerkraut, nachos, and sixteen crumbled up chocolate chip cookies.

2. The DAR-Fish Taco, a 24-inch fish taco, filled with an entire striped bass, two heads of cabbage (shredded), a field of radishes, and four pounds of vanilla soft-serve crema.

3. The Elvis (Andrus), a sandwich made of 24 bananas and thirteen pounds of peanut butter, served between two “records” made of chocolate Oreo cookies, and topped with a game-used home plate dipped in caramel.

4. The Prince Veal-der, a 24-inch veal parmesan hero, accompanied by a bucket of pasta and a wheelbarrow filled with extra tomato sauce for dipping.

5. The Colby Lewis, a gigantic grilled (colby) cheese sandwich, Scott Baker-ed in the oven until all melty.

6. The Mitch More, More, Moreland-and-sea, where two 24-ounce steaks serve as the “buns” for a lobster roll, made from two pounds of lobster meat, four fields worth of celery, and a Costco-sized jar of mayonnaise.

7. The Ron WashingTON-OF-FOOD, a garbage pail filled with whatever leftovers the stadium kitchens have on a given day, pulverized in a blender, and served with a straw (whipped cream topping optional).

Any others?

Too often, we use NotGraphs as a forum to satisfy our own whimsicality. We find things funny and silly and crack jokes and make everyone’s day a little brighter.

That’s stupid. Life is at once a long slag that is over too soon. Every one of us will get our hearts broken, will lose people we love, and feel like we’re a crushing disappointment to our families and friends. And if you don’t, you almost certainly should because you’re probably insufferable. We are, all of us, lucky if we make it to the end of this life with our wits relatively intact and we leave this world with as many holes in our bodies as we came in with.

It is in the spirit of reminding you that life is pain, Princess, and anyone who tells you any different is selling something, that I present to you the most existentially troubling and depressing statements about player injuries from the past week:

“I couldn’t feel my shoulder.” -Felix Doubront, Boston Red Sox starter, after being removed from a game against the Blue Jays yesterday with a dead arm.

It’s hard to feel anything these days, I know, given how numb we’ve all gotten to each other’s pain. How can you even know if your shoulder is there?

Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — In a move to shake up the format and increase viewership of a failing show, MLB Network will re-brand their program “High Heat with Christopher Russo” to “Christopher Russo Argues with a House Plant.”

The NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team, in speaking with sources inside MLB Network, has learned that the new format being launched was just one of several possibilities for a new direction to the show. Sources say pilots were filmed for shows with names that included “Christopher Russo Watches Reruns of Top Chef,” “Christopher Russo Reminisces with Your Dad,” and “A Still Image of Christopher Russo but with Top 40 Music — Please Watch.”

“It was a two-bird-one-stone situation,” one executive said. “We needed to try and boost ratings, and we needed to find somebody that could tolerate being screeched at for a half hour.”

Russo, known for his cantankerous persona and a voice that could strip a sizable room of its paint, has had a revolving door of guests on the show including players, managers, and MLB Network personalities alike. Initial testing has concluded that the house plant has the best chance to stay long-term.

“It seems silly to do a remote with a plant,” a producer said. “But if we kept it in the same room, it would start wilting at a rapid pace.”

The roll out of the new format should happen near the beginning of June, as soon as the network finishes cutting new commercials and the studio goes through another round of soundproofing.

…Joey Watto also possessed a datapad, on which he would maintain copious records of opposing pitchers and defensive shifts employed against him. Watto only used said inventory as an occasional refresher, however, as he had a great memory for previous plate appearances and game situations. Also in Watto’s arsenal were several loaded lucks chunks, which he would use to remind himself that “luck” happened when opportunity met with a prepared mind and body. As a diversion, Watto owned a shisha, which would, for him, replicate the climate of hi native Canadaria. Another of Watto’s personal effects was his swagger stick; he used it to hit line drives and, occassionally, homeruns. Although he had left family behind on Canadaria, he never cut off contact with them, and always sent money home to them. Within a standard year, he had earned enough to pay off his debts. Despite his initial success, however, he was not satisfied, and was convinced that pitchers were trying harder to get him out than they were with batters of other species….

In case you missed it, here’s the first member of the MLB All-Star Wars Team, Smeth Sith!

…so I was hungry, you know. It’s hard to maintain this calorie-restricted diet my doctor has me on, telling me it’ll help me live forever, as if however long my life would otherwise be isn’t long enough. And it’s hard enough to avoid temptation when you aren’t starving yourself on three hundred calories a day, let alone when you are.

I was at the Mets game, so of course I was looking for a distraction, and I remembered reading something about Ryne Sandberg and Shake Shack, but I couldn’t quite remember what it was, since my short-term memory is shot from, uh, something that happened to me, I think, that I’m having a bit of trouble recalling….

Anyway, Shake Shack sounded good, since I am known to enjoy the occasional fast food indulgence. Well, I wouldn’t say “enjoy,” since what can any of us really enjoy given what’s been going on in the Ukraine, but I can at least usually tolerate and effectively digest a hamburger. And anything that brings me closer in spirit to a Hall of Famer like Ryne Sandberg can’t be a bad thing, so after waiting six and a half innings on line, I ordered a Shack Stack — that’s a cheeseburger and a mushroom burger, on top of each other, just like my brother and sister used to sleep right on top of me when we were kids and our parents could only afford half a bunk bed.

The burger comes, and it looked a little funky — I mean, there were mouse footprints inside, and it was kind of a greenish-purple, if that makes any sense on the color spectrum, and I took a few bites and

OH MY GOD MY INSIDES ARE COMING OUT OF ME

MY OBP (ON BOWL PERCENTAGE) WAS 1.000. FOR DAYS.

ALTHOUGH MY BABIP (BATTING AVERAGE ON BOWELS IN PLAY) WAS ONLY ABOUT .275.

(Fortunately I keep a mop in the bathroom.)

MY FIP (FECES-INDEPENDENT POOPING) WAS VERY VERY HIGH.

I don’t know what was pouring out, I really don’t.

AND I HAD FOUR BS (BLOWN-OUT SKIVVIES) IN JUST TWO HOURS.

I was about -300 Wipes Above Replacement before everything finally started to subside and I could get on with my depressing life of data entry and cat wrangling. Of course, I had to sneak out a locked Citi Field by climbing the outfield wall since no one had bothered to check the family restroom before locking everything up. And so at four in the morning, there I was, dangling over by the big Home Run Apple, trying to hail a taxi cab in the middle of Flushing (and having killed my eardrums with the sound of Flushing for hours and hours in a row), underwear balled up in my pocket, and the second half of my burger in a to-go bag.

And I was hungry.

So I figured I’d chance it and eat the rest.