As the Internet teaches us, it’s Hall-of-Fame voting season, which means a bounty of carefully nursed grudges and logic tortured to the brink of demise. The actual, bricks-and-mortar Hall of Fame is a lovely place that is worth your time and U.S. currency. Those charged with populating the Hall of Fame, however, are in not small part bloated, slappy harlequins with no sense of proper mission or context. Thus, Dick Allen’s — Mister Dick Allen’s — criminal absence from Cooperstown.

The good news, however, is that Mr. Dick Allen, despite the chronic neglect, is as healthy and confident as something unimaginably confident and healthy. And that leads us to this enduring truth …

Mr. Dick Allen — he’s just fine, thanks.

The Josh Reddick of my mind has been very busy. First, he was all optimistic. Then he was all pessimistic. And he’s still in there knocking around.

What he’s done to cope is this: change up his styling. Each look represents how he’s feeling at the moment. Each look plays with line, texture and depth. Each look is a snowflake. Each look has a motto.

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Arthur Rhodes has pitched for 20 seasons and nine different major-league teams. In addition to his mastery of left-handed batters, Rhodes has also mastered his passions via the practice of Zen Buddhism.

Central to the practice of Zen is koan study. Wikipedia informs us that a koan

consists of a story, dialogue, question, or statement, the meaning of which cannot be understood by rational thinking but may be accessible through intuition or lateral thinking. One widely known koan is “Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?”

Recently, NotGraphs has found a collection of koans that encapsulate Rhodes’ compiled wisdom, generally involving dialogues he’s had with younger teammates. NotGraphs will share these periodically for the spiritual benefit of the readership.

Rhodes on the meaning of baseball:

Mitch Moreland asked Arthur Rhodes, “What is Baseball?” Rhodes said, “Three pounds of flax.”

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What follows is an image of Alex Rodriguez, invader of boudoirs, at something called a “Professional Hollywood Basketball Game”:

You might notice that Mr. Rodriguez, in this daguerreotype, is both becocked and bespectacled. It is the latter quality that is somewhat surprising. What is also surprising is that Mr. Rodriguez is visibly agape. Is it something he sees? Or has Cindy Crawford, in tones hushed but not hushed enough, prescribed something crude and immodest for him — something that assumes him to be both cad and masher? Careless whispers indeed.

The glasses suggest craft pale ales shall be sipped. The countenance suggest standards of decency shall be reconsidered.

(Love and the making thereof: HBT)

As seen below, Fred McGriff is about to embark on a long career of smiling.

“Look, mom: I’m rated.”

Here, the smile that would warm so many hearts, find it’s way to so many cities and onto so many teams, into so many livingrooms, the livingrooms of our dreams, our strangest, sweatiest dreams, is yet but a smirk on a young McGriff’s superstar lips. Read the rest of this entry »

So, I was reading Dayn Perry’s highly informative post yesterday about putting your baseball hat in the dishwasher. Of course, I had to turn to Google to find out the answers to some burning follow-up questions, like:

(1) Can I also put a glove in the dishwasher?
(2) How about a bat?

When I discovered a truly horrifying piece of news from last summer that doesn’t seem to have gotten the attention it deserves.

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Over at SB Nation, which has its own currency and standing military and everything, Jon Bois has done the blessed and necessary work of putting together the top 50 sports GIFs of 2011. I tell no tales when I say the Internet World Championship Belt is now around the handsome waist of Mr. Bois.

As is the case with all great acts of Internetting, however, I am left with questions. For instance, how is number five not number one? Another: When will the woman — the philistine bitch-face — in the following GIF be boiled in oil in the town square for the satisfaction and amusement of the right-wise? Click and then ready your pitchforks and torches …

Short of a public execution, which I understand is frowned upon by those who don’t realize Increase Mather was right about everything, I hope this lady breaks a shin once a year for the rest of her life and gets pregnant with triplets at age 52.

Klout is perhaps the stupidest thing to happen to social media, it in itself not exactly high art.  If you haven’t heard of Klout, it allows you to see how “influential” you are on Twitter and Facebook based on some kind of algorithm Klout probably makes up as it goes along.  I myself am a 53, whatever that means.

One of the other, mostly insane, things about Klout is that it allows you to give other Twitter users a +K…again, whatever that is…designating their mastery of some subject, presumably as a sign to other Klout users as to who they should go to to decide what movie to see, or what car to buy.  Thanks to my idiot co-blogger on The Platoon Advantage and heterosexual life partner, Bill, and his efforts, I am decidedly an expert on “Moms” (tread lightly, fellows, for the mom I’m an expert on could be your own).

And the best part is, it keeps track of you whether you sign up for it or not!

Anyway, here are the overall scores for your favorite baseball-related Twitter feeds (higher is better), and the other ridiculous topics on which your favorite people are also influential, according to Klout: Read the rest of this entry »

As I am wont to do, I was recently reading Woman’s Day and ran across this championship bit of information, which was under the ever-evolving rubric of “Things You Can Put in the Dishwasher”:

4. Baseball Hats and Visors
“The dishwasher is a fantastic way to make sure hats keep their shapes,” says Linda Cobb, a cleaning expert who is also known as the Queen of Clean. Put hats on the top rack, head opening down, on a separate wash cycle from dishes because you can’t use dishwasher detergent (many contain bleaching agents). Instead, fill the detergent cup with borax, found in the supermarket laundry aisle. Run a regular cycle without the heated dry option, then place hat over a glass or jar to dry. Reshape brim while damp.

Slipping in (tee hee) a transparent double entendre like “reshape brim while damp”? That’s sooo Woman’s Day.

This has been a post about putting your hat in the dishwasher. This is the offseason.

Most of the things I did today are shameful, and concern for the reader’s modesty forbids me from recounting them (i.e. those things I did) in these pages. Among the less shameful activities in which I engaged, however, was to visit the very excellent Grey Matter Books in Hadley, MA, and buy the book you see pictured here, lying on a friend’s rug.

A Baseball Winter: The Off-Season Life of the Summer Game is an account of the 1984-85 offseason of five clubs: the New York Mets, the California Angels, the Atlanta Braves, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Cleveland Indians. As editor-authors Terry Pluto and Jeffrey Neuman note in the Acknowledgments, “its focus [is] on the backstage aspects of the game: contract negotiations, trade talks, in short, the games as it is played off the field.”

Having read the first 10 or so pages, I can speak to one of the book’s virtues — namely, that it’s written in diary form, with three- or four-page entries for each (or most) of the days of the offseason. The style lends itself to a sort of urgency, a sense of witnessing the events as they unfold, that’s very pleasant.