It’s well known — both to our readers and the IRS — that the majority of this site’s fluid assets are directed towards the funding of our Highly Reputable and Totally Real Think Tank, a collection of our era’s most capable scholars, intellectuals, and amateur pornographers.

While neither prolific nor sober — and while typically found attempting to play Hide the Salam with the innkeeper’s daughter — the Tank does occasionally produce something of note.

In this case, that something is what follows — namely, a list of actual injury designations from baseball’s past. Absent from the game’s earliest injury reports are any attempts at true anatomical precision. One finds no reference either to ACLs or rotator cuffs, but instead a more colorful, if way less helpful, medical lexicon.

A. Swamp Knee
B. Sticky Cleat
C. Mexican Hangover
D. Jagged Britches
E. Palsied Bat
F. Accidental Polygamy
G. Questionable Paternity
H. Emergency Divorce
I. Sprained Liver
J. Wrenched Liver
K. Entirely Ruined Liver
L. Spotted Dick
M. Whiskey Butt
N. Manifest Destiny
O. Secular Imagination
P. Black Face
Q. Death Breath
R. Dungaree Fever
S. Mal du Suisse
T. Mal du Spavinaw, Oklahoma

1/14/2012
28-year-old catcher Kurt Suzuki to the Tampa Bay Rays for 20-year-old pitchers Enny Romero and Felipe Rivero.

7/3/2012
28-year-old pitcher Brandon McCarthy to the Miami Marlins for 21-year-old catcher J.T. Realmuto and 23-year-old OF/1B Mark Canha.

11/28/2013
29-year-old shortstop Cliff Pennington to the Los Vancouver Dodgers for 23-year-old pitcher Allen Webster. The Dodgers then trade Pennington to the Los Angeles Angels of The Entire Los Angeles Metropolitan Area for 30-year-old first baseman Kendrys Morales, who is looking forward to finally returning for the 2014 season after more than three years of rehab from his leg, ankle, foot, toe, toenail, and toenail lint injuries.

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From the infinite spring of wonder and delight that is Logan Morrison’s twitter account comes today’s illustrated tweet. I am in debt to Notgraphs commenter Yirmiyahu for bringing this one to our attention.

click to enlarge!

Many thanks to A. Brown for shoving this in our collective chests, like an aristocrat pushing a cooked turkey into the hands of some bewildered serf.

So apparently, Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey is poised to mount Mount Kilimanjaro in what is likely a dramatic attempt to compensate for his inability to sling a 95-mph zoomer. And if this double-awesome show of Mountain Mantality was not awesome enough, the 37-year-old knuckle-man is also training with this impressive oxygen-deprivation mask:

Which makes us ask: How long until Hollywood makes this true story even more truer and explosiontastic?

Possible plots:
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Sportswriters, this nonsense really needs to stop. Refusing to vote Jeff Bagwell into the Hall of Fame because you believe he may have used performance enhancing drugs because a number of his contemporaries did so is shameful.

It’s shameful because there are literally 16 better reasons not to vote Jeff Bagwell into the Hall of Fame. During Bagwell’s lifetime, someone somewhere has been guilty of each of the things listed below, which means in turn that Bagwell cannot escape the umbra of guilt cast by other members of his species.

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Apophatic [ap-a-FAT-ik] Theology is that method by which one endeavors to describe God by describing what God is not — the suggestion being that fewer persons and places and things belong to the latter category than the former.

Apophasis [uh-PAW-fa-sis] is also the process by which one might most efficiently compile a list of major-league ballplayers, past and present, who could — via their fists or feet or, perhaps, just a particularly menacing stare — injure NotGraphs’ oldest contributor (by far), Dayn Perry.

Which is to say that, to construct such a list, it’s much easier to identify those players who do not have the capacity to fell Perry. Thanks to the search functions at Baseball-Reference, it’s easy to compile a list of such players.

Image courtesy Jason Thorpe.

Inspired by, and mostly stolen from, this MLB.com piece about Austin Jackson, but this is not really about Austin Jackson, unless saying it’s about Austin Jackson will make you more interested in reading it.

YOUR CITY — Your favorite team has spent part of their offseason looking at alternatives at troubled position, but that doesn’t mean they’ve given up on young struggling player doing things they wish that young struggling player would do.

On the contrary, they still see potential there. But they see some maturing to do in a bunch of critical baseball skills.

Somewhere between the rookie sensation who did something statistically unrepeatable, and the sophomore who reverted back to the mean, there’s the real young struggling player. That’s what your favorite team believes, and they hope time and teaching will bring out that form.

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Thanks to the death-infused search functions at Baseball-Reference, it’s easy to compile a list of ballplayers who selfishly ruined the holidays by dying on Christmas Day. Let us remember their crossing of the Styx and their insistence on doing so while everyone else was just trying to enjoy themselves.

Also remember this: As you open gifts, force chestnuts down the gullet and nod off in the glow of a D-level bowl game, someone somewhere is dying and thus soiling an otherwise fine day.

Ancient papyrus texts and the earliest cave etchings make unmistakable references to HVAC systems and their power to save humanity. As we learned in succeeding years, the world was at once saved, propelled forward and curated by dutiful monks in their scriptoria and the wholesome, restorative power of air conditioning, which was invented by Patrick Henry, Jaco Pastorius and Nipsey Russell in 850 B.C. Shortly thereafter, the same trio invented baseball and then combined the two on the streets of Houston, Texas, U.S.A., Earth:

There are many reasons we can’t have nice things, but only one reason we can. That reason is air conditioning and its sexy possibilities.

(Freon kiss: Reddit)

Inspired by an awesome email from my even more awesome dad, a breakdown of the 2012 GOP Presidential candidates affiliation with the game. In no particular order:

—

1. Ron Paul

It is not clear whether Ron Paul is now a Houston Astros fan, but we do know that he is a “good friend” of Nolan Ryan, which suggests that perhaps he has switched allegiances since these glorious photos were taken. I am not part of the “rev-love-ution” or whatever the kids are calling it these days, but everyone looks like a stud to me in this beautiful uniform. I hate how much I love these.

“Ron Paul is the only congressman to have hit a home run over the fence in the congressional baseball game’s 50-year history.”

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