If you’ve been following baseball today, you’ve been following the buccaneering romps of the Miami Marlins. In recent days, of course, they’ve inked Jose Reyes and Heath Bell, and today they reportedly made a whopping offer to Albert Pujols. As you can imagine, everyone who’s anyone is talking about the bundled derivative that is the Miami Marlins. One Hanley Ramirez, however, seems not to appreciate that he is no longer What We Talk About When We Talk About the Marlins. In fact, he’ll have none of it:

So if you see Hanley Ramirez within the next news cycle or three, please be a dear and let him know you were just talking about him.

Questions about Albert Pujols’s age should hardly be off-limits. With the baseball’s most feared hitter primed to receive perhaps the largest free agent contract in the game’s history, it would behoove any team that is bidding for his services to consider his age. Questions like “How smart would it be to give this player a contract that could pay him $25+ million into his forties?” should weigh heavily on any competent GM’s mind.

A related concern, which has haunted Pujols for much of his career, is that he may be a few years older than he says he is. After all, it is not without precedent for young Latin American players to fudge their DOBs by a few years in order to make themselves more appealing on the US market. Just this September, it was revealed that Marlins reliever Juan Carlos Oviedo (Leo Nunez) had assumed a false identity and is a year older than he had previously claimed. As Edward Mujica explained, just a year can make a world of difference in how much a Latin American player is paid, creating an incentive to fudge:

“At 17 years old, you maybe lose $100,000 or $150,000 when you sign [compared to a 16-year-old with the same skills]. And if you’re like 18, you might sign for $5,000 and maybe they give you an opportunity.”

But as Dave Cameron writes over at Fangraphs, the case for believing that Pujols fudged his age has numerous holes.

Baseball scribe Jon Heyman is having none of it, however. You can count Heyman among the Pujols Birthers:

(It is not unfair to wonder whether Heyman would be calling for Pujols to produce his birth certificate if Pujols was a client of Scott Boras.)

Below I present Jon Heyman’s twitter timeline from the future.

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I wanted to wait — but I just couldn’t — until Fat Tuesday (aka Mardi Gras) and dub it the Feast Day of the lovable Ronald “Ronnie” Belliard, who was know for approaching most days as though they were the last before a prolonged period of fasting, and for sex scandals — two things at the core of the contemporary Pardi Gras.

French fries.

Some of you might recall a 2007 extortion case in which some bloke demanded $150k from poor pudgy Ronnie in exchange for keeping the fact that the infielder had impregnated his (i.e. the extortionist’s) daughter. You probably won’t remember (unless you are me or one of the ten kids I hung around with) the rumors I heard as an adolescent, when Ronnie played for my beloved Brewers: that the Ron-dog paid one of the Brewers’ bat boys to keep him well-stocked in porn vids. Read the rest of this entry »

His personalized, Millar-emblazoned, Baltimore Orioles bathrobe. Yeah. Also, please note the “COWBOY UP” bumper sticker on the back of Millar’s massive truck. It’s a lifestyle, yo.

And, if you’re still not convinced, yes, it really is him:

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Our ongoing quest, in the manner of a noble knight-errant, is to assign cool nicknames to players rather than indulge in the tired, lamewad paradigm of assigning cool players nicknames. Before we launch the latest installment, however, a trip through our Hall of Honouur, which is so stately, so regal, so much itself a celebration of the Norman Conquest, that an extra British-English unstressed “u” is required for proper spelling. …

“Bad Miracle” – Wily Mo Peña
“Captain Black Tobacco” – John Danks
“$45 Couch” – Yuniesky Betancourt
“Liván Hernández” – Liván Hernández
“Frog in the Pot” – Carlos Zambrano
“Aqua Velva Man” – Chase Utley
“Victorian Sex Rebel” – John Axford
“Good, Round Friend” – Prince Fielder
“I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass” – Kyle Farnsworth
“Interrobang” – Adrián Beltré
“Turbaconducken” – Ty Wigginton

And the nickname now available for purchase? It’s “Hot Lettuce”!

Denotations, Connotations, Implications, Intimations, and Incriminations:

It is a landmark day in the young annals of Nickname Seeks Player: a reader contribution. Faithful page viewer Bryz, who surely has better things to do, passes along this championship explanation:

I am in the middle of student teaching right now, and I had to bring the leftover remains of a chicken Caesar salad to school for lunch. Not desiring some cold chicken, I chose to nuke my salad via microwave prior to eating it. I took the first bite of chicken… not bad! Then I moved to a Caesar dressing-covered piece of lettuce. One chew, two chews, pause, spit it back into the bowl. It was terrible. Apparently lettuce above room temperature is like drinking cold (not iced) coffee; it’s just not right.

I was telling this story to a fellow student teacher and friend of mine at the end of the day, and I explained how the salad sucked overall because of the hot lettuce. That was when I thought instantly of the “Nickname Seeks Player” posts at NotGraphs, and I felt that something I had just said would fit perfectly: “Hot Lettuce.”

Lettuce by itself is rather blah. It’s nothing outstanding by itself, and I bet no one has ever said with gusto, “I want some lettuce today!” It’s something you add, but I don’t think you’ll really miss it if it’s gone. But hot lettuce is a whole different story. It is something that is just… filthy. Nasty. Has the power to make you do a spit-take. Thus, what I am imagining in a “Hot Lettuce” type of player is someone that overall was unspectacular, but when he got hot (performance-wise, not Adrian “Don’t touch my head!” Beltre hot or Carson Cistulli-attractiveness hot), watch out! This player being hot turns him into a dominating force.

We like it. The concept of “Hot Lettuce” as a nickname, that is, not actual, foul-tasting hot lettuce.

Prototypes from Baseball’s Gauzy Past:

More from Bryz:

Players that I feel fit this description might be John Mabry. 2.1 career WAR, and 1.6 of it was amassed in his 2002 season chronicled in Moneyball. Rich Harden is another player that I like, because he’s mixed in some “meh” seasons (regular lettuce) with some great seasons (hot lettuce). There’s certainly also other, non-green wearing, non-former Athletics players that could come to mind for this nickname.

I would add: Mike Damn Laga.

Guiding, Determinative Query:

What current major-league player should be nicknamed “Hot Lettuce”?

The convention floor, which is filled with hot lettuce and used, tortured rubbers, is open for nominations …

Fun Baseball Armadillo Facts:

* Armadillos are members of the same family as anteaters and sloths. As is the case with most members of that superorder, they have low body temperatures and a slow metabolism. That helps them get through doubleheaders without needing a snack in between.

* Armadillos have poor vision, but large eyes. This makes them excellent candidates for umpiring once their playing careers are over.

* Armadillos are covered in relatively small, overlapping epidermal scales called “scutes”, composed of bone with a covering of horn. In most species, rigid shields cover the shoulders and hips, with a number of bands separated by flexible skin cover the back and flanks. Basically, catchers.

* The North American nine-banded armadillo often jumps straight up into the air when surprised, which can then send them straight into the bottom of your car. Kinda like when a slugger is trying to avoid the tight fastball and brings his hands right into the pitch.

* Armadillos are solitary animals that do not share their burrows with other adults. So don’t go try to hang out with him down there at the end of the bench.

* Armadillos have been consistently expanding their range in North America over the last century due to a lack of natural predators, and have been found as far north as southern Illinois and Indiana. Bandwagon fan.

* There’s a Pink Fairy Armadillo. It is pink, but not very fairy like, so he can startle. Sorta like when I showed my wife a picture of Corey Hart.

Presented with limited commercial interruption:

It’s pretty obvious that Mo Rivera is a straight-up classy dude. He’s also aged well, beginning as a novice starter, and morphing into an established closer, if you know what I mean. And this picture oozes machismo, no?  Power khakis, power belt, power polo. Wind-up wrist watch. Oh-bay-bee.

So Mariano, I know your voice isn’t working so well. You had that surgery, and we’re all so happy you’re doing well. Allow me to play wing man here.

Any ladies want a dance with the relief Romeo? Step right up.

Pictured above is a fish with a baseball in its mouth. Was it put there to silence his entreaties and complaints? Or is this how the fish catches the baseball?

Or was the ball placed in the fish’s mouth in order to provide a brief amusement — an amusement designed to make someone forget, for a fugitive moment, that he, like the fish, will one day die and that what lies beyond is as unknowable as it is unavoidable and that a nothingness that spans the black balance of forever might constitute … the best for which we can hope?

The fish with a baseball in its mouth is dead. And so we all shall be, probably sooner than we dare to contemplate. Is there meaning to be found in the inexorable misery that is as much a part of us as blood, bones, viscera, and dreams reduced to momentary consolations? It scarcely matters.

This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

Reader Dawson Bergmann utilized his Twitter machine this afternoon to alert the present author to an image he’s (i.e. Bergmann’s) created using some combination of Photoshop and his imagination.

An image very similar to — although, I suppose, not precisely like — this (clicken to embiggen):

Might it be the start of a meme? Survey says “Possibly.” (Note: that the survey included a sample of only one person — that one person being the author — is immaterial.)

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Hey, every baseball card, please make note of former NFL center Jim Langer’s 1979 Topps card:

From BillRipken.com via Coudal.