Young Roy Halladay was born in that letterman’s jacket. Over the years, it grew with him.

The look in Young Roy Halladay’s eyes says, “I might make love to you in the back of a sensible sedan, or I might go to church.”

Young Roy Halladay has been said to resemble “Orel Hershiser with extra America sauce.”

Young Roy Halladay once, at age four, removed his growing letterman’s jacket and, at the behest of his mother, put on the most adorable sailor’s blouse for a posed Olan Mills portrait. Afterward, he removed the sailor’s blouse, wrapped it around a United States phone book, and tore it in half. “Never again,” he told his mother. “I love you,” his mother said. “Never again,” said Young Roy Halladay.

Young Roy Halladay is capable of inducing “sexual fainting” in exactly a million cheerleaders, all at once.

That’s not Young Roy Halladay’s Adam’s Apple; that’s a second, even stouter heart.

Young Roy Halladay has a stack of postcards from the protective fathers of the world. Each one reads: “It would be my privilege if you impregnated my teenage daughter. I shall lean a sturdy ladder against her second-floor bedroom dormer. The window is unlocked. Careful of the ivy.”

Young Roy Halladay is there for those with nowhere left to turn.

(HT: Snakkle and Todd’s championship Twitter feed)

The three people you meet in heaven are not Spike Lee, Shaquille O’Neal, and Dustin Pedroia, it turns out, as that triumvirate is currently occupied watching the Jets-Pats game in the Meadowlands tonight. Naturally.

H/T: Every person on my Twitter feed.

In these four-wheel-drive pages, we’ve already held the rebranded Miami Marlins to account for their sartorial affronts. But now it’s time to look at this thing through fresh eyes and loins …

The accompanying music can best be described as “a murdering of innocents,” and the only thing that would make this more “Miami,” which is America’s worst city, is if an alligator were getting a Brazilian wax on stage while high on coke. Still, I must confess that I kind of like the all-whites and all-grays on awkward, under-duress display here. The font saves the day, as does Ozzie Guillen’s pocket square.

Jeffrey Loria, much like Dick Clark, knows how to reach kids these days.

Michael Franks’s “Baseball,” from his album “One Bad Habit” (1980, Warner Brothers).

Today, we answer some important questions: Is baseball really that much like love? Did the Pittsburgh Pirates look awesome in 1970? How can I keep control of my nerves with the way you wind up when you throw me those curves?

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Walter James Vincent “Rabbit” Maranville would have been 120 today. We here at NotGraphs would be remiss if we did not take a moment on this special day to pay our respects to a man who blazed a trail for the generations of David Ecksteins that followed him.

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891, Rabbit played shortstop and a bit of second base for 23 seasons from 1912 to 1935–the majority of them with the Boston Braves. He wasn’t a very good hitter (career .314 wOBA and 84 wRC+), but FanGraphs really likes his fielding (career 130 fielding runs above average). If he had retired after the 1924 season, his 42.5 WAR up to that point would have looked perfectly decent. The problem was that he played another ten seasons and finished his career with 50.5 WAR, which makes his career averages look rather Ecksteinian. Still, owing to the fact that he played for a long damn time, he made it into the Hall of Fame in 1954.

He was like Eckstein in two other important respects.

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The convention floor is vacant, save for pools of spilled liquor and the desperate residues of mass Onanism. And thus the time for exercising the franchise is upon us. Names have been placed into nomination, and patriots charged with knowing what is best for you have whittled those names down to 10. Please reacquaint yourselves with the impassioned arguments and then go and vote sexily …

Thank you for voting. Please have a pre-owned lollipop.

Behold, perhaps the most important Google Map of our times:

Point A is the Hilton Anatole hotel in Dallas, Texas, which I’m told will be the location of the 2011 MLB Winter Meetings. And, should you care to click and embiggen, the annotated window shows the presence of that bastion of American culinary mastery: Medieval Times Dinner And Tournament.

Consider, for just a second, the possibilities here. Imagine, a joust between Ed Wade and Ruben Amaro over which prospect is included in their next inevitable deal. Imagine, Billy Beane hustling an entire restaurant with his revolutionary way of building a joust team. Imagine, Mike Rizzo stuffing his face with a giant mutton chop and spilling the majority of a stein of mead all over his lap.

Endless possibilities, as you can plainly see:

http://youtu.be/4Fc6ZbEwo5s

And this only scratches the surface. Be sure, we here at NotGraphs plan on detailing a variety of scenarios we can envision between the executives of the game we love and the greatness of Medieval Times. You just can’t get this coverage anywhere else, you guys.

While it seems odd to make a baked good in commemoration of a ceremonial first pitch, I’m forced to assume that’s what this is …

The civilian’s pants, the nervously clinched legs, the ill-fitting jersey, the forced smile, the scarcely prehensile way in which he clamps the ball — what about this doesn’t bellow “the instant before a ceremonial first pitch”? Given the gentleman’s palpable distress, it is certain that a humiliating short-hop in front of thousands soon followed. This cake, then, serves but one purpose: to remind him that he is now and forevermore something less than what we think of when we think of a man.

This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

Or at least to the first 40 seconds of this video. And maybe it’s Joe Esposito. I think you know what I’m trying to say.

At the very center of Stoic philosophy lies the notion that the happiness of the individual is incumbent not upon the circumstances surrounding that individual, but rather on the individual’s capacity for bringing his will in line with nature — of concerning himself, that is, only with that which is within his control.

While this concept is largely foreign to moderns, there are still those who find within the precepts of Stoicism a key to the secret of a happiness most elusive.

Among that minority is San Francisco’s talented right-handed reliever Sergio Romo. Romo, well-versed in the work of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius both, has reached a point now, by virtue of his spiritual fitness, where he is capable of retaining an inner tranquility under even the most fraught circumstances.

At the DMV, for example:

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