As you may have heard, certain sinister Boston layabouts spent much of the 2011 season acting like doobage enthusiasts sans doobage. Well, America’s Worst Sports Section^TM is back on the case like a maggot on a leach on a lamprey, and they have a gallery that invites you to decide, with gentle nudging from America’s Worst Sports Section^TM, whether certain key members of the Red Sox got fat as the season deepened and the KFC boxes and cans emptied of shitty beer mounted. Here’s one representative photo of the previously un-indicted Clay Buchholz:

If you’re like me, then so moved were you by the implications of the photo above that you began scampering around on all fours, rooting at the floors, sprouting cloven hooves, and making your finest and most bellowing hog-to-the-slaughter noises. Look, will you, at that indolent sworper of a man in the second photo! The Caligulan excesses! The betrayal of The Nation! Fack!

By all means, peruse the entire gallery. It’s striking how lighting and angles can reveal before God and all The Fat and The Lazy.

So shape up, Sox, or that guy in Globe mail room who knows Photoshop will give you all piggy snouts.

(A piece of fried chicken shared like the strand of pasta in “Lady and the Tramp”: HBT)

“You’re out of your depth.”

Okay, so I may have called the Moneyball movie “boring.” Perhaps it could have been spiced-up a bit by adopting Bradley Woodrum’s excellent suggestions. But I may need to revise my opinion now that I have happened across one of the many revisions of the script. This particular reivision was done by noted directory Paul Thomas Anderson. One unfilmed scene from Anderson’s script between Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane and Anderson-favorite Philip Seymour Hoffman Art Howe really stood out to me.

—————————–
INT. A’s OFFICES – THAT MOMENT

BILLY BEANE and PETER BRAND emerge from Billy’s office and walk done the hallway…. PETER’s eyes widen and he ducks into the video room… BILLY keeps walking…. ARTIE H. approaches…

ARTIE H.: Hey, Billy.

BILLY: Artie, hey, what’s up, man?

ARTIE H.: Freaking lost again, y’know, right?

BILLY: Four in row.

ARTIE H.: Right. Hey, did you see my new lineup for tonight’s game?

BILLY: You have a new lineup?

ARTIE H.: Yeah, you wanna see?

BILLY: Sure.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two points for every “yes” response.

Have you ever…
1. Been in a fantasy league?
2. …more than five in a season?
3. …more than ten?
4. Done a mock draft, just for fun?
5. …even when they stopped being fun?
6. …even while you had other things you knew you should have been doing, and the idea of practicing for a fake thing by doing an even more fake thing made you feel like the most useless person in the world, yet you couldn’t resist?
7. Owned a copy of Ron Shandler’s Baseball Forecaster?
8. …an autographed copy?
9. Told a major league player that he was on your team?
10. …asked him to steal more bases?
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NotGraphs, of course, has a lengthy and proud history of using animal GIFs and or action-video footage as stand-ins for baseball happenings. Unbelievably enough, we have not yet decided to stop doing this. And so courtesy of the lovely and talented Crashburn Alley comes the forthcoming bit of wonderment. Please and thank you click!

Now that you have sufficiently absorbed the image in question, we are compelled to ask:

Thank you for voting, and may the ungovernable berserker-sheep among us grant you safe passage.

Briefly, between pitches, please take note:

Now, fans of baseball, back to the game, as the urgent breaking update suggests.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V9kJw-kWQ8

I don’t technically need a reason to post the video above. It stands alone, and the test of time, as you certainly know by now. That’s the beauty of NotGraphs; under Chairman Cistulli, we roam free. But I actually have one. A reason, I mean: The New York Times wrote about the Milwaukee Brewers’ famed sausage race:

And just past first base, it was the chorizo, the one in the sombrero, who broke the orange tape as the victor.

How’s that for a sentence about a sausage race? The Times makes it so easy to visualize the race, to picture the sausages running for glory. In my mind’s eye, I can see the chorizo crossing the finish line, arms raised in triumph, ending with whatever the hell it is a victorious Usain Bolt does at the end of one of his races.

Obviously, no article about Milwaukee’s sausage race is complete without the details of what occurred at Miller Park on July 9, 2003. With one swing of the bat, history was altered. Pittsburgh Pirates then-first baseman Randall Simon’s life would never be the same. Nor would Mandy Block’s. Not after Simon struck poor Block, only 19-years-old at the time of her assualt, an innocent Italian Sausage running her first and last sausage race, with a bat to her head.

Our lives, too, were changed. We — society — knew that we would never, ever see or hear three people talking as seriously about a sausage race again.

The police report of the incident, which ESPN’s Page 2 were the first to get their hands on, was damning:

Read the rest of this entry »

I realized that I felt sorry for CC Sabathia the fifth inning of game three of the ALDS Detroits/Yankees series . He had allowed five hits and walked the same number, and was about to be seen as partially responsible for the end of the Yankees season. C.C. begins intentionally walking Miguel Cabrera in the most awkward game of catch I have ever seen. One of his terrible throws to Russell Martin got away and Ramon Santiago advanced to 3rd base. At this moment, CC had this very specific look on his face in that moment that provoked a visceral, maternal reaction in me immediately.

🙁 🙁

You ever watch a kid try to do something and not be able to work it out? They just watched some other kid do the same thing, but they just can’t get their chubby, tiny hands around the pieces to do the thing themselves” Or when an older woman starts digging for change in a tiny coin purse and she just can’t pull the pennies out because her hands are shaky? That look. Helplessly watching someone struggle with something they know they should be able to do is in my all time bottom five of feelings, right next to when I make a special trip to 7-11 and the coke side of the slurpee machine is broken.

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I think it was Hamlet who said that there’s nothing better than “grabbing a few brews with the bros.”*  That sentiment, surely, was true in 1603, and it is even truer today, as THIS JUST IN the Boston Globe reports that Josh Beckett and Jo(h)n’s Lester and Lackey drank beer (!), ate fried chicken (!!), and played video games (!!!) in the clubhouse, instead of supporting their teammates in the dugout, during the Bosox’s epic collapse.  How dare they?  What is this, an intramural softball game?**

*Maybe it was Polonius

** It’s a shame Josh Beckett didn’t go to college – I think he would have loved intramural softball.

Some people have taken them to task for their behavior, but, really, it could have been worse:

Ron Artest notoriously admitted to keeping a bottle of Hennessy in his locker, which he would swill during halftime of games he was playing in.  Also, yes, that’s him in his jersey after winning game 7 of the 2010 NBA finals – he forgoed changing clothes and went straight to partying.  Much later that night he finally took off his jersey – and gave it to Chris Brown.

In a bit of breaking news, we here at NotGraphs have been able to procure the video footage of Bud Selig breaking the news to Cowboy Joe West that his services would not be needed for the Championship Series’.

However, in the spirit of WCW pay-per-views from 1997, we’re only able to show you stills of the video. Sit back and enjoy.

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If you carefully read the terms of service printed on every MLB game ticket, you’ll notice the following bit of muddled legalese:

XXIV(f): If Major League Baseball (hereafter, PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL CONCERN) can’t have you, then no one will.

A bit troubling, no? Indubitably so, but you might be left wondering how MLB wields such far-ranging plenary powers. The answer, which is also the correct answer? They take pictures of you at the ballpark and allow anyone with an Angelfire Internet Computer to ogle you and your native indignities. From the Computer Link:

Below are panoramic photos taken from the 2011 MLB postseason. Each panorama was created by stitching together hundreds of photos taken over a 20-minute span. By logging in via Facebook Connect, you can tag yourself, as well as friends who attended the game. You can even zoom in to identify individual faces. (Emphasis and bloodcurdling font mine, but should totally be theirs, too.)

Each of us is special, but each of us — above all, this writer — is also a misshapen idiot. If we wanted to be seen doing what we do at a ballgame — i.e., sweating, grunting at dot races, drooling on our foul-smelling shoes, screaming in tribal unison at the mascot with the t-shirt cannon, catching our breath from eating too fast, picking at scabs, idly probing our own orifices — then we’d log on to Chatroulette between innings. Some things, however, are best left unseen, and those things are we, the stinking people of the world.

So thanks, MLB, for ruining everything.