It’s that time of year again. As we get ready to turn the calendar over to September, another glorious season of baseball enters its final stretch. Indeed, if the baseball season were equivalent to rounding the bases, we’d presently be about one fifth of the way between third base and home. (I’ll leave it to the boundless imaginations of NotGraphs readers to determine, if the baseball season was a romantic interlude, what stage of hot-and-heaviness it would be in.)

It is the time of year that baseball scribes from around the country begin to pen their obligatory MVP and Cy Young ballot articles. It is the time of the year that we realize that the ballots of most baseball scribes make absolutely no logical sense. It is the time of year when a (particularly ossified) cadre of scribes become intellectual contortionists as they attempt to justify their decisions not to vote for the clearly most deserving player. What a special time of year!

Rather than wade pointlessly into the MVP discussion (that’s the job of my robot colleagues over at FanGraphs), I will use this space to join in the NotGraphs tradition of celebrating mediocrity with absolutely no concern for objective reality or standardized criteria.

Here are my Least Valuable Player picks to this point in the season:

Read the rest of this entry »

Transaction: Approved. And, for the record, I hope Ol’ Jim Jam mashes taters forever.

But on to more pressing matters, with the help of NotGraphs’ Highly Reputable and Totally Real Think Tank.

If the Cleveland Indians are using Mastercard …

– The New York Yankees are rolling with an American Express Centurion Card.

– The Los Angeles Dodgers no longer have their credit cards. They were taken away, and cut into pieces, as the Dodgers watched. It was awful.

– The Boston Red Sox are all about the Visa Black.

– The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are using a whole whack of Amex Corporate and Platinum cards, mostly to pay for Vernon Wells’ salary.

– The Florida Marlins have decided of their free will to not use credit cards. Cash only, yo.

– The New York Mets and Chicago Cubs are using their own team-inspired Bank of America Mastercards. They really wanted the free duffel bag and blanket that came with signing up.

What’s in your team’s wallet?

Back in 1976, when men were men and the drugs were just, just great, Philadelphians succumbed to what can best be described as one of the grooviest blood-borne soul-borne pathogens ever to roll across the plains, hills, dance floors, and sex parlors of America …

Some might question the verisimilitude of some parts of this audio recording. However, I have it on good authority that when Garry Maddox and Dave Cash have a conversation over Citizens’ Band Radio, it’s absolutely on the subject of the hottest thing in town.

Notice some fresh, oozing papules on the epidermis? You’ve got Phillies Fever, my friend.

Jazz hands.

It can’t be that easy being good-looking. You get your garden variety jealousy from the men, and the fawning (oh the fawning!) from the women must get old at some point too. You have to spend so much of your hard-earned cash on beauty products (like Pomade!). You have to worry about things that your co-workers don’t even think about (cuticles!), liking losing your luscious locks or what sort of accessory goes best with your shoes. You get asked to do events that you just aren’t well-suited for (runway?). Your tiny flaws get magnified. Everyone laughs.

Then again, the alternative is not that easy either.

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While I have only the most tenuous grasp over cricket and its rules/strategies, I’ve been compelled of late to acquaint myself with the game more closely owing to how P.G. Wodehouse’s excellent Psmith books require some knowledge of it.

The game, I will concede, is still mostly mysterious. Still, I think we can all agree, bespectacled readership: any sport that is routinely played in a sweater vest and calls for a tea break — well, there’s something in that.

Furthermore, some cursory internetting has revealed the Daniel Bard of cricket bowlers — namely, former Australia international Shane Warne. Despite his regrettable “face” and “whole being,” Warne’s deliveries are irrefutably pleasing.

I present here three readily available YouTube videos of Shane Warne’s consummate leg-spin bowling. I don’t present here what you might call “context” of any sort — because, again, I don’t know what’s going on.

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Via the championship Twitter feed of Erick William comes this, which is Carlos Gonzalez, nickname of “Cargo,” doing his finest imitation of actual, real-live cargo. Please click, embiggen and enjoy!

Hosannas! My only complaint is that this is more “dangerous payload” than mere cargo. We have a giant and possibly menacing baseball-ist rising from the sea and, from appearances, about to unleash misrule on the nearest unsuspecting port city. You take it from here, Bruckheimer.

I don’t consider myself a GIF wizard, but I certainly don’t need a Tome of GIF Spells to know when an event is GIF-worthy. Dayn Perry’s recently analogued fan interference play involving Justin Upton was just such an event. All that was missing from the scene: An exhortation to deal with said scene.

Cue GIF:

Apologies, apologies all around, for the long load time, but majesty is ill-rushed.

The year is 1987.  The nation is reeling from a combination of Iran-Contra hearings and Cold War-induced deficit crisis.  Toni Morrison publishes Beloved, depressing the hell out of everyone. Vince Coleman becomes baseball’s new darling, and Full House appears on television screens for the first time.  Patrick Swayze has not yet recorded “She’s Like the Wind”, but he is about to do so.  Clearly, American morale is foundering, and the baseball card manufacturing companies are needed to revive the spirit of America.  No longer was one set per brand enough; we need more.

They fill this demand by selling small, forty-four card individually boxed sets.  These cards were sold, through exclusive retailers, on the premise that if people liked to collect pictures of baseball players printed on small pieces of cardboard, they might want to collect pictures of baseball players printed on different pieces of cardboard.  To increase jubilance, these cards were given red, white and/or blue borders and exciting names. They loaded these cards with as much Gershwin-esque bombast as they could scrounge.

Essentially, they lied to us.  They lied to America. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time for another installment of “Shorter Baseball Columnists,” in which we read mainstream baseball columnists and marginalized bloggers like Murray Chass so you don’t have to! Let us begin!

Shorter Mike Lupica: The Yankees won’t win the World Series unless they do.

Shorter Kevin Kernan: Derek Jeter has confirmed that the Yankees would like to win the division.

Shorter Bill Plaschke: Televising the Little League World Series is bad for children. With that said, it would be fine if they televised it on the hit program, “ABC’s Wide World of Sports.”

Shorter Gregg Doyel: The MLBPA should defend only players I like.

Shorter Jim Souhan: Not many have the guts to say this, but the Tigers are better than the Twins.

Shorter Joe Cowley: I have decided to accept Starlin Castro’s apology.

The “Shorter” approach to Internetty commentary traces back, as best as one can tell, to Daniel Davies.

Jim Thome mashed his first tater since rejoining the Cleveland Indians last night. There’s just something kind of special about seeing Thome back with the Indians, as he was one of the guys who has really been a part of my entire baseball watching life and this whole full-circle thing he’s done brings me back to the days of my youth. Or something like that.

Anyway, you should watch the video, and see if you feel how I feel:

For comparison’s sake, Thome’s 200th homer, also at Progressive Jacobs Field back in 2000:

I feel like these two videos could evoke very different things in very different people (such as: nothing), but I had at least a few thoughts pop in to the old skull: