You may not have been alive back in 1991.  Or perhaps you were, but you weren’t of the age where you came home from school to eat macaroni and cheese and watch Disney Afternoon on syndicated television.  But if you were, and you had parents who bought you Nintendo games for Christmas and didn’t consult with you about them first, you may have once before opened up an instruction booklet to read these words:

At last it can be told. How, at the turn of the 24th Century
the game of baseball was changed forever. It happened in Cape
Codpiece, Florida during the annual winter meetings. On the
aluminum paneled walls of the posh hotel’s Presidential Room
hung stirring portraits of baseball’s all-time greats. Legends
like Cecil “Rooftop” Shingleton, Travis “Tee” O’ Justice, and Tip
“Rude” Wayter. Around the huge conference table sat a group of
sour, seething executives collectively known as the baseball
team owners. The issue before them-astronomical player salaries.
(A Solar League official had just ordered one of the weakest
franchises to shell out $2.4 billion a year to Gomer “Go Homer”
Gomez, a lifetime .250 hitter.)

For hours the owners debated their options. Until suddenly
Irving Flopilidopolous, owner of the Boston Banshees, leaped from
his chair and slammed his fist on the table.

“Robots!” he exclaimed. The other owners looked blankly
at each other. Then smiles slowly crept across their faces as they
realized they had found the solution-replace the players with
mechanical men. No more salary demands. Better yet, no more salaries!
Just obedient automatons pre-programmed for action.

The now inspired owners worked feverishly that weekend
to refine their new sport which they christened Base Wars. The
public was quickly captivated by this bizarre combination of
baseball and gladiatorial combat played by an army of armor clad
cybernetic swingers. They especially loved the one-on-one battle
royales for base possession, the loser of which is retired to the
scrap yard. It wasn’t long before Base Wars became the new
intergalactic pastime.

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The reader might have found himself under the impression of late that, owing to how Charlie Blackmon recently injured himself, that the present author would be looking to use his white-hot prose skills to eulogize some other sort of baseballing PYT.

Allow me to inform the reader immediately that such an impression is decidedly false. How the reader ever found himself under it is a great mystery — and he (i.e. the reader) would do well to begin finding himself astride, athwart, or any other preposition as regards said impression.

In fact, Mr. Blackmon has found some other outlets for his conspicuous Talent — namely, in the different-but-kinda-the-same arts of beard-growing and tweeting.

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Our ongoing quest, in the manner of the noble knight-errant, is to assign players to cool nicknames rather than indulge in the tired, shopworn paradigm of assigning nicknames to cool players.

First, though, a brief jaunt through our Nickname Seeks Player Vaulted Halls of Honor:

“Bad Miracle” – Wily Mo Peña
“Captain Black Tobacco” – John Danks
“$45 Couch” – Yuniesky Betancourt
“Liván Hernández” – Liván Hernández

The nickname up for grabs in this episode? It’s “Frog in the Pot”!

“Frog in the Pot” comes to us by way of the most excellent Don Malcolm, who coined it, in passing, over in this BBTF thread. Frog in the damn pot!

Denotations, Connotations, Implications, Intimations, and Incriminations:

Mr. Malcolm used it to refer to James Loney, who is like a Frog in the Pot because he’s “slowly fried to death as his decline (the increasing water temperature) proceeds by increments.” So the “slow boil of failure” is one possible defining characteristic of the “Frog in the Pot.”

It could also be a player who looks or sounds funny because “Frog in a Pot” is funny. At least until the burner gets fired up.

As well, if Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad” series is any guide — and it is — then the frog is a stabilizing, clear-headed entity. So think of a team leader who slowly boils to death.

Failing any of that, think of a player who embodies what we talk about when talk about frogs.

Prototypes from Baseball’s Gauzy Past:

If Bill Pulsipher didn’t slowly boil to death, then I don’t know who did. Don Mossi kind of looked like a frog. So did Wally Moon. And Benjie Molina is pretty clearly what we talk about when we talk about frogs.

Guiding, Determinative Query:

Which current major-league player should be nicknamed “Frog in the Pot”?

The convention floor, which is covered in freshly steam-cleaned Oasis Blue shag carpeting, is hereby open for nominations …

This guy is sitting on my desk back home in Madison. He is lonely. You can tell by his face.

So I’ve taken to the internet to find him some company. Let’s swim through the sea of bobbleheads available on the grand old internet!

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What follows is a day or three old, but I’ve been stranded in the wilds of Nebraska for the last week, so a little slack, please.

Anyhow, Yankees GM Brian Cashman, who has sorta-kinda lost his mind in the most wonderful of ways this season, recently had this to say about maligned evil-doer A.J. Burnett …

“I encourage everybody to just break it down,” Cashman said. “Break it down. Compare him to other people. Look at his start-by-start. Look at his run support. If you smoke the objective pipe, I think the coverage on him would be a little smoother, more accurate.”

“Smoke the objective pipe.” Give this the weighty regard it merits: Brian Cashman asked the thronged New York media to “smoke the objective pipe.” If this doesn’t become a thing worthy of commemoration by t-shirt, then all the faith I’ve placed in CafePress as cultural barometer nonpareil has been in vain.

Age is also a number — a number that informs statutory rape laws in almost every state.

As the reader has probably gathered, it’s the custom of Team NotGraphs to spend the better part of each day at our lushly decorated headquarters lounging about in different angles of repose whilst drinking delicious, peaty scotches and then comparing them to other delicious, peaty scotches, which we then proceed to drink.

It was, in fact, this very thing we were all doing this afternoon when — I don’t know how it happened, really — but when colleague Jackie Moore and I found ourselves discussing what constituted a “playoff race.”

Jackie submitted that, so far as he could tell, only two races remained in the major leagues as of today — those in the AL Central (between Detroit and Cleveland and Chicago) and NL West (Arizona and San Francisco). When I asked Jackie Moore how he defined race, he proceeded, first, to laugh out loud and then to roll on the floor while laughing and then to laugh his ass off. When he’d composed himself, he proceeded, at that point, to suggest that, in any case where a team had a 90% or better chance of making the postseason, that a race ceased to exist involving the team.

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No true child of the 80s is able to hear the words “sweep the leg” without feeling inside his heart and his mind and his other, more sordid, parts a sense of loathing for so-called “sensei” John Kreese and his unethical karate tactics.

The five months that Madison Bumgarner spent in the 80s were, very clearly, not enough to produce within him this same aversion to leg-sweeping, as last night, in the first inning of the Giants-Braves affair at Turner Field, he felled not Daniel Russo, but Daniel Uggla, via what appears to be a cut fastball — the footage of which has been GIF’d and embedded below for your pleasure.

It’s only a matter of time, of course, before Uggla himself utilizes a metaphorical crane kick to knock out this metaphorical Johnny Lawrence and win the metaphorical All Valley Karate Tournament.

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In the sixth inning of Sunday’s game between the Brewers and the Pirates, Hall-of-Famer Robin Yount joined Bob Uecker in the booth. Discussion turned to newly-inducted fellow Hall member Bert Blyleven, and… well, something about a full moon. We’ll let you figure it out.

Mad PrOPS to our fearless leader Carson Cistulli for pulling the audio at my awesome behest.

Our voyage through multiple layers of meaning continues this week with the storied Cincinnati Redleg franchise.  The last sixty iterations of the Reds are somewhat lackluster from a comedy standpoint: never terrible, sometimes excellent, generally consistent.  Sure, they have Dusty Baker as a manager, but he has Bronson Arroyo’s elbow to bend back and forth like a Stretch Armstrong doll, so there’s no harm done.  The Big Red Machine seemed to destroy the league slowly, inexorably, and humorlessly.  There isn’t even a joke in Bill Bray.

There’s an unfortunate drawback for dealing with the older ballclubs: names didn’t appear on the backs of jerseys until 1960, when Bill Veeck was busy ruining the game.  The Reds didn’t get on board until 1964.  This eliminates some golden opportunities for historically-minded jokesters: there’s no showing off one’s literary chops by throwing on some Coke-bottle glasses and some Jim Brosnan gear, nor can one effectively rock the Dummy Hoy. It’s particularly tragic that there’s no Christy Mathewson jersey, because the combination of unwise trade, twilight appearance, and wonderful old-fashioned bagginess would make it pretty much unstoppable.  Alas.

Still, a poor craftsman blames the tools of his ancestors.  And so, undaunted, we proceed:

1966 Milt Pappas: The list could never start anywhere else.  Pappas was the key piece of the worst trade in Cincinnati history (or second – see Mathewson, above) when an over-the-hill 30 year-old Frank Robinson was sent to the Baltimore Orioles in the offseason.  Robinson went on to win the Triple Crown in 1966, and Milt Pappas went on to be Milt Pappas: winning a dozen or so games a year, posting a FIP in the low to mid threes, and complaining about everything from umpires to lower back pain to anyone within earshot.  Necessary for wearing this jersey: limb flailing.

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In the midst of discussing a graphic produced by Baseball Info Solutions that details Peter Bourjos’s range, Mark Simon of ESPN’s Secret Nerd Squad invokes a catch made by Bourjos last Wednesday — one also mentioned to me of late by FanGraphs Audio’s most recent guest, Sam Miller.

The catch in question is the one embedded abovely that you’ve already watched four times before reading these words. Do consider forwarding it — or, at the very least, describing it as explicitly as possible — to every lover you’ve ever had and/or plan on having someday.

Thank you, Grant Brisbee, for the link. And the memories.