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 Gerry Callahan: Erik Bedard hates the media. Ergo, he will destroy the Red Sox.

Shorter Steve Rosenbloom: Alex Rios is having a bad season, and that, obviously, is a personal attack on me.

Shorter Jim Souhan: The Twins should trade for someone like Donovan McNabb. Or they should trade away someone like Donovan McNabb. Something like that.

Shorter Murray Chass: The New York Post, which is a newspaper, recently practiced what I consider to be shoddy journalism, which is why I hate bloggers.

Shorter Bill Dwyre: I like Derek Jeter.

Shorter T.J. Simers: No one connects with today’s youth quite like Tommy Lasorda.

Shorter Joe Cowley: No one’s ever made a joke about how statheads live in their parents’ basements, right?

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

A southpaw of suds.

Beer is worth traveling for. Most times its to your nearest bar with crafts on tap, but many times its to your nearest beer festival with brewers plying their wares.

Some times it’s worth traveling to a ballpark for a non-baseball-reason. Not all of the ballparks boast only mass-brewed urine waters. Your rare stadium makes beer a priority and features suds worthy of a pilgrimage.

San Diego’s PetCo Park is just one such stadium.

Read the rest of this entry »

In part because I’d love to contribute to our new category “Comedy Jokes,” I have embedded an Internet Comedy Video. This Internet Comedy Video is of Joke-Cracker and Cracker of Jokes Louis C.K.’s riffing on how human society could be improved by the presence of Wild Lions. At the 4:40 mark Mr. C.K. will, as part of this Comedy Monologue, briefly insult the Kansas City Royals Baseball Club.

I should caution you that because this was first broadcast on Lamewad Network Color Television, you’ll notice the troubling absence of Reliable Curse Words like “!@#$%” and “#$%!@” and “Longinus.” My hope is that the Customer will nevertheless be satisfied by this Internet Comedy Video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-CvigrOuqE&feature=player_embedded

Thank you for watching the Preceding Internet Comedy Video.

Around 2pm ET yesterday, amid the experiment in exhaustion that was the author’s Twitter feed ahead of the 4pm ET trade deadline, Arizona pitching prospect Jarrod Parker reminded us all of what’s really important in life — i.e. Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.

The observant reader will also note that Parker’s tweet was RT’d by Arizona starting pitcher Daniel Hudson. I’m not sure if Emily Post has addressed this in the most recent edition of Etiquette, but I’m curious if it represents an honor of sorts for a minor leaguer to be recognized by a major leaguer. Sociology, what?

It’s August 1, the Boxing Day of baseball.  Fans everywhere are waking up late, stumbling downstairs to the tree, and realizing that the ballplayer they were so excited about yesterday looked a little better when it was still in the box.  For others, there are unfulfilled wishes of prospects uncollected, and moves unmade.  This somber disquiet sets the perfect backdrop by which to partake in a little feasting, and reflect on the true meaning of disappointment.  It’s also the perfect opportunity to pay tribute to that elfin figure of the past, Gregg Jefferies.

Life: As a rookie in 1987, Gregg Jefferies had six plate appearances.  In the process he raked two singles and a double and earned a 0.1 WAR. Fans over the world extrapolated these numbers into 600 at-bats and a ten-win season, and reacted accordingly.  In an era when a pack of baseball cards cost forty or fifty cents, his rookie cards sold for upwards of eight dollars, a princely sum.  Owning a Jefferies rookie card was a mark of pride, a membership card into the collecting elite.  Sadly, the precocious Jefferies was never able to match the twenty home runs he hit as a teenager in Double-A, and went on to produce an ironically undistinguished fourteen-year career. Jefferies hit for decent average, wielded a little power and a splash of speed.  If he had stayed with the Mets, he may have developed his own local legend, but instead he was sent into exile, wandering from team to team.  In the end, the man seemingly predestined for the Hall of Fame received two votes.

Spiritual Exercise: First, if you have any rosebuds around, gather them as ye may.  Once that’s done, reflect on baseball as a symbol for the fleeting nature of youth, and the psychological significance of a system in which 97% of teams struggle for six months only to result in definitive failure.  Ask yourself: is Gregg Jefferies a victim of society?  Should we prize the naiveté of the shepherd Daphnis, or the Machiavellian cunning of Odysseus?  Did Gregg Jefferies fail the city of New York, or did New York fail Gregg Jefferies?

A Prayer for Gregg Jefferies

Gregg Jefferies!
You were the golden ticket of a generation.
Your face, ink pressed into cardboard
Instilled a sense of vitality and promise
The possibilities of summer.
Your face matched the youth of our own.
Greatness was something ephemeral
And inevitable.

As we grew older
And left (collectively) for college
To earn our business degrees
You disappeared somewhere between
Philadelphia and Detroit.
Your visage, encased in vinyl,
Frozen in its impish, hopeful grin,
We left in the attic to slowly depreciate.

In which the Royal We insert Dick Allen’s name into various works representative of the Western Canon, thus adding to those various works the patina of blessedness.

Today’s episode: Rainer Maria Rilke’s haunting sonnet, “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” We present it here already translated from the original German for today’s busy executive. Spoiler alert: Dick Allen’s name shows up as a verb this time!

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must Dick Allen your life.

This has been the latest episode of Inserting Dick Allen’s Name Into Works of Literature.

It wasn’t the most active trade deadline ever for the Seattle Mariners, but all wasn’t completely quiet on the western front. The Mariners picked up some prospects in dealing away Erik Bedard, and in far more important news, they signed Wily Mo Pena to a minor league contract. Pena is hitting .667/.800/1.667 with the Tacoma Raniers so far. But I digress.

Naturally this coverage can be difficult on those in the media, but John Hickey of sportspressnw.com was all over it, not only on the site but at his twitter account too:

Click to embiggen

All too often, we see analysis constrained by what people have done in the past; too simplistic, too bland, too dry. Not here. I think we can all applaud Mr. Hickey’s excellent outside-the-box coverage.

It’s a well-known law — authored originally by Hammurabi and enforced in 49 of the 50 states (frigging Vermont hippies) — that one must, after scoring a run, return to his dugout and high five all present.

Nor’s there generally any reason to enforce said law: run-scoring is the currency of success in baseball, and success, as everyone knows, correlates perfectly with personal happiness.

There are times, however, when one is moved only to fulfill the letter of law — as the above footage reveals.

This past Friday, the Royals scored 12 runs en route to an Official Blowout of the Cleveland Indians. Though undoubtedly pleased by their performance, the Kansas City-ers can be forgiven if — by the time Alex Gordon scored in the very first inning of the very next game against the very same team — if the ritual of the celebratory high five had become commonplace, tedious even.

So it’s no surprise that Gordon and Friends took the opportunity to utilize what is known as the Air Five. The Air Five technically satisfies the most basic obligations of high-five code while also requiring minimum effort/enthusiasm.

In fact, this ought to come as good news for Royals fans: not since May 13th, 1994 — en route to a 16-6 win authored by Mark Gubicza — has the Air Five been spotted in a Royal dugout.

What follows is not especially new, but neither am I.

You’ve often heard loose talk of the “Drums of War,” no? What follows features the less famous though equally rousing and deadly, “Guitar and Lead Singer’s Voice of War.”

If the voice strikes you as “Wagnerian” — and it surely does — then that’s because it’s actually Wagner singing.

I don’t have unassailable proof that Alexander’s muscled, glistening, loiny troops listened to this heart-pumping anthem before vanquishing Darius III, but, after allowing this song to course through me over and over on my Sony Walkman with auto reverse, I’m willing to test that theory in the streets. With my war-fists.

(Hot, knowing glance: BBTF)

Using Jon Dyer’s blog as reference, I’m likely to identify Padre reliever Luke Gregerson’s facial hair situation as a Zappa — although with more of a Pencil, and less of a Chevron/Police, situation on the upper lip.