Survey this daguerreotype of Von Hayes, and you may be tempted to focus solely on the tenuous unibrow that introduces him to the world as a cocksman of distinction. But peer more deeply, and you’ll see a countenance riddled with mounting horror …

What is it just off-stage that troubles him so? A baleful incubus plucked from a Goya painting? The dark ways of Ron Hassey? The approaching hoof-beats of the decisive yet still fraught Cold War endgame?

Afflict Von Hayes no more, you sickening menace!

Anyone who’s played the backyard variety of base- or wiffle- or even kickball will be acquainted with the idea of the ghost runner. This sort of ghost, second in friendliness only to the very famous one employed by Paramount Pictures, happily replaces us on base, content with moving station-to-station like a phantom Molina brother.

For all the popularity of the ghost runner, however, the ghost swing remains a rare sight, utilized by only the avantest of sporting’s garde. Yet it was just such a swing that Milwaukee pitcher Randy Wolf employed in the top of the third inning of Saturday night’s contest against the San Francisco Giants.

As you see in the footage above, San Francisco’s Ryan Vogelsong begins the at-bat with a four-seam fastball to Wolf — to which Wolf responds by leaving the actual bat on his left shoulder and taking a pretty substantial cut right-handed with his invisible bat. The result? That depends. The baseball that you and I see lands in catcher Chris Stewart’s glove for a strike. The one that Wolf was swinging at appears — if we assume that Wolf follows its path with his eyes — appears to land foul somewhere down the first-base line.

Some will call it madness; others, genius. As you might imagine, both parties are right. For now, it’s our duty merely to appreciate Randy Wolf’s brazen declaration on behalf of the whimsical.

Despite the fact that he enters play Saturday with a line of just .245/.303/.372 (.277 BABIP), it’s entirely likely that — owing to a combination of defense, park adjustment, etc. — it’s entirely likely that Sam Fuld is an average major leaguer. Add to this some notable biographical details — that he went to Stanford, for example, or that he has diabetes and worked for STATS, Inc. and went to Phillips Exeter and is Jewish — and one finds in Sam Fuld the makings of a Nerd Among Men.

Fuld himself problematized that narrative on Friday night, however. In the top of the fifth inning, with Fuld on first, Fuld’s teammate Sean Rodriguez grounded to Royals second baseman Chris Getz. Attempting to start the double play, Getz flipped to shortstop Alcides Escobar, who’d moved over to second to take the throw. What happened after that is what you see in the expertly embedded GIF at the top of this post.

Read the rest of this entry »

First, lay eyes, heart and soul upon this, your Daguerreotype of the Evening …

Now, based on this photo and its many, many blessed connotations, what should Mr. Calderon’s nickname be?

A – Smooth Jazz
B – Pendergrass Stains
C – Sexual Face
D – Jheri Seinfeld
E – Love and Rockets
F – Whole Soul
G – [Your Suggestions Here]

OK, so technically those are stirrups. Specifically, those are Evan Longoria’s stirrups, and I don’t feel I’m going on a limb declaring these the best aspects of the Tampa Bay Rays uniforms.

More importantly, I would buy a pair of these things in a New York Tampa Bay minute, but I can’t seem to find them for sale anyway. I’m not insane for wanting a pair of these. Right? Right?

Little to nothing is going right for the Seattle Mariners this year. Save for the mustaches of Eric Wedge and now Brendan Ryan, and, well, all their stellar pitching, Seattle’s 2011 season is a lost one.

Amid all that losing, though, Ryan has found reason to smile. He does, after all, lead the Mariners in WAR. And if you’re wondering what Ryan’s mustache has to do with his team-leading 2.1 WAR, the answer is obvious: everything.

Image credit: Reuters, via daylife.

The above footage from Tuesday’s Giants-Dodgers broadcast has been making its way around the internet. As you will see in the video, a young man, having missed a shot at a foul ball proceeds to pout, get noticed by the gentlemen in the broadcast booth, and have a ball hand-delivered to his seat. The video has been celebrated by some as an example of the great things humans are capable of if we are just nicer to each other.

I see something far more insidious at work.

The message here is, apparently, that pouting pays. This boy went home with far more than just a baseball on Tuesday — he went home confirmed in the belief that no pout goes unrewarded. The Giants’ broadcasters have set a very dangerous precedent not just for this boy’s parents, but for this boy himself, and the future of our society as a whole.

Read the rest of this entry »

Note: as a number of reader-commenters have suggested here, it’s very possible that the basepaths at the pictured stadium are only 60 feet long, therefore negating all of the inspired work you find in this post. This, once again, reveals why “facts” are harmful and ought to be ignored.

A couple days ago, in response to a piece I wrote that waxed poignant on the pleasures of baseball and its capacity to constantly generate data of all sorts, reader/commenter/modern man Danmay noted that, perhaps stranger than one club hitting over half of a league’s homers is a club averaging almost a triple per game.

I can reveal now that the team hitting all those triples are the Lions of Savigny (or, Savigny-sur-Orge to be precise, a suburb of Paris), a club in the French Elite division (treated with awe-inducing prose here). I can also now reveal that, owing to the new technology of “drawing red lines on images from Google Maps,” it’s possible to determine if, in fact, the dimensions of Savigny’s home park, Stade Jean Moulin (whose dimensions are absent from internet), might influence the Lions’ triple totals.

But first, a test. Regard, below, an image of very famous Fenway Park (also courtesy Google Maps). Because we know (a) that home to first at Fenway Park is 90 feet and (b) that home to the left-field wall at Fenway is just over 300 feet, we can test our method to see if it works.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the hirsute likes of Oscar Gamble and John Henry Johnson, baseball has a proud history when it comes to the Afro and the rocking thereof. More recently, Coco Crisp is to be praised to the heavens and back for keeping it impossibly real.

All that is well and good, but the gauntlet — a hairy, awesome gauntlet — has been thrown down at the feet of those who take seriously the fusion of baseball and Afros …

And the people say: Your move, Mr. Crisp.

In the late 1970s, a certain American new wave band asked one of life’s tough questions.

More than 30 years later, Andrew Stoeten, Dustin Parkes, and Drew Fairservice (left to right) of Canadian-based Getting Blanked have asked a similarly difficult question — this time in picture form.

The answer, if it even exists, will likely be revealed by a close reading of one of the triumvirate’s live game chats. But that’s a giant, big if, people.