The author wouldn’t mind faire-ing a couple of bises with the French First Lady.

If there’s anything more annoying than a young, childless person spending two-plus weeks in the South of France at the height of summer, it’s to hear that same young, childless person complain about spending two-plus weeks in the South of France at the height of summer.

Because, it’s a fact, reader: the South of France is an exercise in charm. The women are almost uniformly beautiful*; the weather is warm and dry; the vin is equal parts delicious and affordable; and the picturesque, winding rues are absurd in their picturesque-ness and winding-osity. Moreoever, an inability to understand the native language means that one is free from accidentally overhearing inane conversations that might interfere with the traveler’s illusions about this land of milk and fine honeys.

*Led, notably, by First Lady-cum-supermodel-cum-heiress-cum-classically-trained-musician Carla Bruni.

For the baseballing enthusiast, however, there’s a small sable cloud attached to the vast expanse of silver lining that is this wonderland of sophistication and perpetual drunkeness — namely, the difficulty in ever watching even a second of live baseball.

Read the rest of this entry »

I consider myself a rather feverish defender of Colby Rasmus against the mewling hordes who would trade him away for, say, Rick Honeycutt. However, my devotions to Mr. Rasmus and his flat bill, which makes him look fly, are shamefully lesser than those of this young lady …

No, I’m not going to mock impressionable teens when they undertake something with earnestness. Instead, here’s a decidedly partial listing of things that “Fire Burning in the Outfield” is better than: Creed, the poetry I wrote in college, seafood, the NFL, Broadway musicals, Rick Reilly, “Two-and-a-Half Men,” tribal-armband tattoos, Nickelback, people interested in Casey Anthony’s whereabouts, the body politic. I could go on, but I need to watch that again.

So where’s your hip-hop paean, La Russa?

(Loving ballad to reader Nick for the 411.)

Bon to the jour, bespectacled readership. I am Carson Cistulli, and this is FranceGraphs.

In our most recent — and, not incidentally, only other — edition of FranceGraphs, we looked at the slight, but significant, differences between the French and American versions of FanGraphs. Today, we cast a gaze at the French baseball league, the Championnat de France de baseball Élite — or what we’ll call the Elite division, for short.

French baseball, as with French (and other European kinds of) soccer, utilizes a promotion/relegation system of which the eight-team Elite division is merely the top. Below this is the 18-team National 1 division and 24-team National 2 division, the latter of which is composed of winners from numerous regional leagues.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday night, July 14, America’s elected officials took a much deserved break from trying to figure out what to do with all that debt, and took part in the most American of activities: baseball.

The 50th annual Roll Call Congressional Baseball Game was played at Nationals Stadium last week, and, thanks to a pair of well-educated NotGraphs readers, what you’ll find below is a brilliant review of the Democrats’ 8-2 victory, their third in a row since 2009, after they, the rest of the country, and, well, the world, took it on the chin from the Republicans for eight straight — and long — years.

Huge political props go out to Dara and Noah for their review. Thank you kindly, and long live the American spirit.

Even the participants in the annual Congressional Baseball Game are aware that it’s a slightly pathetic event. The only Baseball Hall of Famer who’s ever appeared in the game, former senator Jim Bunning, is not a member of the Congressional Baseball Hall of Fame, and the game program prominently features a quote from former Congressman Marty Russo calling it “the one thing that’s left where members (of Congress) get to have fun together.” Nonetheless, the 2011 game, played last Thursday at Nationals Park, managed a crowd of a few thousand Congressional staffers, interns, and hometown fans nostalgic for the lovable bumbling of the past few Nationals seasons. But fans on the left-field (aisle?) side were in for a pleasant surprise. The Democrats turned in an impressingly not-incompetent performance, winning 8-2 on the strength of a legitimate gem from pitcher Cedric Richmond.

Read the rest of this entry »

Man of a Thousand Employers Billy Martin knows a thing or two about a thing or two about real baseball. As such, it should come as no surprise that Martin is profoundly impressed by the Realistic Home-Video Baseball Game that is in his midst …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D54sGd7lUYQ&feature=related

Once upon a time, there was a distinct line between Actual Baseball and the Realistic Home-Video Baseball Game. But then the sorcerers at Atari Video-Gaming Concern came along and blurred that line to the point of invisibility. Billy Martin told us so. Like sinners at a tent revival, we have no choice but to heed his words.

We have our first upset. Dave Winfield obviously wasn’t taking the whole thing very serious and Warren Brusstar glared his way to victory. Maybe Winfield was ranked too highly, or maybe he was just bored, or maybe it was October in his world, but Brusstar’s constipated fire beat the sated mmplops look. Maybe that says something about our bathroom preferences.

Anyway. It’s time to move on. This week we have two classic Mets figures going head to head. Could we have another fire and ice pairing? Looks like it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Via the DCist comes your Daguerreotype of the Evening, which is Jayson Werth’s admiring, from a sensible remove, an unfolding situation that can best be described as “The Gentleman’s Dilemma” …

Since we can’t see Mr. Werth’s rapt countenance, we’re forced to speculate on how, exactly, he might be taking all this in. Is his pose one of cool detachment? Mounting revulsion? Fear that, much like Philly, tasers are spoken here? Vague, gnawing hope that tasers are spoken here? Envy that has its foundations in his longstanding desire to be manhandled by a battalion of constables while wearing his most gorgeous bridal whites? Or is he merely admiring the craftsmanship of the “N” on the outfield wall?

Or are his eyes closed as he thinks back to that time, years ago, in an open-air bazaar in Tangiers, when he let Dr. Vega slip from his grasp …

(Thanks to reader Josh and his assassin’s sense of calm for calling this to our attention.)

It is a well-established fact that the kids these days are somewhat entitled, what with their mp3s and their Kinects and their computer graphics.  Back in my day, we listened to mp2s and played migraine-inducing Virtual Boys and our video games sometimes didn’t even have graphics.  If you wanted to kill a troll, you typed the words “kill troll”, and the game narrated whether or not you were, in fact, successful in killing the troll.  Note: you were often not successful in killing the troll.

Among computer games, the interactive fiction genre began before people even owned computers.  Thirty-five years after people first typed “xyzzy”, the community is alive and well, or at least alive, dwelling in a strata of internet culture just beneath the basement from which the bloggers write about their sabermetrics.

Which leads us to our subject: three weeks ago saw the release of the first narrative baseball game.  Bonehead is written by Sean M. Shore, and tells the story of New York Giants first baseman and teenager Fred Merkle, whose baserunning gaffe in the final week of 1908 helped cost his team the pennant and dogged him the rest of his life.  Your goal is to re-enact that day, beginning with standing in line at the train station on the way to the stadium.

What’s interesting about Bonehead is the distinction it makes between you as the player and Merkle as the character, despite the fact that you are effectively acting as Merkle throughout the story.  The game makes it clear early on that Merkle is destined for misfortune, and that “winning” the game, i.e. playing it to its proper ending, brings about this misfortune.  Between passages of the game Shore weaves vignettes of Merkle’s later years.  Meanwhile, the game provides multiple opportunities to end the game another way, many of them averting ignominy.

Bonehead is free to play, and the game can be downloaded here.  The game file requires an interpreter to run, and they can be downloaded on the same page.

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 Bill Conlin: If you quote Ryan Howard’s WAR to me, I might just kill your stupid face.

Shorter T.J. Simers: For some reason, Ned Colletti isn’t telling me precisely what I’d like to hear.

Shorter Bill Plaschke: Peter Bourjos is like a kid out there and also cute.

Shorter Mike Lupica: I am not a lawyer, but Roger Clemens is in trouble.

Shorter Dan Shaughnessy: I am not a lawyer, but Roger Clemens is out of trouble.

Shorter Murray Chass: The All-Star Game can be saved by Twitter, which I hate.

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

If you’ve wondered recently to yourself, “Where in the world is Carson Cistulli?” the answer to that question is, perhaps surprisingly, not that he has gone from Nashville to Norway, Bonaire to Zimbabwe, Chicago to Czechoslovakia and back, but rather that he was in Tuscany over the weekend and, presently, has found his way to the south of France.

If you’ve never been to this country (i.e. France) before, you should know that it’s pretty similar to the United States, except for the fact that (a) the unemployment rate here is exactly 100% and (b) you can get arrested for not smoking.

Another thing you should know is that, as is the case with a lot of the foreign media that arrives here, FanGraphs actually looks different in this country. Embedded above is a totally clickable and embiggenable image from the author’s own computer screen. The attentive reader will note that, while not crazy different, there are, in fact, some small edits that Sarkozy and Friends have made to the Baseballing Experience that is Our Fair Site.