I first felt a twinge in my elbow when I was scrubbing the blood off my front door. Don’t worry– it wasn’t human blood. I didn’t think much of the pain at first. Popped a couple of Advil. Or at least I thought they were Advil. I’d lost my contacts, so I was just groping at the medicine cabinet and guessing. Turns out I took two extra-strength laxatives. I don’t even know why they were in there. An old girlfriend left them, I think. If I had a nickel for every old girlfriend who left laxatives in my medicine cabinet… well, I’d have about as many nickels as I have now. So there went the rest of the day. And, over and over again, aggravating this new elbow injury. (I just couldn’t figure out how to do what I needed to do with the other hand. Also, now I’m out of toilet paper. Started using the backs of my fantasy baseball spreadsheets. Pretty much what they deserved anyway. Comeback year from B.J. Upton? Ricky Nolasco: Cy Young contender? Josh Reddick: MVP?)

By the next morning, I was emptied, spent, and my elbow was now throbbing. This was nothing like the time I was shot in the arm by a bandit. It was worse. I tried icing it, but I fell asleep, the ice melted all over my floor, and leaked into the apartment below. My downstairs neighbor knocked on my door holding a baseball bat and began to threaten to bash my head in… but then he saw the blood — turns out Dove Moisturizing Lotion doesn’t get blood out of doors — and got scared off. Some good luck, for once. Anyway, ice didn’t do anything, heat didn’t help (TIP: don’t put your elbow in the microwave!), and my actual Advil expired in 1996, so they didn’t do much good either.

I made an appointment with Dr. Andrews to get it checked out.

Got to the office early, because I thought maybe I’d see some ballplayers in the waiting room. But it was just a bunch of elderly men and their home health aides. “Hopeless Joe?” called the receptionist. I got up and headed back to exam room #1. The nurse told me to remove my pants. “But it’s my elbow!”

After the colonoscopy (ouch!), Dr. Andrews cleared up the confusion. Wrong Dr. Andrews. Of course. And the real one doesn’t take my insurance. Obamacare, ugh.

Vitals:

Game: Out of the Park Baseball 15 (OOTP Baseball 15)
Platform: PC
Developer: OOTP Developments
Modes: Franchise, Online Franchise
Cool Features: Incredible contracts system, massive player and coaches database (now including accurate INTERNATIONAL rosters!), complete customizability, plenty of add-ons, and a robust online community

Categories:

Realism: 10/10.
Graphics: 8/10.
Difficulty: 10/10.
Details: 10/10.
Playability: 10/10.
Intangibles: 50/50.

Total Score: 98/100 (A+)
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On the one hand, a thing that exists in the world is this PITCHf/x chart from Colby Lewis’s player profile at FanGraphs:

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I am getting a little tired of matzoh and macaroons. I mean, I don’t really mind matzoh and macaroons, and there’s nothing stopping me from turning them into some kind of more delicious concoction (matzoh macaroon pie?), but a week of matzoh and macaroons is getting kind of boring. (Pro tip: matzoh with cream cheese and banana is tastier than it sounds.) (Pro tip #2: matzoh with butter and horseradish is not tastier than it sounds, but if your in-laws walk into the kitchen while you’re eating it for breakfast, they’ll think you’re a little insane.)

While certain among us appear to extract quite a bit in the way of pleasure from it, I have personally never been the sort who enjoys merely browsing at a bookshop, the pastime doing little else but to cultivate within me a sort of mental exhaustion and corresponding grudge with the species for having carried on at such terrible length.

One advantage to age — although one hardly substantial enough to compensate for the many terrors it will ultimately exact upon my person — is that it has taught me to develop a strategy for such times as I am compelled (typically by my ever-loving wife) to visit a bookseller.

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Generally speaking, the tastes of the vulgar crowd are precisely the sort that ought to be ignored. In the case of George Springer, however — which Houston Astros prospect is distinctly compelling — the tastes of the vulgar crowd and also the tastes of those with more sophisticated interests appear to be entirely aligned.

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There’s a certain sort of pain a ballplayer is compelled to endure as a result of striking out in a major-league game. There’s another sort of pain — a more immediate one, surely — which a ballplayer clearly is forced to tolerate on such an occasion as he’s hit by a pitched ball.

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As a completely rational and acutely astute baseball fan, you are no doubt aware (and a bit frightened) of the psychiatric disorder known as Puig Derangement Syndrome, or PDS. Afflicting bitter white men between the ages of 65 and Jurassic, PDS is characterized by an extreme psychological response to Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig and often manifests in these symptoms: throwing a Budweiser against the wall and immediately referencing DiMaggio whenever Puig misses a cutoff man; writing a barely decipherable screed on Grrrrrr.com whenever Puig is thrown out while trying to stretch a single into what is otherwise a hustle double; phoning a peer and sneering, “You watchin’ this?” whenever Puig celebrates a home run by “doin’ all that celebratin’;” and snarling something about the “right way” and “that ain’t how we do things here” whenever Puig rides in a nice car to a local restaurant.

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The top indication that major-league right-hander Josh Johnson is a classical scholar used to be the paper he wrote on the theme of sal (or “wit”) in the work of the Neoteric poets and which appeared in the Autumn, 2007, edition of the American Journal of Philology.

Now, however, the top indication that Josh Johnson is a classical scholar is the fantasy update from today that’s pictured above — which fantasy update reports that, not unlike the Socrates of Plato’s Apologia, Johnson is committed to perpetual examination of the self.

Credit to reader David Internet Jacobs for spying the source material here with his (one presumes) regularly sized eye.

You crazy for this one, Kenny.

San Diego minor-leaguer Cody Decker and his teammates on Padres’ Triple-A affiliate El Paso have received (deserved) attention of late for an elaborate practical joke performed over the course of an entire month and at the expense of veteran major-leaguer Jeff Francoeur.

Writing for Sports on Earth, champion of the people Matthew Kory has utilized Decker’s prank as an entrée into further consideration of baseball’s most notable pranks. A creditable piece, Kory’s, and one which has served as the impetus for what follows — namely, a record of five practical jokes from baseball history which have, for one reason or another, been lost to time. Until this very second, one notes.

1906: Famously eccentric and perhaps also mentally disabled left-hander Rube Waddell, attempting an early and particularly zealous form of what later became known as Hot Foot, straps teammate Socks Seybold to the latter’s bed, sets it aflame, and then exits the premises. Thanks only to the heroism of local fire authorities, Seybold is rescued, but is no longer capable of smell.

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