Introducing “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 Jon Heyman: The Giants are upset about Buster Posey’s injury and would like to see some rule changes. That won’t happen. Also, Pablo Sandoval is on The Twitter.

Shorter Murray Chass: In some ways, Carlos Santana — the guitarist, not the catcher — is like Pete Rose. In other ways, they’re really not that similar.

Shorter Dan Shaughnessy: It occurs to me that there are some random, unconnected and perhaps meaningless connections between the Red Sox and Cubs. Fortunately, these connections are sufficient in number to last an entire column.

Shorter Wallace Matthews: Bartolo Colon has been good this season. But when he sits around the house, he really sits around the house. Know what I mean?

Shorter Bill Conlin: I recently received some stupid emails about the Phillies.

Shorter Bill Plaschke: I refuse to stop talking about the Lakers.

Shorter T.J. Simers: Don Mattingly sucks.

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

“Go Mets!” – Jerry Seinfeld on Saturday Night Live in 1999.

This picture was not discovered by the superlative tumblr awesome people hanging out together, but the post, on Brendan Bilko’s tumblr (eloquently named ‘stuff‘), was inspired by it. And, really, I’m not sure it counts as hanging out. David Bowie and Jerry Seinfeld were appearing on Saturday Night Live together and ostensibly were promoting some venture or another. This was no brunch in the West Village sans entourages. That might blow some minds, given the two dudes involved.

Here are some snippets of that completely fictional meeting. David Bowie had an egg white omelet with Gruyere and sage while Seinfeld opted for the French Toast with extra syrup. Both had Bellinis. Because they are ballers.

“Man, do you believe this Wilpon guy? The Mets are snake-bitten? Really? I mean, sure, but since when were owners supposed to tell the truth about their teams? What’s with this guy?”
“Jerry, what are these ‘Mets’ you keep talking about?”
“You do know what baseball is, right?”

“Do you ever feel like there’s just no hope? Like we’ll never get anywhere?”
“Yeah, any time I go to Citi Field.”
“I was talking about the human race, Jerry.”
“Me too.”

H/T James Kannengeiser

To understand what’s happening in this finely crafted GIF, you need first to understand that, for reasons only Father of Capitalism Adam Smith can tell us, the Houston Astros play host to a promotion called the Taco Bell Hot Sauce Race. Given this video evidence, it appears similar to the sausage and president races one finds at Milwaukee and Washington, respectively, except sad.

In any case, between innings during Daniel Hudson’s most recent start, Border Sauce Mild apparently found itself out of position and, instead of taking the safe way around, challenged Hudson — and, one might say, the human spirit — to a singularly peculiar game of chicken.

This is the result.

What follows represents the first of hopefully many posts in these pages by Mr. Patrick Dubuque. Mr. Patrick (as he’s called by children of the American South) has contributed to various SB Nation sites (including Lookout Landing and Roto Hardball) and Pitchers & Poets — in addition to work that appears at his own site, The Playful Utopia. Perhaps Mr. Dubuque’s most noteworthy quality, however, is his ability to effect the voice of a 19th c. aristocrat with almost no effort — a trait much sought after in these pages.

Sometimes, there’s almost too much going on in a photograph. There’s the popped collar, a rebellious statement made by someone already forced to wear a late-80s Indians jersey. There’s the playfully cascading mullet. There are the eyes, staring either at a mime beyond the camera or, perhaps, the future. Floating above is the omnipresent visage of Chief Wahoo, whose toothy grin renders the most amiable man dour in comparison. Finally, Mr. Nichols appears to be wearing a pair of eyeglasses.

Nichols was a professional, workmanlike pitcher, one who obviously recognized the importance of reducing glare and expanding peripheral vision on the mound. He also understood the aesthetic appeal of accentuating one’s cheekbones. Such a pair of spectacles makes it nearly impossible, in fact, to judge the proportions of the rest of the face: is his nose too large? Are his lips too thick? We cannot compare them to anything, anything except the glasses. We have lost the essence of Rod Nichols behind these panes of glass. He hides in plain sight.

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Read Yves Montand’s private journals, and you’ll quickly learn that he dreamed — desperately, lustily — of walking around the streets of Marseilles looking like a Fathead Wall Graphic. Monsieur Montand is no longer with us, but the force of his vision has given us this, which is a thing that you can purchase via MLB’s Internet computer page …

Gentlemen, start your coin purses.

Hard to argue with one Mr. Aron Bender’s bestowing of the title “Balk of the Year” on this little gem:

That’s Mike Pelfrey pitching for the Mets in Saturday’s game against the Phillies, with Dom Brown batting. The balk moved runners to second and third, but luckily for Pelfrey, he got Brown to ground out to end the inning. If Brown singles in one or two runs there, I’m sure Pelfrey hears about it the next day from Mike Francesa. Instead, it’s just a harmless (albeit hilarious) balk.

Eddie “The Brat/Muggsy” Stanky

Eddie Stanky is among the many illustrious players to have two nicknames: The Brat and Muggsy. You, dear acned reader, do not need me to explain the obvious superiority of the Muggsy nickname (for the clean face’d aristocrats who have mis-browsed here: Eddie “Muggsy” Stanky — all “ee” endings!).
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“I’m looking for pythons.”
“Right this way, sir.”
“No, I don’t think you understand. I’m looking for the kind of pythons you can’t buy in a pet store.”
“Then you’ll need to see Ted Kluszewski.”

Image, which, upon being clicked, embiggens, swiped directly from the Internet web site pages of the Cable News Network.

What follows is a screenshot from the home page of my fantasy league, from maybe about 11:30pm CT last (Friday) night.

The bit in red there represents my inner monologue upon loading/gazing briefly at said page. (As always, clicking = embiggening.)

Note: if the reader is curious about which team belongs to the author, it’s actually the only one you can’t see there, on account of it (my team) is the first place one.

The New Yorker’s most excellent Jeffrey Toobin is astride the current baseball news cycle because of his lucid piece on falling but not yet quite fallen Mets owner Fred Wilpon. Indeed, when, in the course of the same dispatch, you get Sandy Koufax to go on record, have an email conversation with the incarcerated Bernie Madoff and do such a masterly job of teasing out Wilpon’s insecurities that he plaints, “We’re snakebitten, baby!” you’ve got reportorial chops. But as great a scribe as Toobin is, let us recall that he’s also a baseball fan in outstanding standing …

That, readers glistening from hard-won sweat, is an image of Toobin’s laptop when he was on set and empaneled by CNN during the tedious run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Yes, Toobin — rather than listening, in rapt admiration, to Anderson Cooper’s handsome ruminations — was checking in on postseason base and ball. Since politics is a lodestone for all that is miserable about the stinking human animal, we should praise Toobin for this most righteous decision.

History teaches us that Paul Bunyan skipped out on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 because he had Marlins tickets, so it should be no surprise that Toobin, a distant cousin of Bunyan’s, is similarly inclined. Accruals of power helped along by vacant stares and scripted outrage or green, grassy baseball? Toobin chose correctly, and may all the gods bless him for having done so.