Answer the following questions, testing your critical analysis skills:

1. “The cost is what is keeping Mets fans away from the ballpark” suffers from the same logical flaw as which of the following sentences?
(a) The cost is what is keeping music fans away from the Right Said Fred Reunion Tour.
(b) The cheese is what is keeping hungry people from eating a grilled cheese and rotten tuna bones sandwich.
(c) The maggots are what is keeping people from eating that corpse over there.
(d) Bartolo Colon.

2. The man in the picture:
(a) Works for The New York Post.
(b) Had a better seat, but didn’t want to be able to see the Mets lose quite so clearly.
(c) Needed somewhere to quietly reflect.
(d) Has been photoshopped in.

3. The full article mentions the $6.25 hot dog cost, highest in the game. The cost of hot dogs is a factor driving attendance to the same degree as:
(a) What’s inside the hot dog.
(b) The brand of mustard.
(c) Ruben Tejada.
(d) Which alternate uniform the team is wearing on a given day.

4. Also from the article: “John Canova, who lives in East Meadow, bought Mets season tickets from 2001 through last year. He gave up this year, he said, because he found it exceedingly difficult to sell the tickets for games he didn’t attend….” Based on this sentence, which of the following is true:
(a) John Canova has been in a coma since 2008.
(b) John Canova has too much disposable income.
(c) John Canova has spent a lot of time on the StubHub website.
(d) All of the above.

5. “Michael Weinstat, a registered investment advisor who lives in Woodbury, owned Mets season tickets with a friend from 1987-2009. He gave up after ’09 because, armed with the public knowledge that the Mets had lost so much money to Bernard Madoff, he saw the storm coming.” Michael Weinstat:
(a) Is clearly the reason the Mets haven’t won the World Series since 1986.
(b) Knows he is the reason the Mets haven’t won the World Series since 1986 and feels awful about it.
(c) Is making up this so-called “friend.”
(d) Indirectly lost a lot of money to Bernard Madoff.

If you answered (a), (b), (c), or (d) to any of these questions, you are correct. You win as many Mets tickets as you want.

Kindly place your eyeballs directly on the monitor to fully enjoy this duel of filth between Alex Cobb and Yu Darvish. These two gentleman twirlers went seven scoreless on Sunday.

Pro Tip: If you watch these two loops, one GIF per eye, for thirty rotations, you will indeed be teleported to medieval England, where you can convince the locals you are a powerful warlock once they see your walkman, velcro shoes, and beeper.

Adrian Beltre jammed the gear stick into park and sat in his truck until the song finished. Once it was over he sat another moment. The street lights weren’t yet flickering on, but they would soon. He grabbed his thermos from the front seat, climbed out and snapped the padlock on his toolbox in the bed of the truck. Inside, something — maybe the way his footfalls echoed too deeply on the linoleum — told him no one was there.

As he made his way into the kitchen, though, he saw the backdoor open, and through it he saw Glenda hanging wash on the line. At the table was her half-eaten salad — iceberg lettuce, sliced radishes, carrots with Wesson and sugar as the dressing. She thought losing some weight would help her find work, but she wasn’t losing weight. Or finding work.

He stepped out on the back porch, and she turned to him. “Hey, she said, and turned at once back to the line.

“Work was fine,” Adrian Beltre said.

“What?”

“Work,” he said. “I figured you were about to ask.”

“Oh,” Glenda said. “How was it?”

“It was fine.”

“I’m almost done,” said Glenda.

“All right.”

He eased back into the house and fished a Miller out of the crisper. The first sip grabbed his throat going down, and he coughed into his fist. He started to reach for the stack of mail on the counter but stopped. He set the beer down and pulled off his work boots and dropped them with a tough thump in the utility closet. If he didn’t put them there, she would, and then he wouldn’t be able to find them.

In the living room, he parted the curtains. A puff of dust made him start to sneeze, but then he smothered it. He watched it get darker out. Slowly? It seemed slow to happen. Or faster than it should, maybe? Earlier that day, he’d thought about the evening for some reason. Not this evening, but any of them. When it got darker did the change drift in, like fog across a field, or did it come down to them, like a rain in the middle of the night? He didn’t know why he’d thought about that today as he’d loaded totes onto a trailer bed. It wasn’t the kind of thing he usually thought about, but today he did. He told himself to watch and see how it happened when he got home that night — if he got home in time. And he had gotten home in time. So he lit a cigarette and watched the yard and the trees at the darkened edges. Was it easing in across the walk? Was it dropping in through the maples? A sprinkler hissed down the street, and the hostas next door seemed to wave to the sound. Was it night yet? Is there an instant when it goes from evening to night? If there is, was that it right there?

“Did you hear me?” Glenda said from close behind him.

He had not heard her. Adrian Beltre kept watching without quite knowing what to watch.

Charlie Blackmon in Front of Angry, Red Bill Cosby (i.e. Art)

At certain points in the not very distant past, the present author has utilized his editorial privileges to the end of celebrating both the je ne sais quoi and also just the regular quoi of Colorado outfielder Charlie Blackmon.

To mark Blackmon’s notable 6-for-6 performance on Saturday (box) — and also to exploit that achievement to the end of driving more internet traffic — I’ve assembled links to all the pieces concerning Blackmon that have appeared at this prestigious internet weblog.

Below are the works in question, presented in chronological order. Note that dates have been presented in classic European fashion (dd/mm/yy) for Maximum Sophistication.

Turn on Your Heartlight: Rockies to Promote Blackmon (06/06/11)
In which Neil Diamond’s opus is used as directed.

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8:01pm: Below is the footage of Tanaka’s first major-league swinging-strike — what appears to be, not surprisingly, a splitter to Jose Bautista. Much more surprisingly is how it came only after Tanaka conceded his first major-league home run.

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Earlier this afternoon, the present author published a ca. 1900-word screed at popular internet website FanGraphs designed ostensibly to examine a kind of baseball prospect that appears particularly immune to failure but intended secretly to herald relatively unheralded San Diego shortstop prospect Jace Peterson.

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The nomination process, which was as close to blatantly stealing from one Dayn Perry as I dare get, for he is from Mississippi, probably owns several firearms, and has booby-trapped his house, is now complete. So now comes the part which I both love and fear, the exercise of your franchise. Love, because I enjoy seeing how the teeming, grubby masses abuse the great freedom of the vote that they were mistakenly given, and fear because the results always represent a stumble downward, away from the perfect Eden which the One True God, Mike Trout, wants for us.

And so, it is with trepidation and titillation that I present to you your opportunity to decide which ballplayer, because of his ubiquity and transformative ability, once and forever more,, shall be called “Big Data” behind his back (for who among us is likely to have the prairie oysters to say it to his face?).

[polldaddy poll=”7942725″]

Thank you for proving the Founding Fathers wrong.

This is fun: Last Monday, in the seventh inning of a Spring Training game against the Reds, Indians manager Terry Francona used a conventional method – i.e., emitting words from his mouth hole – at an unconventional time – i.e., during a pitching change on the mound – to inform right-hander Blake Wood that he (Wood, not Francona) had made the Cleveland rotation.

Less fun, at least for NotGraphs President and CEO Carson Cistulli, is this true fact: While Wood celebrated his achievement and Francona told the tale, the aforementioned mogul was forced to relive the many and various ways by which he, as a young and dream-filled ballplayer, learned that he had not made the team.

What follows is a truncated list:

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The graph presented above — which depicts all the pitches at which A.J. Pierzynski offered during yesterday’s (Wednesday’s) game at Baltimore — is unexceptional insofar as swinging at baseball pitches is, like, one of A.J. Pierzynski’s main responsibilities as a sporting professional. “The undersigned,” one imagines Pierzynski’s contract reading, “agrees, in exchange for $8.25 million, predominantly to swing at and also to catch baseball pitches.”

What is exceptional, however, is the graph above considered in context of the graph below — which graph depicts all of the pitches at which Pierzynski didn’t offer on Wednesday.

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Did you know the best show on television, Game of Thrones, returns to our humble screens this Sunday? Did you also know that baseball premiered on our televisions in earnest last Sunday? It’s impossible that these events are a mere coincidence, so I’ve done the lord’s work by taking the next step and comparing members of the Seattle Mariners to our fictional friends in Westeros.

Jack Z is King Joffrey
The man in charge, whom most would like to see dethroned.

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