Albert Lyu and Carson Cistulli are overzealously reviewing colleague Jonah Keri’s forthcoming book, The Extra 2%. Feel free to read parts one and two and three and/or four of this literary tour de force.

In what follows, our interlocutors discuss the short, but mostly troubled, episode in history that was the Rays’ performance in the amateur draft before the Sternberg takeover.

Cistulli: Albert, I feel compelled to begin our discussion of chapter four (entitled “New Blood” — a.k.a. almost, but not entirely, the name of the first Rambo movie) by noting that the brief intermission between our most recent and the current posts is not, as a reader might suspect, due to our lack of zeal concerning Mr. Jonah Keri’s book, but actually due to an overabundance of same.

In point of fact, since we finished our exchange last Friday afternoon, I’ve been almost entirely incapacitated by exhaustion, and have just now crawled to my keyboard and typed out this brief message. Am I wearing pants? Hard to tell.

All of which is to say: for those who buy this book, maybe ask your girl* to clear all your appointments for the day.

*Also, make sure you still live in the year 1963 before you refer to your secretary as “girl.”

Albert: Carson, I feel likewise, not that the book has been a toll — it has been a wonderful read thus far, the chapter-by-chapter review — it’s almost like too much vacation, too many Hawaiian sunset beaches, too long of a spring break, too many non-alcoholic Pina Coladas, that you just need to spend a few weeks at home just chilling or playing Pro Evolution Soccer or taking a quiet walk around the neighborhood, just so things are, you know, a little bit different.

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With each day it becomes increasingly clear that our feast-day celebrations for notable baseballing figures aren’t going away.

Life: “Wee” Willie Keeler played 19 years in the major leagues, and his .3413 career batting average is the 14th highest of all time. The diminutive Keeler is famous for his simple batting advice — i.e. to “hit’em where they ain’t.” He’s also noted for having perfected, while playing with the Orioles of the mid-1890s, the “Baltimore Chop,” which is either (a) a technique wherein the batter hits the ball into the ground purposely so’s to induce a high bounce, or (b) a signature move in a mid-Atlantic variety of the martial arts.

Spiritual Exercise: In his poem “The Snow Man,” Wallace Stevens describes a character, out in a field during winter, who “beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” How, do you think, is it possible that “nothing” can both be and not be — and how, if at all, does this relate to Keeler’s famous approach to hitting? Finally — and most importantly — with whom, between Keeler and Stevens, would you prefer to have a drink?

A Prayer for Willie Keeler

You won the award for best spiritual wisdom
when you declared that your preferred strategy
while batting was to “hit’em where they ain’t” —
and won it again shortly thereafter
by advising a young teammate not to bite
the hand that feeds him, but certainly
to find out whose arm it’s attached to.

When a New York paper reported that you’d
experimented with chloral hydrate, nitrous
oxide, and even peyote in your efforts
to apprehend the mystery of your art
you neither denied nor confirmed the claim
but responded that to characterize hitting
as an “effort” of any description would be
to badly misunderstand the practice, continuing:

“I neither try to hit the ball,
nor don’t try to hit the ball,
nor try not to hit the ball
nor don’t try to not hit it.

And though I’ve occasionally
not tried to try and hit it,
and, even once, didn’t not try
to try and not hit it, I’ve found
all these approaches unsatisfying.”

The beacon that draws us north.

It’s the beginning of March, and that means the players report to warmer locales while the nerds head north. It all makes sense when you look at the lineup that MIT Sloan Business School puts together for their annual Sports Analytics Conference.

This year, FanGraphs will be in full force at the event, as Daves Cameron and Appelman will be attending, and your intrepid NotG reporter will be covering the event’s nerd-angles and nerd-crevices. If you doubt the credentials of the event, just check this list. The invited speakers and panelists this year include:

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Allow this post to remind all manner of book-writers: NotGraphs is in the business of receiving your books for free, reading them, and then writing thinly veiled advertisements on their behelf.

Courtesy of Amazin’ Avenue’s Eric Simon, the NotGraphs Literary Bureau has recently come into possession of the forthcoming 2011 Amazin’ Avenue Annual.

A review will almost certainly follow next week. In the meantime, here’s a the table of contents:

Foreword
by Ken Davidoff

Introduction
by Eric Simon

Part 1: Looking Back On 2010
Chapter One: Ten For ’10
by Eric Simon

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As you’ve surely heard by now, according to Charlie Sheen, Charlie Sheen is winning. At drugs, at life, at everything. And that fact is not lost on today’s baseball players. At least not the Kansas City Royals, according to Hardball Talk’s Craig Calcaterra:

Mucho talk in the Royals clubhouse about Charlie Sheen. Guys daring each other to answer every media question with “winning.”

Ironic, considering the Royals know next to nothing about winning. Heyo! And, yes, I will be here all week. Tuesdays and Fridays, usually, but sometimes I pop in unscheduled.

Sports Illustrated’s trusty Vault also got in on the fun, tweeting a Scorecard article from April 1996, when Sheen was spending $6,537.50 on extracurricular activities other than cocaine:

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While the actual baseball race in the American League Central should be compelling enough, there’s another pitched battle (baseball pun, free of charge) developing in Flyover Nation. This battle, naturally enough, is over proposed civic statues that will never actually happen.

In Detroit, home of the Tigers and Miguel Cabrera’s basest urges, there’s a movement afoot to construct a giant totem to the greatest half-man/half-machine to take back the streets since Nathan Hale. I speak, of course, of Robocop.

In Kansas City, home of the Royals and their discontents, the people want, automatically and for them, a statue of relentless tickler of funny bones Vicky Lawrence dressed up as everyone’s favorite rolling pin-wielding materfamilias, Mama from “Mama’s Family.”

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Today’s contribution to baseball’s mostly new feast-day tradition is like ten works of art in just one work of art.

Life: Despite a career WAR of 116.1 that places him 14th all-time amongst field players, Ott’s legacy is a strange one. For example, he never once won an MVP Award in his 22-year career, and yet was a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Beyond this, anecdotal evidence suggests that modern fans are unaware of Ott’s dominance in his own time. Writing for The Hardball Times, Steve Treder attributes Ott’s lack of notoriety to his (i.e. Ott’s) mostly bland personality, the complications stemming from his home ballpark (the Polo Grounds), and his earlyish death at the age of 49.

Spiritual Exercise: Ask yourself, “What is fame?” Is it, as Socrates says, “the perfume of heroic deeds”? Or is it, as history suggests, merely a popular musical film from 1980?

A Prayer for Ott the Undeservedly Obscure

Mel Ott!
With your small stature, nondescript features,
and gruesome death at the hands of Javier Bardem
you represent the single biggest influence on the work
of American filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen.

In an interview with the Chicago Reader
they describe you playfully as the
Ferrari 308GTS to their Magnum PI.

In another, with Asian Banker magazine,
they ask, “What exactly is Asian Banker, anyway?”

It’s these simple but penetrating questions
that inform the Coen Brothers’ celebrated process,
and the sort of questions, too, which reveal
the crime that is your undeserved obscurity —
a crime, if not against humanity per se,
then certainly against some kind of local ordinance
in one of our country’s more enlightened towns.

Ryan Shopshire was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays in the 32nd round of the 2009 MLB Amateur Draft. Six feet five inches tall, and weighing 200 pounds, it’s Shopshire’s dream to one day pitch in the big leagues. For the coming season, Shopshire’s teamed up exclusively with brand-spanking new baseball blog Through The Fence Baseball, and will be blogging about his experiences in the minor leagues in a series entitled Talking Shop.

Witness:

First I want to tell everybody a little about my baseball background. I am a so-cal boy born and raised in the most beautiful place in the states, Orange County California. I played my high school years at Orange Lutheran High School, a premier power house. After high school I accepted a scholarship at Long Beach State to play for the Dirtbags. My freshmen year there I experienced my first injury playing baseball (a stress fracture in my throwing elbow) and made me miss my entire season. At the end of the season exit meetings the coaches decided that Long Beach would not be my home the following season. This was a big blow to me because this was my first choice school out of high school.

My path was altered but I believe it made me stronger and more knowledgeable. My next two years I played at Orange Coast Community College in beautiful Newport Beach, California. At Coast I played at one of the most prestige community college baseball leagues in California and the nation. We made the playoffs both years there and it is always fun playing for a winning program. After my time at Coast I accepted a scholarship to play at San Jose State University. I did not know much about the program before I was contacted by the University but, I was informed that it was a winning program. I played there for two years and my team had a combined record of 72-45.

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Jeff Schultz of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution caught up with Chipper Jones today, and he wasn’t terribly happy, particularly with some denizens of the lowest floor of houses owned by their mothers.

“I still feel like I have something to offer, and the cynical fan can really kiss my ass. I really don’t care. There’s a bunch of true fans and the people who actually want to take the time to get to know me know who I am. The guy who sits in his mom’s basement and types on his mom’s computer, I couldn’t really care less about.”

Hey, Chipper. I lease the basement I live in, thank you very much.

And given my basement-leasing situation and recent support of Chipper Jones’s continued baseball career, I resent that. But hey, if Chipper needs an imagined enemy to get through his 18th Major League season, I’m perfectly willing to play that role.

(Hat tip to Dustin Parkes at The Score)

Mankind has often wondered aloud — or in the form of modern epic poems — where the line is exactly between self-promotion and community service. This post seeks to ride that line as one might a 1950 Triumph 6T Thunderbird motorcycle — that is, very stylishly and with seemingly no effort.

The reader might be aware that we at FanGraphs recently released our preseason fantasy guide, The Second Opinion. Given its low price-point and white-hot content, the Second Opinion itself is more or less a gift to humanity.

The reader might also be aware that, unlike last year, we neglected (at first!) to provide a PDF version of same. Reader demand, however, has prompted the Dark Overlord not only to provide a PDF download, but to suggest that a more satisfyingly formatted one might be available next year.

On its own a PDF can be slightly unwieldy — good for printing, certainly, and maybe searching, but not necessarily ideal for reading. However, with iBooks, users of the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch can import the Second Opinion PDF into a considerably more friendly “reader” format. Search functionality also remains available in this form, too, allowing readers to access all player-specific information (in preparation for — or even during, I suppose — a fantasy draft). Furthermore, links to FanGraphs player pages remain active, in the event that readers require deeper statistical information on a player.

So, uh, “Ta-da!” is what I mean to say about all this. And also maybe “What a country!!!”