If the chance to watch tons of spring training games on your computer is the CURE for spring baseball fever, I’m confused as to what exactly spring baseball fever is. Because I would think MLB.TV would more accurately be the CAUSE of spring baseball fever, or at least a symptom that you have it.

The cure for spring baseball fever, on the other hand, might be a Lifetime Movie Marathon, or maybe this weekend’s Polar Vortex, to make you feel like spring will never really arrive. Or perhaps the cure is a broken Internet connection and no more cable, so you can’t watch or read about baseball. Maybe the dissolution of your fantasy league, or a spouse threatening to leave you if you spend one more minute talking about your keeper list. Perhaps the cure for spring baseball fever is doing your taxes, or going to a funeral.

MLB.TV, on the other hand, will only make your spring baseball fever worse.

(And, yes, I spent way too much time thinking about that headline.)

The problem with being underemployed isn’t that I have to borrow money to pay rent, or buy store-brand Cheerios (Tasteeos! Heyo!), or the shame of seeing your peers thrive in their lucrative jobs with cars that don’t make loud popping sounds and roommates that bring their children to term. It’s that I can’t afford MLB.tv.

Raising $129.99 (because only Premium can be streamed on my roommate’s HDTV (through my roommate’s Roku)) can’t be that hard. As I sit on my roommate’s sectional using my girlfriend’s laptop, here are some ideas for how I can raise enough money to pay the bills get MLB.tv. These ideas, unlike everything else around me, are my own. For shame:

Sell My Body
Not for sex! Jeez! I’m not a manwhore. I’m not a sex-person. I’m not a coital-event-horizon. And I love my kidneys. They’re mine! NO TOUCHY! (Emperor’s New Groove reference!) But here’s what I will sell: my feces. That’s right! My precious, pungent stool is a prime specimen for transplantation into someone else’s butt to heal their GI woes. Fecal transplants are real. And my prospective recipient/baseball-enabler wouldn’t even need to bother about it being “safe” or “sterile” (it’s poop), they can just come on over and we’ll do it in my kitchen. 

Yard Work (W)
I’m a scientist, barely, and I know what work is: W=Fd. I’ll be generating tons of Newton-meters, or joules, in someone’s yard by moving things around. See that rake? I’ll put it over there, by the fern. Boom: joules. I’ll kick a rock until it rolls over. Boom: joules. I’ll move a barcalounger to a sunny spot on the front porch. Boom: joules. I’ll pick up a copy of Cosmo. Boom: joules. I’ll learn a sex tip. Boom: joules.

Make a Kickstarter with Tiered Donation Rewards as Follows:
$1: I send you a GIF of me blowing you a kiss.
$5: I send you a picture of me holding your name on a sign while being chased by an angry Albert Belle.
$25: You can come over and I’ll make you tacos and perform an uncomfortably intimate foot-washing ritual. While you eat tacos.
$50: I send you a pair of PINK-style sweatpants, except they’re blue and orange and say “I’m with Colon” on the butt with an arrow pointing downwards. They only make sense when you’re riding Bartolo Colon like a mechanical bull. Otherwise they’re kinda embarrassing.
$129.99: You get to watch Albert Belle ride Cistulli like a mechanical bull. While I make you tacos.

When I was in college I wrote zero novellas and rarely even a short story. Instead I wrote first pages to longer pieces that would not and could not exist. I put them each into a file cabinet, where the ink bled and intermingled, emerging as one embarrassing Rorschach blot. But despite my performance issues as a young writer, I soothed myself with the knowledge that there were very few twenty year-old novelists.

Now that I am thirty-five that comfort has grown tepid. My production has grown inconsistent, the tone of my longer pieces warbling as I patch them together fifteen minutes at a time. I am no longer one author, but a collective: one paragraph written by the hollow, pre-dawn Dubuque, the next the amalgam of a distracted Dubuque scribbling post-it notes at his desk. The result is often a mosaic, the kind one needs to stand far away from.

It’s hard not to think of the aging curve, reflecting on these facts: the gentle descent, the almost loving touch of attrition. Granted, the curve for writers is a much softer slope than the graph above. But it’s particularly noticeable now, when so many of our favorite baseball players are in the Best Shape of their Lives. It’s become cliché to note the cliché, but there’s also an underlying sadness to the fiction. It’s never the young who proclaim their physique; they don’t need to. Only the old think about feeling well, desperately cleave to the hypnotherapy of positive thinking. The alternative is the abyss.

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Hello, everyone. Hello. Welcome. Welcome.

Welcome to Baseball Tonight.

Well, it’s almost upon us everybody. Baseball is almost here, in fact, the first Spring Training games began today.

[Applause Break]

Yes. Baseball is here and everyone is getting back in shape. Pitchers are loosening their arms, batters are getting their timing down. I even saw Ron Gardenhire trying out some new curse words to yell at umpires.

[Break for Laughter] Read the rest of this entry »

Stolen without shame from this video of Bob Uecker’s 2011 speaking appearance at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the animated GIF embedded here documents many of Uecker’s entrances on the Tonight Show — and, more pressingly, the assorted vestments with which Uecker willingly chose to adorn himself.

Few baseball players can retire from baseball and immediately be a 10-year veteran of broadcasting, but that’s exactly what SP Jamie Moyer and “OF” Matt Stairs have done. Our hard-working visual analytics crew has broken down the pregame footage from today’s Toronto-Philadelphia game, and the signs are obvious: The Stairs and Moyer duo have been in the booth since 2004.

“But I distinctly recall seeing these guys play baseball after 2003,” you might say.

You might have dumb-brain. Here, take a look for yourself:

Those are not recently-retired pro athletes. Those are leisured gentlemen of the Booth. They meet all the criteria. Face lines, gray protein strands extruding from the head, an absence of protein strands in certain head areas, slouchy postures, world-weary gazes, tired and nuanced smiles — these are all the irrefutable scientific signs of a broadcasting veterancy.

This leads us to ask, of course, how many other broadcasters are secretly playing baseball? Well, at least one.

For the past few years, MLB has honored America with the wearing of gaudy caps that it also sells for money on its Web site and in real stores across the land; from sea to shining sea, if you will.

This has, it would seem, been a huge success. And in 2014, the Major-est of all Baseball Leagues will once again be doing this sort of stuff. And not just on Memorial Day, The Fourth of July Day, and September the Eleventh Day. No! This year, there will be more caps, for more capital-D days.

I got my hands on some copy and artwork of the 2014 caps.

NotGraphs exclusive, yo.

Regard.

The “United States of Awesome” Cap
Memorial Day (May 26), The Fourth of July Day (July 4), and September the Eleventh Day (September 11), and Star-Spangled Banner 200th Anniversary Day (September 14)
Regardless of what Carson Cistulli may choose to believe, America is THE BEST. And America’s flag is the starriest and stripiest, and therefore, THE BEST. so this year MLB will be forcing teams to wear this gorgeous thing on not one, not two, not three, but four occasions.

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TEMPE, Ariz. — As a three-time All-Star, and former .300 hitter and middle-of-the-order threat, Joe Veteran has no need to listen to critics, especially those ripping on his huge contract.

He would of course love to be able to silence them, but, in his heart, he knows they’re right.

Veteran, who is trying to bounce back from the two worst seasons of his career, said he thinks he’s likely to be even worse this year, the unavoidable march of time taking its toll on his bat speed and other underlying physical skills. And while he avoids reading stories about himself– mostly because he spent so much time as a child developing his baseball skills that he never learned to read– he is forced to admit that what he hears on sports talk radio is almost certainly accurate, and he will never reach his previous heights again.

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It’s usually about this time every year where I sit down and look at the forty man rosters of each club, and realize there are about a billion random middle relievers I don’t know anything about. I don’t think that’s because I don’t do my due diligence. Moreover, given the high turnover rate for relievers, I don’t feel like it’s my duty to memorize all these guys either. They’re all going to be gone in two years, and I’ll have to learn a whole new set of forgettable names. None of you know or care about them.

Don’t think so? Fine, we’ll prove it. Pop quiz, hotshot. Modern day middle reliever I hadn’t heard of or fictional character from an Edith Wharton novel? I’m tired of relaxed grading standards. You need to get at least 80 percent to pass. Read the rest of this entry »

Each day this week, the author is recounting notable home runs he’s conceded during his life as a nearly decent baseball pitcher at various levels.

Previous Installments: One / Two

Date: March, 1998
Level: High School (Preseason)
Place: Lake Bonny Park in Lakeland, FL (Link)

I am both (a) almost certainly plagiarizing the work of another, more talented author, but also at least (b) appealing to capital-T Truth, when I note at the outset of this brief post that, during the career of a young ballplayer, there are moments when he is compelled, against his will probably, to acknowledge that he’s unlikely ever to become an older ballplayer — or, at least not the sort of older ballplayer who’s compensated for his virtues afield. “This is not for you,” the facts of reality conspire to announce gravely. “Time to re-evaluate your options, probably.”

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