It’s not for the present author to say whether the reader should or shouldn’t click upon, and therefore embiggen, the image embedded above. What such a reader would find upon so doing, however, is a lightly annotated version of tomorrow’s (Wednesday’s) MLB.TV schedule — which schedule reveals that, indeed, three spring-training games are available for consumption by the capital-P People.

Among the players expected to appear, for example: the very curious Trevor Bauer (for Cleveland) and very promising Joc Pederson (for the Los Angeles Nationals) and not actually that Italian Tony Cingrani (for Cincinnati).

There aren’t nearly enough stadium features named after players. And the ones that do exist are named after players who don’t even play anymore. Wouldn’t it be more fun for teams to commemorate current players? First in what will either be an ongoing series or not…

CITI FIELD, PROPOSED (click to embiggen)

The horrifyingly unregulated NotGraphs Genetics Lab has done it again, for the first time. You, the reader, asked (maybe) for someone as frightening as Clark the Crack Cub, as prolific as Jeff Sullivan, as tyrannical as Dayn Perry, and as handsome as Cistulli isn’t.

You pleaded: “Engineer us a leader, oh NGGL! May he strike terror in our hearts! May he give courage to our loins! May he sport the wisps of countless ghostly hairs! And can his name be a pun?! OMG CAN HIS NAME BE A PUN!?!?!”
We answered: “Quiet, rabble. It is done.”

HOMER UN

(And his genetic antecedents, Homer and Kim Jong Un):

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. Read the first installment here.

Date: June, 1993
Level: Prep League (13-year-old Babe Ruth)
Place: Rollins Park in Concord, NH (Link)

Frequently it’s been the case in my adult life that people have mistaken me for longtime reliever and Dominican Republic native Octavio Dotel. “Excuse me, but are you Octavio Dotel?” people will often ask me, for example, on the streets of this or that American city. Or “Mr. Dotel,” they’ll say, catching up to me as I finish my afternoon jog, “could you please sign this baseball I happened to be carrying for some reason that I don’t even know?”

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Now that the Winter Olympics are behind us, and with them those boreal Danish cyborgs, those European blurs, those airborne American ice-o-nauts, those pawns of the alpine graviton, we can steer our Olympian spirit back to that lonely orphan of the Quadrennial Games, baseball. We the people, endowed with the Visa-commercial belief that we can achieve our dreams as long as we set our minds to it and also have parents who will drive us to the rink each morning at 4, can now seek ways to restore the American Pastime to this international event, the Pastime having been abruptly voted out some years ago when a bunch of Commie Pinkos got together with a bunch of wine-sipping art lovers to deny Americans their Gawd-given right to Americanize the rest of the world, and also to dominate it.

Granted, baseball got booted from the Summer Games, not the Winter, but since the Games of Ice ’N Snow are still fresh on our minds, and also since the Summer Games jilted Doubleday’s baby like a lottery winner divorces his wife, let’s work to return our game to Olympia’s embrace by making baseball part of the frozen fortnight, shall we? That’s right, fellow ’Murcans: Let’s make it a winter event!

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.

Date: May, 1990
Level: Little League
Place: Sanel Field in Concord, NH (Link)

Like a liar, is how I’ll begin this series of brief anecdotes — owing, I mean, to how this particular one (i.e. this anecdote) doesn’t concern an actual, but only a would-be, home run. Sue me, is what anyone offended by this is invited to do.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here are the results of the first round of this weekend’s Mock Mock Draft:

1.1 “Haha, I thought fantasy baseball was stupid as it is, but now you’re having a even faker practice draft for your fake draft?”

1.2 “Oooh, you got Trout? Too bad this isn’t a REAL DRAFT, sucker.”

1.3 “Maybe you should draft Garrett MOCK in your MOCK draft! Oh, he hasn’t played since 2010? EVEN BETTER.”

1.4 “Your fake team is even worse than your actual team. Which isn’t an actual team, of course.”

1.5 “I bet your spreadsheet isn’t even working right.”

1.6 “Maybe I’ll make you a mock dinner for you to eat after your draft, you terrible, neglectful husband.”

1.7 “You’re lucky this is a mock draft, because if it wasn’t, you would be in for a very long season.”

1.8 “Even Hopeless Joe had a better mock draft than you, and he left after three rounds to hang himself.”

1.9 “Ever hear of shortstops? Doesn’t seem like it.”

1.10 “Are you CRYING because someone took Byron Buxton before you? There’s no crying in mock drafting, crybaby. Save it for the actual auction, where crying is actually pretty common.”

1.11 “You’re not even pretending to respect the budget limitations you’re going to be faced with in the real draft. Oy.”

1.12 “Mock? More like a mockery. Who picks Justin Upton in the first round anymore?”

1.13 “There are more teams in your mock draft than number of years of education yo momma completed.”

1.14 “Uh… Mariano Rivera retired last season, moron.”

1.15 “Are holds actually a category in your league? That is so 1997.”

1.16 “I bet you don’t even know the strategic differences between drafting in the middle of the round in a snake draft versus one of the ends.”

Braun

versus

Brains

versus

Beauty (McGowan)

Read the rest of this entry »

Kitchenware and baseball players. They’re the same! The same exact thing. This morning I fried bacon on Brian McCann’s hot head (get it? because he did that angry thing!)! I’m just joshing, you guys. *snort* They’re not the exact same, but because humans are capable of abstracting the properties of objects and object-groups we can write silly internet stuff about how “this is like that” and “this other thing is like that other thing!” How fun is it to make those connections? HOW FUN IS IT. *throat noise* 

Ovens=Pitchers
Ovens are like Pitchers! You need your oven to both “handle the heat” and “bring the heat.” Just like a human baseball pitcher person! Plus you’re always entrusting your oven with the most important stuff, like cake. And if they suck you can always just give up on the first one and use your microwave oven. (That’s a relief pitcher!) Not that anyone microwaves cake. Whatever!

Catchers are Frying Pans!
Because they take a beating! They’re getting flamed from below and sizzled from above. You need them for every meal, even if it’s just to melt some butter to pour over noodles that you’ll eat alone while watching House of Cards. And just like the Teflon surface of your pans, catchers tend to break down sooner than other appliances/players/parallels!

1st Basemen are like Strainers
The job of a 1st baseman is to catch stuff, primarily. But because they’re Prince Fielder sometimes, it means they definitely don’t catch everything. WHICH IS JUST LIKE A STRAINER!

2nd Base is a French Press
I think of second base as the low-capacity, slightly fancier, but less reliable version of a shortstop (or do I? am I lying to you about my opinions so I can write a thing? yesmaybe!). Since you’ll soon see that I think of shortstops as drip coffee makers, this should make sense later, sort of. Here’s a picture of my stupid broken french press that I taped up so I could keep using it to appease my addiction:

SS (SURPRISE!*) is a Drip Coffee Maker
They’re the energy of the defense, always coming through in the biggest way, making the biggest plays and creating large, brown stains. POW! They’re an American staple, and even though some people have a Mr. Coffee (Asdrubal Cabrera) and others have something fancier (Andrelton Simmons) we all rely on our daily dose of shortstop. Or coffee. Or whatever.

*not a surpise

I’m equating thirdbasemen with blenders in this one
Because they come in a wide range. One version is horrible and breaks and spills your smoothie all over your counter and the other is a nice food processer. Like one is Miguel Cabrera and one is Adrian Beltre in his prime. get it ok good.

LF and RF are Spatulas
RF is the flippy turny spatula that grabs food and skillfully manipulates it with their powerful throwing arms and LF is the spatula that scrapes up crap from the side of bowls because they didn’t have the range to catch the cake dough before it bounced into the corner and the runner scored from first.

CF is a Fridge
The fridge is the keystone of the defense. It tracks down leftovers and perishables and covers the field that spatulas cannot. You might see a fridge make a spectacular diving play to make the final out, or it might simply hold your milk til you drink it. Sometimes a potential home run hit by, say, a strainer, will be caught at the wall by a fridge, and thrown back to the oven. My ability to separate kitchenware from baseball players is completely eroded.

See: Cameron, Dave. “The Worst Transactions of the 2014 Off-Season.” Web log post. FanGraphs. N.p., 21 Feb. 2014. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.