It’s that time of year again, time when players of Major League Baseball announce via their Twitter machines, Instagramophones and hacked email accounts that, hey, no foolin’, they’re in the best darn shape of their lives.

Now, I’m no geometer, but it seems to me that apart from, say, “broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with forearms resembling the Lord God’s in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam and with legs like those exclusive to Secretariat’s wet dreams,” one of the best shapes for a player to assume would be “round,” and by “round” I mean “perfectly round,” or, to put a finer point on it, though not too fine a point because then we’d be talking about the Cartesian coordinates and that would be pretty boring, “spherical,” because in all honesty, it would be funny to see the guy roll down the dugout steps.

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Welcome to NotGraphs’ annual (starting now) ranking of the Top 25 Prospectors in history.

This is an ever-evolving list, as we celebrate the men and women, real and fictional, who defile our cherished Mother Earth, scarring her and removing her mineral wealth in the name of personal gain. We celebrate these great prospectors, of course, because who doesn’t love gold and whatnot, and many of them made a ton of money, which is an accurate representation of their worth as people. These prospectors are ranked based on a combination of the importance of their discovery, the amount of money they died with, their contributions to popular culture, colorful language, and how I’m feeling this morning.

25 – Gabriel Read

Found gold in New Zealand. Who cares?

24 – Father Manuel Lopez

Allegedly found gold in Arizona in 1774, and made the Papago Indians local mine it all for him. Not cool.

23 – Antoin Stander

Discovered gold on Eldorado Creek in Alaska, lost all his money, was a horrible drunk, and had to pay his way out of Alaska by working in a ship’s kitchen.

22 – Edward Hargraves

First to discover gold in Australia, after failing in California.

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ROUND 1
1. Mark McGwire, LAD
2. Alan Trammell, ARI
3. Dennis Martinez, HOU
4. Andy Van Slyke, SEA
5. Chili Davis, OAK
6. Don Baylor, LAA
7. Howard Johnson, SEA
8. Terry Steinbach, MIN
9. Tom Brunansky, MIN
10. Kevin Seitzer, TOR

ROUND 2
1. Steve Sax, ARI
2. Tim Wallach, LAD
3. Wally Joyner, DET
4. Omar Vizquel, DET
5. Jay Bell, CIN
6. Juan Samuel, PHI
7. Dave Righetti, SFG
8. Sandy Alomar, CLE
9. Joe McEwing, CHW
10. Roger McDowell, ATL

ROUND 3
1. Davey Lopes, LAD
2. Dave Magadan, TEX
3. Alfredo Griffin, LAA
4. Gary DiSarcina, LAA
5. Tim Bogar, TEX
6. Daryl Boston, CHW
7. Juan Nieves, BOS
8. Dave Roberts, SDP
9. Rick Schu, WAS
10. Greg Colbrunn, BOS

Lopes definitely dropped, right?

As promised in my previous post, I present to you the results of an experiment: drawing wrong-handed. I am left-handed, and these drawings were done with my right-hand. Mostly I wanted to do these drawings because my brain is wont to wander off down dark corridors. Down one of those corridors lives the fear that my stronger left-hand will one day be mangled in an oil derrick, and I will be forced to learn how to use my right hand to do things, and will, in all likelihood, lose my career as someone who draws stuff. I’m heading off that fear, though, by trying to learn myself to draw right-handed. Take that, oil derricks of the world! Anyway: wrong-handed drawings of American League parks, fields, stadiums, coliseums, and centres.

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Bronson Arroyo takes one last, long drag of his Pall Mall then puts it out in the ashtray that now holds seven butts. He has been there for 23 minutes.

“I already told you,” he says as he exhales smoke out his nostrils. It melds with the steam coming from his coffee cup. “I’m not doing it, Walt.”

“Come on, B.A,” says Walt. “We need you. Just this one last time.”

“I’m retired.” He taps his cigarette pack against the side of his index finger until one stick emerges from the group. He brings the pack to his face and pulls the straggler out with his lips. His Zippo flips open.

“I know you are,” says Walt. “I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I weren’t desperate. This crew I got lined up, they’re good. But they need to be great to pull this thing off. You can make them great. And wait ’til you hear what this score pays.”

“Don’t care.” His mouth said it. His eyes let Walt know he meant it. He ran his yellow fingers through his yellow hair.

“There’s gotta be something I can do to convince you, something you want. Name it. Name it and I’ll get it. Come on, B.A. I need this. Do it as a favor to me.”

Bronson Arroyo slid to the end of the booth, and stood up. He slung a weathered leather jacket over his shoulders and reached into the right-hand pocket. He pulled out four crumpled dollar bills and tossed them on the table.

“Sorry, Walt,” he said through his cigarette. “I stopped doing favors a long time ago. Nothin’ good comes from them.” He turned and walked toward the door.

“It won’t last you know,” Walt projected.

Bronson Arroyo turned around slowly.

“This feeling of superiority, of finality, it won’t last. You have more money than you’ll ever need, and you got out of the game alive, but that calm won’t last. What are you going to do now, huh? You’re gonna sit at home and watch old movies? Get that stupid rock band back together? Grow those fucking dreadlocks again? No way. Just when you think you have a normal life again, it will come back. Not all at once, but over time, that itch will come back. And soon enough, you won’t be able to fight it any longer. You might catch on with that crew in Tampa or Oakland or Chicago. Just for something to do. To feel like you’re alive again. But it won’t be the same. They aren’t your crew. You HAVE a crew. And that crew needs you. Joey, Chappy, Billy, Tony — they all need you. Fuck, I need you, man. So I’m asking, one last time. But if you walk out, you’ll never hear from me again. You might see our names in the papers, but you won’t hear from any of us anymore. It’s your choice. It’s your chance. Your last chance.”

Bronson Arroyo walks back to the table. He puts out his eighth cigarette butt. His eyelids lower. He exhales deeply.

Dayn Perry and the present author are recording a Question Time™ edition of FanGraphs Audio at 12:30pm ET tomorrow (Wednesday).

The reader is invited to submit a question for Perry — whose likeness is the emoticon for self-disgust, probably — in the comment section below.

The present author–a man in deep need of competitive stimulation–has been vigilantly tracking the results of an online poll he posted on these very pages just last week. Such is the state of his life right now. What he has found has been nothing short of pure, jubilant sex. You continue to get a sense of the author’s life. But really: tracking the results of the online poll has revealed a tight, sensitive race moaning with intrigue, betrayal, and lead changes. Mainly lead changes. Sexy lead changes.

RECAP: Last Thursday I generated some ideas for useless metrics by thinking of a word, writing that word in ALL CAPS, then writing out what that WORD might mean were it to measure some aspect of Major League Baseball. I then asked you to vote for your favorite pseudometric, keeping in mind that after this metric is created it can never be undone and will forever change the landscape of statistics (if the landscape of statistics was a Saharan dune and this metric was a dying breeze, shifting three to five grains of sand). I didn’t really say all that but you get the picture. I’m not great at brevity. Just go back and read the post.
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Colin Zarzycki wrote a post with this title on RotoGraphs this week. Unfortunately he didn’t reveal how we can purchase one of these pens for ourselves. Fortunately, I have done the necessary investigation. This is most likely the Dodgers pen he is referring to.

The Aurora Diamante… is covered with over 30 carats of De Beers diamonds on a solid platinum barrel. It has a two-tone, rhodium-treated, 18KT solid gold nib and is personalized with a coat of arms, signature, or portrait.
[LINK]

And at $1.3 million, it isn’t quite as expensive as the entire Astros roster, but it’s close.

The author, a person in his mid-30s, has recently (i.e. today) allocated what might reasonably be called a “shameful” number of his waking hours to a sports-related video game. What video game — or even what sport, precisely — is beside the point. The point is that the author has also hastily fashioned, by way of free graphics-editing software, the graph pictured here, which depicts certain findings the author has found.

Dirty, dirty science, is what we have on all our hands now.

On Saturday night, the Dodgers loaned their stadium to the L.A. Kings for a bizarre outdoor ice hockey game in 64-degree Los Angeles, an exciting tribute to refrigeration, sponsored by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Of course, it’s nothing compared to what will be happening one night this July, when the Kings loan their stadium to the Dodgers for the first baseball game on ice since the Cincinnati Red Stockings took on the Alberta Ice Fishermen in the 1894 Transamerica Series. Carl Crawford, Hanley Ramirez, and Josh Beckett are already set to get injured in the contest, while Yasiel Puig will be driving the Zamboni.