And he has the Internet to thank! With the first ever Hall of Fame vote credited to “tweeples,” presenting the immortal and amazing Jacque Jones!

Apprecaite my tweeples for helping me get that 1 HOF vote. Seriously that is awesome.

— Jacque Jones (@JacqueJones11) January 8, 2014

@desipiodotcom @kengurnick @raymon322 Happy New Year Angry Smurf!!!!!!

— Jacque Jones (@JacqueJones11) January 8, 2014

Jacque Jones was once on a fantasy team of mine, I think. It was not the season he had the .852 OPS. Maybe it was the one he had the .446 OPS. Yes, that’s right, .446. Happy New Year, Angry Smurf.

I ain’t to proud to admit it — I was slightly bummed out by the Hall of Fame results today. So, to cheer myself up, I do what I usually do when I’m feeling glum — read the Wikipedia list of inventors killed by their own inventions.

It is here that I stumbled upon Karel Soucek, a sort of professional stuntman from Canada. Soucek had an idea for a barrel that was padded, so he could survive inside of it when he took it over Niagra Falls. It worked, as he survived the trip. Then, Captain Smartguy got it in his head to one-up himself and drop himself and his barrel from the ceiling of the now ill-fated Astrodome into a tank of water — a 180 foot drop or so. It did not go well. He died on site.

You heard me, the Astrodome is a murderer. And when it is torn down, the ghost of Karel Soucek will rise above the wreckage, only to float into the greater Houston area, softly uttering his catchphrase.

“There is no heaven or hell; there is no God. It’s all a myth. You’re born, you live, one day you die and that’s it.”

For Soucek, that one day was January 19th, 1985. And that’s it. I somehow feel less bad about Craig Biggio now.

(h/t to my skip Adam Derkey, who’s whose incessant nagging regarding my curling sweeps has prompted me to buy a horse hair broom.)

In what has sadly become an annual tradition, once again the BBWAA has failed to elect John Wesley “Pebbly Jack” Glasscock to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Glasscock, whose major league career extended 17 seasons from 1879-1895, stood out as one of the finest shortstops of the 19th century. With the stick in his hand, Glasscock managed to hit .290/.337/.374 (a 112 OPS+) and was a defensive whiz to boot. According both Fangraphs and Baseball Reference, Glasscock measured in excess of 60 wins above replacement for his career, and was easily one of the 20 most valuable shortstops in baseball history despite playing in an era where teams often played fewer than 100 games a year.

Standing just 5’8”, Glasscock was smaller than most of his contemporaries, but it proved to be more important how he used his size, as he played his position like a much bigger man and he would invariably leave his teams more than satisfied with his performance. In his prime, it was difficult indeed to get him off the field, as he led the majors in games played at short through 1899. He was always a man in motion, had intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the sport, and seemingly would always come through in the clutch.

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Oh, you were looking for something else?

The past 24 hours have been filled with some considerable discussion of baseball writer Ken Gurnick’s hall-of-fame ballot, with which Gurnick selected pitcher Jack Morris to the exclusion of other, probably more qualified candidates.

Gurnick’s trespasses hold zero candles, however, to those trespassed against us today by very late Czech author Franz Kafka, who not only somehow retains a vote for the Hall of Fame, but has used that privilege to select only Bug Holliday, a clear attempt to help sales of his famous novella Die Verwandlung — or, as it’s known commonly in English, The Metamorphosis.

First things first: I’ve accepted that this is a hopeless case. Abraham Lincoln won’t make it into the Hall this year, or any year. The pointy-headed math-geeks who have hijacked our culture have no time for an Honest Abe; they glance over his stat sheet, note the blank spaces with a sneer, and conclude that the rest of us ignoramuses are suffering from a sad delusion. No matter how much we might revere the guy, the numbers reveal the truth: the Great Emancipator just didn’t put up the “value” of a Tim Raines or an Alan Trammell or whatever sabermetric darling they’re mooning over lately.

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The facial massage technique designed by Japanese beauty expert Yukuko Tanaka is a really good kind of facial massage technique, according to the promotional materials concerning it that are available online. If the author’s understanding of the present site’s demographic is even nearly accurate, however, it’s akin to fact that the reader has not seen a video demonstration — in GIF form, specifically — of said massage technique in action.

Entirely remedied, is how one might accurately regard this aching deficit.

Suffering is universal, of course. We all suffer, and we all find ways to distract ourselves from it as often as possible. What cold weather does is make us especially unable to distract ourselves from suffering. It dissects our optimism, laying us open, piece by piece, revealing the bits that composed our wintery cheer and freezing them solid. So we complain. We moan, we cry, we tweet, we Instagram snapshots of temperature gauges and the frost in our beards. We complain a lot, and it feels good. So, to help us broaden the number of ways we can express displeasure with our nation’s airmass, allow me to put this arctic vortex in baseball terms: It’s Pete Kozma. And he’s about to bat for your team.

Nyjer Morgan is looking to come back to the U.S. after a year in Japan.

Its a rainy evening in Okaniwa but Plush found a decent Mexican restaurant in Japan. Fresh chips and gaucamole. A cha-cha dance for Plush

— Nyjer Morgan (@TheRealToneP) February 22, 2013

I think Japan will miss him.

If asked to characterize his life at the moment, the author might very well suggest that it’s full largely of despair and also blackest despair. “Why go on?” he’s been compelled to ask recently of the stupid, unblinking moon. “Is it not just a carnival of sorrows?” he’s inquired just today, in fact, of (apparently) quite an unfriendly crow perched on the sill. A sorry state of affairs is what one finds at Chez Cistulli, is the point.

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