Former Major Leaguer Fernando Tatis doesn’t just use Twitter to voice his general confusion regarding Hall of Fame voting, he also employs it to broadcast unseemly wisecracks.

Friends, I have seen the future, and the future is now. It comes with hyperlinks, tab-delimited tables, and bulleted lists. It comes in typefaces with dignified names, like Times New Roman and Courier New. It comes fast and it changes on a dime, provided you click reload often. It’s called the World Wide Web, and it will forever explode your notions of possibility.

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Last Thursday I presented to you readers some useless snack-like facts to get us from one thing happening in the offseason to the next thing happening. I’m sure it left you momentarily satisfied, and then, about an hour later when your blood sugar dropped, egregiously unsatisfied and cranky. Though my methodology in determining most of the facts I listed could be described as “dubious” and “mainly derived from answers people provided on WikiAnswers,” some of the facts were even less rigorously determined. They were determined by no method, really, except for me guessing and laughing. One such item was particularly amusing to me and is reproduced below:

Possible Defensive Alignment with Nobody On if Baseball Was Played with a Jellybean and Not a Baseball

What this post is, is more of these types of silly guesses on how one might align themselves defensively on a field if one were playing baseball differently or under unusual circumstances. All of the following assume no one is on base.

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Courtesy of Baseball Think Factory, I have discovered MLB.com’s online auction site. You or I have junk, we throw it away. A major league baseball team has junk, they try to sell it to the highest bidder. These are prime items here.

A game-used locker nameplate from the ALDS, for A’s third-base coach Mike Gallego.

A game-used baseball from a Henry Urrutia single.

Cubs coach Jamie Quirk’s team-issued pants.

Sign used during AL Wild Card game, Indians vs. Rays, labeling the “Still Photography Workroom.”

Rockies game-used lineup card from a random game in May 2009 (can be yours for just $1.00!).

And, finally, just for Thanksgiving, Brewers pitcher Jim Henderson’s turkey-shaped hand tracing.

Happy bidding!

This beautiful and autumnal neighborhood is almost certainly populated by Times‘ readers.

Demographic research conducted by Media Matrix suggests that the average reader of the New York Times online is 47, well educated, and earns approximately $75 thousand per annum.

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A typical, run-of-the-mill European.

Living in Europe, the author has become acquainted with a population of this world for whom baseball, strangely, isn’t a daily concern. Because they’re otherwise occupied with punishing the most ambitious and ingenious of their race, is perhaps one reason why. Because they haven’t been properly introduced to the sport, is another possible reason, however.

With a view towards addressing the latter contingency, the author has produced below the top-10 leaders in baseball this season by velocity — as rendered in kilometers per hour, however, so that the European mind might more readily comprehend it. What else the author has done is to capture video of Dodger relief prospect Jose Dominguez throwing a fastball in June at 163 km/h to then-Phillies outfielder Delmon Young.

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You may have forgotten about Matt Harvey. I did for a spell. Perhaps the title of this post struck a dower dour chord in your heart. Writing it certainly did.

This off-season, there will be a fair amount of wheelings and/or dealings. Some players will sign big contracts, some will sign small ones. Others will get traded. And we will expel a lot of time and energy contemplating on what these happenings mean for those players and their respective teams.

But let us save a little time, and perhaps a little more energy contemplating on Matt Harvey. For with every day that passes, he grows stronger. He grows stronger and more eager and one step closer to doing shit like this again:

Heal fast, Matt Harvey. We will continue to remember you.

Ken Griffey Junior Executive is nothing like a junior executive. Rather, at age 20, he is the Chief Executive of World Baseball Talent. He reports directly to Willie Mays himself.

Ken Griffey Junior Executive hasn’t any time to write or type, but whatever he projects into this state-of-the-art car-phone receiver — right down to that infectious smile — is transcribed by adoring millions. Right now he is finalizing the acquisition of a majority stake in the newly public stock of fashion-sweater moguls Dolce & Cosbyana. Ken Griffey Junior Executive will see to it that his fashion-sweaters are made of 100% ebullience.

Ken Griffey Junior Executive is driving a lightly used 1988 BMW M5 not out of financial necessity (pffft!) or any sense of frugality, but rather because it is far classier than the new 1990 version of the same model. Also, his million-dollar ass cannot be put in jeopardy by the arduous task of breaking in that stiff Bimmer leather. Next month, Ken Griffey Junior Executive will buy a new lightly used 1988 BMW M5.

Ken Griffey Junior Executive was just checking in on his Ken Griffey Junior Smiles Outlet, where his used smiles are sold at wholesale prices with a portion of the profits benefitting children’s charities. Now, he is off to consult with the printer about some new business cards. Bone coloring with Silian Rail font? Eggshell with Romalian type? Ken Griffey Junior Executive is thinking of something more subtle: an off-white stock of tasteful weight, watermarked with a nautical compass…

Sorry for chiming in again so quickly after my last post. Usually I need at least a couple of weeks to recuperate after writing a few hundred words for Internet consumption, but this Jhonny Peralta signing really got to me. I have experience in the area of drug suspensions and attempting to find a new job afterwards. A few years ago I found myself terribly addicted to a complex cocktail of Ambien, Lexapro, and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream every night. My supervisor down at the content mill where I worked noticed that I was, well, a little zonked out most days, and getting a little too big to fit in my cubicle. He obviously couldn’t afford to move the wall out by a few inches — “you get two square feet, Joe, that’s just how it is in the real man’s workin’ world,” he would say, while counting his Bitcoins — so he put me on unpaid leave and told me to clean myself up. I stopped the Ambien and Lexapro cold turkey, switched from Ben & Jerry’s to some diet substitute, and spent the next two weeks awake, manic, and unable to leave the bathroom, because whatever was in that diet ice cream just made me go and go and go without end.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, so I came back to the office, and the content mill had gone out of business, replaced by a team of Tweeting robots trolling for page clicks, and my job was no more. And then — and here’s where the similarities to my situation and Peralta’s really become obvious — a man in a Cardinals hat said he wanted to take me as a prisoner for the next 4 years, and pay me in Cheerios.

Sudden withdrawal from Ambien may cause hallucinations. I think.

I did take steroids once. Cleared up a rash I got, from this one time I sort of volunteered at a homeless shelter. I didn’t realize it was a homeless shelter. And the volunteer coordinator didn’t realize I was homeless. The steroids gave me another rash, somewhere else, of course. I take steroids, I get a rash. Jhonny Peralta takes steroids, he gets $52 million dollars. They say money doesn’t buy happiness, but no one’s ever said they prefer a rash. So I think he wins.

I should check out that Cardinals fan’s Cheerios prison. It doesn’t sound that bad, sort of.

Year 2! Year 2! Year the second!

In the comments of Year 1, Ol’ Double R axed:

Any way to see our pre-draft profile? You know, the one when the draft list is released? Or at least our scouting history?

So, what the heck, right? We’re doing this for fun. So here’s this:

Uh oh.

For whatever reason (not including the possible reason of data entry error; this I double-checked), some of the prospects did not have quite the prospectiness of other prospects. I am open to suggestions that might improve this in later editions.

Go below the jump for a more detailed look.
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