There either is or isn’t an actual Czech folk song regarding the successful construction of a new baseball field. What follows either is or isn’t a translation of that same folk song’s lyrics into English by the author.

In the middle of Czech Republic, a new baseball field was built!
Syn, slaughter the fatted calf.
Dcera, prepare a stew from harvested vegetables.
In the middle of Czech Republic, a new baseball field was built!
Tonight, we abandon reason for pleasure.

Read the rest of this entry »

The date: the November 14, 1989.
The place: your idyllic childhood neighborhood, teeming with family owned drug stores, people who say hello to each other on the sidewalk, and Richard Marx cassettes.
The scene: you, begging your parents for a couple of bucks to go to the baseball card store. “They’re not toys,” you cry in a reedy voice that betrays a luckless adolescence. “Baseball cards are an investment.” You show them your Beckett Baseball Card magazine, revealing a series of numbers with arrow signs pointing up.

The date: November 14, 2013.
The place: a Value Village. People still talk to strangers, except now they kind of mumble things and smell slightly off. Richard Marx cassettes still present.
The scene: Your partner is looking at baby clothes that said baby has, in the time it takes the human brain to process visual information, already outgrown. And as you’re glancing through bright, plastic, potentially deadly toys, you find this:

Your baseball card portfolio has been underperforming.

Read the rest of this entry »

It is not the reader’s concern what specific question I was moved to ask Mademoiselle Google — a question regarding perhaps the human condition and or the author’s current straits. What is of interest is that Mademoiselle Google anticipated the query to come. She was incorrect in her anticipations, but they cast light upon what shall henceforth be known as “The Four Hot Mysteries”:

The call is coming from inside the house? To that I would say, “The Cubs are inside the Internet.”

Also, to answer The Four Hot Mysteries above:

1- In either case, to what end?
2- There is no place that does not see you.
3- Sometimes.
4- Four.

This sort of thing is precisely the reason I typically use HotBot.

Those who cling to reason will demand an explanation for the present weblog entry, which consists of little more than an embedded audio clip of comedian Amy Schumer uttering the words “inside baseball” — perhaps in the presence of NPR personality Terry Gross, perhaps not.

For those who — like probably all the members of American rock band 38 Special, for example — for those who know that one is best served merely by holding on loosely, the presence of this brief audio clip will be as second nature. “Did life even exist before I heard Amy Schumer just saying ‘inside baseball,'” those same readers will ask.

“It did and it didn’t,” is the correct answer, of course — as everyone already knows.

It’s that time again. The time where I get to write one last post about the Ron Swanson Baseball Hall of Fame and then am forced to think of new and original posts for this godforsaken website, rather than just keep running variations on the same thing over and over. Honestly, I don’t think any of us are going to get what we want out of our time together going forward. After all, Notgraphs has been reduced to whatever this is, jokes about France, and is kept afloat practically singlehandedly by the diminishing returns offered by David Temple. And next week it’s back to Back In the Game recaps for me. Because I hate myself and you.

So let us revel one last time in the glory of Ron Swanson, patron saint of all that is worthwhile, and his acolytes, who were decided upon by you, the masses, like this was some kind of homecoming election. Once again, you have correctly identified and chosen to recognize the most popular, beautiful, and athletic people in your class. Congratulations to you, you sheep, you have confirmed my worst thoughts about you.

The leading vote getter was…

Read the rest of this entry »

First came the vote for the American League Rookie of the year.

Fine. Maybe they just didn’t feel comfortable voting on a guy they didn’t see before voting. It’s pretty hard to call up a stat sheet, maybe call a friend covering the Rays, and hey Cody Allen did have a great season. Position players are over-rated.

Then came the vote for American League Manager of the year.

Well, now that’s a little peculiar. Could it be?

I can be small. Happy that John Farrell didn't win manager of the year. Still think he pulled a fast one on some really great people.

— steve simmons (@simmonssteve) November 13, 2013

Hey now.

Reminds me of the time I offered to get the table beers while losing at poker. Winner got my twenty bucks and a warm skunked Heineken I found downstairs. Or the time I convinced the scorer — she liked me — to change Carson Cistulli’s hit to an error because Cistulli played more often than I did on our JV squad. Or the time I bid all of my free agent budget on Travis d’Arnaud just because I knew Mike Podhorzer needed a catcher in our TOUT league. (He won anyway.) Or the time I traded Adam Wainwright because he struck out Carlos Beltran like that. Or the time I kicked my nineteen-month old son’s ball over the fence because he scored a goal on me.

Sour grapes taste good.

NEW YORK — Major League Baseball and FanGraphs, in an effort to have people shut up about Miguel Cabrera, Mike Trout, and the American League MVP Award for one goddamned second, have teamed up to announce the creation of a new award, the Mike Trout Award, a source from the commissioner’s office told NotGraphs on condition of anonymity. An official announcement is expected Friday afternoon.

The Mike Trout Award will be given annually to Mike Trout, for being the best player in baseball, and to a player in the National League who represents the essence of Mike Trout by leading the National League in Wins Above Replacement, as calculated by FanGraphs. It’s hoped that the Trout Award will mercifully end the debate between the Baseball Writers Association of America, fans, and sabermetricians everywhere — mostly on the Internet — over who are definitively baseball’s most valuable players every year. Because after two years, it’s fucking exhausting.

The Trout Award was to have been created for the 2014 season and beyond, but after Trout versus Cabrera Part II in the American League, MLB, and especially Commissioner Bud Selig, who acted “with a sense of urgency,” according to our source, pushed up the award’s timeline.

“Seriously, no one at MLB really cares who wins the MVP awards,” our source said via email. “We just mostly want not to receive angry phone calls and emails and even one weird — and pretty graphic — fax, which we suspect was sent by Mr. Brian Kenny. In any case, we believe the Trout Award is the perfect solution to stop the insanity.”

The winners of the Trout Award — Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen — will be presented their awards on Monday in a ceremony at MLB headquarters in New York City.

The author needn’t really mention that left-handed Tampa Bay prospect Grayson Garvin was born and raised in Georgia. Indeed, history dictates that there are only two sorts of people in this world who could reasonably have that name: those who were either (a) born in Georgia or (b) born in Georgia but then subsequently killed while serving in the European Theatre of World War II. That left-handed Tampa Bay prospect Grayson Garvin is alive and not dead reveals which sort of Grayson Garvin he is.

Indeed, it isn’t Grayson’s biography which the author cares to address here, at all. Rather, why we’ve all gathered at this internet post is for the purposes of inspecting Garvin’s breaking ball — in this case, as it appeared during the young Georgian’s Arizona Fall League start of November 9th.

Here’s the first example of it — in this case, to Kansas City outfield prospect Lane Adams:

Read the rest of this entry »

We love Vin Scully for many things — one of which is his general grandpaness. But did you know Vin Scully used to be a young person? THE DEVIL I SAY! It’s true, at least according the below clip of some sort of TV show in which a young Scully acts. Is it acting if a baseball announcer plays a baseball announcer? If it is, Scully has acted quite a bit, according to his IMDB page — the go-to source for all your Vin Scully acting credit needs. The clip is from a show called Alcoa Premiere, which played scripted TV dramas that dealt with some heavy stuff. Famous movie composer John Williams also scored the show, for what it’s worth. Enjoy seeing a dark-haired Scully from a simpler time when we didn’t have to deal with all this technology and inter-racial marriages.

(h/t to the Scully-fan Twitter account @vinscullytweet)

It’s high time someone spoke up about a potentially dangerous trend in Major League Baseball. The league has been pushing its luck for years in assembling awards candidates at season’s end. Driven (I can only assume) by some kind of twisted sensationalism, it has been arranging players not only in closer and closer proximity for photoshoots, but forcing them into more and more active and realistic positions, and thereby greatly increasing the chance of accidental injury. Don’t get me wrong: we all love looking at these pictures. But someone, at some point, is going to get hurt. And we cannot allow that to happen.

These shoots have been going on for as long as we can remember, but the basic safety controls have been gradually eroded for years now. While players were traditionally photographed in casual, head-on poses:

…these poses were abandoned in favor of “action shots” like the following — though each player was still confined to a separate small room, with fairly thick walls.

Read the rest of this entry »