Nearly actual reportage conducted by this internet weblog has revealed that, despite his frequent claims to the contrary — distilled to their essence, most notably, in the 1998 hit single embedded here — late Bronx-born rapper Big Pun remains the most valuable player to basically anyone with some combination of (a) ears and (b) a heart.
Ah, the MVP awards. Where we make virtually every player feel bad just so we can honor two guys for their luck-enhanced statistics. Haven’t we figured out by now that it’s all just statistical noise? Roll the dice and Jacoby Ellsbury can hit 32 home runs, or R.A. Dickey can be unhittable for six months, or Nick Punto can be above-replacement-level. One in a million seasons, I could probably get a hit or two, walk once or twice, and end up with a million-dollar contract instead of this minimum wage job shoveling coal into the boilers here at the local mental health facility. And yet we continue to award the random nature of results instead of what’s really important: the rational understanding that life is meaningless, sports are diversions to help us forget we’re all going to die, and the real most valuable player is the one who best distracts us from dwelling on the truth.
Which makes this year’s most valuable players Alex Rodriguez and Mariano Rivera, because I still have hundreds of articles to read about each of them, and that will prevent me from thinking too hard about the exceptions in the fine print of my life insurance policy.
Please direct all complaints concerning lazy photoshopping to cistulli at notgraphs dot com.
It came to my attention this morning that Internet web site and the O.G. Google, Yahoo!, is selling off some of its domains. As I buy and sell domains like my portfolio depended on it (it does), this grabbed my interest. As a professional domain broker, I’ve come to quickly analyze the potential worth of domains. While some are certainly more valuable than others (if you think I’m spilling the beans on this, you have brain damage), one confused me: Batoota.com. I did some very quick and even dirtier Googling of the Internet to find out just what Batoota meant. It seems to hold little meaning in actual language, used mostly as a name in countries where brown people live. But this spoke to me. Batoota. Batooooooota. It has a ring to it.
So I turn to you, fair NotGraphs readers. Let’s come up with some sort of stat or acronym or something that makes this domain useful. Let’s create another term that confuses people and sets the statistical movement back a few years. Most importantly, let’s make me some money.
I recently Photoshopped the head of Toronto mayor Rob Ford — who’s better known in proper circles as “Melvin Nosotros Good Times” — onto the body of famed baseball halfling Eddie Gaedel. I surveyed my work and thought it stupid.
But then David G. Temple, the handsome Muay Thai expert with wind-swept hair and a far-off look in his eye, posted some Photoshoppage of a pizza on top of Tropicana Field. Upon viewing Mr. Temple’s contributions, I thought, “My dumb work has been sanctioned.”
Here, then, is Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s head sloppily placed on Eddie Gaedel’s body:
At this point, the reader will note that, unlike Mr. Temple and his post, I can scarcely be bothered to construct a false meta-narrative around my lousy photo. For I am Dayn Perry, practitioner of lassitude.
In the interest of redemption, though, I leave you with one of the sky-scraping tweets of our century — one that carries with it the whiff of our baseball …
In Toronto news, Rob Ford is signing Bobbleheads while a judge watches crack video. This tweet is 100 percent true.
— Chris Jones (@MySecondEmpire) November 12, 2013
#Hero #NeverForget
Breaking news from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s article about Clint Hurdle winning the NL Manager of the Year Award:
“Clint’s passion is infectious,” Pirates owner Bob Nutting said in a statement.
PITTSBURGH– The entire city of Pittsburgh is under lockdown after it was revealed that Pirates manager Clint Hurdle has an infectious case of passion. According to sources, he developed this condition after leaving his post as manager of the Colorado Rockies, where he mostly floundered with indifference for years, occasionally flirting with mild excitement, but never developing the full-blown passion condition. It is not known at this time where Hurdle acquired his passion, although rumor is that Andrew McCutchen may be a carrier.
State law requires all Pittsburgh residents to have received the passion vaccine, which protects against most strains of the illness. The passion vaccine involves living in Pittsburgh for any amount of time.
In the US, approximately 800 to 1,500 people are infected with passion and 120 die from the disease per year. About one of every five survivors lives with permanent disabilities, such as euphoria, inertia, laughter, and psychological problems. Even in cases where treatment has been given, the fatality rate is around 15%.
If you have close contact with Clint Hurdle, see your doctor for prophylactic antibiotics.
A great philosopher and beloved dead uncle once said “with great power comes great responsibility.” To date, no one has deemed me worthy of receiving great power (and rightfully so; I would misuse it the first chance I’d get), and so I’m reduced to creating and maintaining a fictional Hall of Fame based on the teachings of fictional character Ron Swanson. This gives me some infinitesimally small amount of power, and since Uncle Ben never mentioned that, I don’t feel obligated to exercise any responsibility at all. As such, I am abdicating any and all responsibility in the selection process, save for organizing the candidates for your voting pleasure.
Based on your feedback, the new nominees are:
Wade Boggs – For mustache-having, For love of meat (fried chicken before every game) and scotch, For popularity with the ladies, and For unquenchable iconoclasm as expressed through his appearances on The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Cheers
George Herman Ruth – For love of meat and scotch, For popularity with the ladies, For unquenchable iconoclasm, For disdain of unnecessary rules and regulations, For general joie de vivre.
Bill Veeck – For toughness (lost a leg in World War II), For woodworking (carved an ashtray into wooden leg he received after losing leg in World War II), For love of meat and scotch, For unquenchable iconoclasm, For blatant disdain for unnecessary rules and regulations (hired Eddie Gaedel to pinch hit), For general distrust of authority. You know what, just go read this comment.
Satchel Paige – For love of meat and scotch, For unquenchable iconoclasm, For blatant disdain for unnecessary rules and regulations (jumped contracts constantly in his youth), For general distrust of authority.
Mickey Mantle – For love of meat and scotch, For general popularity with the ladies, For toughness (played on a bad knee his whole career).
Ted Williams – For love of meat and scotch, For having wives with similar names, For toughness (fought in both World War II and the Korean War, crash-landed a plane and walked away), For unquenchable iconoclasm
Ceats
— Ben Revere (@BenRevere9) November 13, 2013
At the beginning, which is also kinda the end, of Orson Welles’ 1941 cinema classic Citizen Kane, newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane whispers a single word, rosebud, before shuffling off this mortal coil. The search by a reporter, Jerry Thompson, for the possible relevance of that word to the life of the famous and troubled Kane serves as the device by which the film is driven forward. Ultimately, Thompson’s search is fruitless — even as the mystery is resolved for the viewer in the film’s closing frames.
MINNEAPOLIS — In a turn of events that residents are calling sad and uninspired, a local writer of baseball “comedy” poorly Photoshopped an image of a pizza onto an image of Tampa Bay’s Tropicana Field, in a failed attempt at producing humor.
“I don’t get it,” one neighbor said. “I mean, I guess if there is funny text to go along with it, then maybe. But this on its own isn’t funny.”
“It sounds to me like he’s flat out of ideas,” a woman claiming to be the writer’s wife said. “This happens every so often. He just finds it hard to be creative. I mean, he isn’t really creative anyway, but you know what I mean. Whatever, it’s not like anyone reads that site.”
Preliminary reports indicate that the writer had high hopes for the image, and perhaps planned on writing a faux news story about it. But once the story was started, the writer quickly realized the piece had no merit. Yet, without any other real ideas to contribute, he knew he was stuck with the image. Witnesses say he proceeded to delete the entirety of the accompanying text, replacing it with yet another faux news story about the actual act of Photoshopping the picture. At least one witness claims that that text is what readers are reading at this moment.
Police are also following up on eyewitness accounts claiming that the writer has no idea how to end the article in a funny or amusing way.
Yoga was invented by British naval officers during the Siege of Malta to confuse enemy semaphore interpreters, and brought to the mainstream by Japanese schoolchildren in the 1950’s. These days yoga is for everyone, not just Brits and young Asians. This is good news! Along those same totally not untrue lines, it just so happens that my favorite yoga positions are inspired by real-life baseball players. This post is me sharing three of them with you.
Counsell Pose
This pose is only fully realized if you have a baseball bat handy. First grab the bat, left hand over right. Take a deep breath, and feel the fat draining from your horrid, porcine excuse for a human body. You now weigh 85 lbs., like Craig Counsell. Your mind, too, is in Counsell-space . Feel the alignment of the universe as Craig felt the alignment of well-executed double-plays during his 16-year career as a defense-first infielder. Splay your legs wide beneath you and slowly raise the bat above your head. Now raise the bat even higher. Feel the stretch in your chest as you poke the gods. Take a breath. Release the pose as if weakly dribbling a grounder to second base.
Martinez Pose
This two-part pose is meant to get your juices oogling and boogling. Carlos Martinez is, of course, a rowdy young fire-baller known for his yoga-inspired delivery. To channel his Martinezness, begin by putting all your weight on your left foot and sticking your leg out to the side at a 90-degree angle. Try to focus on one point, like a tree in the distance, or Yadier Molina, to help maintain balance. Now think of all the things in your life that are stressin’ on you, like the kiddos, troubles with a lady-friend, getting blamed by the boss for something that was Doug’s fault, or pitching to red-hot David Ortiz in the World Series at age 22. Next, picture all those stresses congealed as a fuzzy-bad-ball-thing floating in the air in front of you about thigh high. While maintaining eye contact with your “object in the distance” (your “Yadi”), violently twist the hips and sweep the right leg through the fuzzy-bad-ball-thing like Charlemagne swept the Lombards out of Northern Italy. Repeat until you feel like your stresses are thoroughly routed.
Rizzo Pose
Next let’s try an endurance pose. The Rizzo allows us to embody eternity within the terminal confines of our infirm human shells. Start by forcing a smile—make sure it’s forced! Don’t think of any actual reason to smile. Instead, think of a time you have to force a smile, like anytime someone shows you a YouTube video. Next, twist your arm back as if thousands of fantasy owners are punishing you for disappointing them when they needed solid first-base value. Now, hold that pose for ten-thousand years. This one is tough! Keep that forced smile and twisted arm as long as you can. Eventually your smiling face will melt into a vacant world-weary stare, and layers of dead calciferous sea organisms will coat your face (you think that’s shaving cream?) as you rest on the ocean floor where Chicago once was (thanks global warming and other ocean-causing catastrophes!). Your twisted arm will fall off and become a gathering place for bored sea minnows. Your other arm will meld into your side as your body slowly becomes a featureless monolith. As you watch human civilization crumble around you, try to recall the little things, like fresh sheets or how the smell of blown-out candles reminds you of your eleventh birthday. After ten-thousand years of holding Rizzo Pose, relax and carry on as usual.
