The 18,172 proud gentlemen who have donned a Major League uniform, plus Boileryard Clarke, can be said to be the finest baseball athletes the world has ever offered. But of course such a statement requires an untenable simplification. It ignores Josh Gibson, for instance, and Sadaharu Oh, and it includes Yuniesky Betancourt. Not only that, but it discounts a great many gifted athletes who, for various circumstantial reasons, were never given the opportunity to excel in this particular sport. One can safely assume that Jesse Owens would have stolen more than a few bags, and that Mikhail Baryshnikov would have made one hell of a shortstop. One once said similar things about Michael Jordan, but one bad apple doesn’t spoil the bunch, now does it? And why stop there, really? Why not speculate about the baseball IQ of the Duke of Wellington, or the scrappiness of Spartacus, or the mound presence of Moses?

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Ken Rosenthal has something to say.

Like most men who wear bow-style ties without irony, very spry baseball reporter Ken Rosenthal is not immune to the charms of the beaux arts. As the following poem suggests — composed entirely of lines from his recent dispatch from the front lines of the baseball news cycle — Rosenthal is capable of writing poignant lyrics on the nature of hope even when he appears to be writing just about a hypothetical Cardinals trade for Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki.

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*

…but probably not that soon, since he just moved into a new house last summer.

There is a surprising amount of information on the Internet about where Joe Mauer lives. There is this weebly page that appears to have been created by a child. A 2007 video tour of what was then called his “mansion.” An aerial shot of the estate he bought in 2012. And a 2006 Sports Illustrated “Cribs” feature on the house he shared with Justin Morneau, proving that Mauer drinks orange juice and collects bobblehead dolls.

*Yes, let me just leave this image here without further comment on the headline.

**NOTICE TO ALL MLB PLAYERS**

Effective immediately, MLB will be expanding the list of banned substances, per the Joint Drug Agreement. Testing positive for any of the following substances will result in an immediate 50-game suspension. In the interest of transparency, we are including the “street names” of these substances, so that you may comply in a quick and easy fashion, and without confusion. If you have any questions about these substances, such as their chemical makeup, feel free to contact your agents, your MLBPA union representatives, your doctors, or a combination thereof. This is not a complete list, only new additions. A detailed and thorough list can be obtained from the League office, or your MLBPA rep.

NEW BANNED SUBSTANCES FOR 2014:

• Fling
• Spit
• Cheese
• Knuckle
• Goober
• Swamp Foot
• Bela Fleckstacy
• Control Alt Defeat
• Brown Skittle
• South by South Pacific
• Jesse Camp
• Midnight Train to Georgia (the Country)
• Grease 2
• Parker Full of Posey
• Creamed Corn Row
• Ram Jam
• Ronny James Dios Mio
• Fart Barrel
• Hose Face
• Knight to E6
• Friendster
• Popamatic Bubble
• Ian Ziering
• Hitler’s Pyramid
• Bubb Rubb
• Black Lung
• Black Bung
• William Hung

Hello? Oh, hi, sorry to bother you so late, it’s Matty Baseballs.

…

What? It’s not that late? Haha, of course. To me, it’s always baseballs o’clock, please pardon me.

“Hello, Baseball? Matty Baseballs here. I hear you’ve got baseballs for me…”

…

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Because life is meaningless, morality is fiercely relative, and even the work of humanity’s most beautiful minds exerts its influence only for a few thousand years, the present author prefers to concern himself with mere trifles — nugae, a Roman person would likely say, were he not long dead and his language nearly as dead, too.

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The 2013 season has concluded for our mystical NotGraphs OOTP Fantasy League. Here is a look at the entrants that made it into the first draft:

We started with 17 five-star prospects, and we are down to just 2 five-star prospects. Jerry “Juice” Loose is still projected to be a five-star reliever and my humble top overall pick, John Donne, has retained five-star status because, let’s be honest, he failed to sign with the Houston Astros and is still benefiting from Shiny New Tow Syndrome.

Here are the top five prospects in my estimation, as well as the player cards for all the remaining players:
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I just read through 189 reader comments about the Braves moving from Turner Field to a new stadium in the suburbs. Why did I do this? So I could pick out my favorite one and post it. The winner:

U all R stupid 4 sayin this is a bad idea. Finaly we can go to a game and not worried abut my wife gettin rapped.

Oh, Internet, you have done such a great job of raising the level of literacy in this country.

A dispatch from Japanese site Nikkan Sports, translated poorly by a computer into English, reports that “Major landlord” has plans on returning to major-league baseball “in full knuckle learning.” A tweet along those same lines — in this case, however, courtesy very polite outlaw Patrick Newman — suggests that what’s actually happening is former Boston and Montreal and Washington and Milwaukee and Toronto and Cleveland right-hander Tomo Ohka, now 37, is attempting a comeback to the majors as a knuckleball pitcher.

Ohka has been pitching of late in Japan’s independent leagues, it would appear. The reader is invited to enjoy recent video footage of him doing precisely that, above — set lovingly, one will note, to a combination of Bush’s 1996 single “Machinehead” and a group of enthusiastic amateur musicians. A second video, in this case from September, depicts Ohka pitching atop an infield composed of what is almost certainly reclaimed coal ash.

doing laundry

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) November 8, 2013

I was on Twitter at 4:15 a.m. on said Friday morning, reading that Jon Heyman was doing his laundry. I favorited the tweet, and thought to myself: “I should post this on NotGraphs.”

I then asked myself what I was doing. We are the product of our decisions. I had laundry to do, too.