Do you have something slightly less than total indifference to late son-of-a-bitch Boileryard Clarke? Have you ever wanted to spend a probably inclement weekend afternoon at Maryland’s Druid Ridge Cemetery? If so, then have your photo for your family Holiday Card taken in front of or beside or behind Boileryard Clarke’s actual headstone this weekend.
A brief note: there is good news on the Back in the Game front. It has officially been cancelled by ABC, so our weekly torment will end. There is also bad news, and that’s that there are seven more episodes to burn off before this show disappears in its entirely. That’s actually one episode more than we’ve been forced to endure thusfar, so our torment will not end quickly. However, the show is off until November 20, meaning our torment shall be delayed. Thank heaven for small miracles. Now, how to torment you until then…?
In recent months, thanks to my six year old’s obsession with Transformers and Lego’s, I have become increasingly familiar with the deeply weird world of online toy reviews on YouTube. These reviews presumably help collectors decide whether they want to drop $125 for the new, two foot tall Metroplex at San Diego’s ComicCon, though they have also inspired The Boy to ask whether he can get the $400 Lego Death Star for his birthday or an original Shockwave off of Ebay for $120. Thanks, YouTube, for inventing new ways for me to disappoint my child.
These reviews, however, are available for damn near every kind of product, presented by presumably well-meaning people who have a webcam, a lot of extra time, and a generous spirit. You, perhaps, will benefit from their expertise. For instance, you might be asking yourself, “Self, how do I get my baby interested in baseball?” Have you considered the Playskool Swing ‘N Score Baseball Toy?
Here’s an excerpt from Munenori Kawasaki’s recent interview with Sanspo (translation):
[…]
You were not planning on getting an interpreter?
I thought I could figure things out, but things did not work out quite that well. There were times I sat through hour-long meetings and could not understand a word that was said.
What did you do?
I pretended I understood. Then I would go to the coaches later on and they would draw me pictures to help me understand. It was like, “Oh, that’s what they were saying.” That’s what it was like.
Bless that man. And shame on all MLB franchises if this guy doesn’t get a 40-man roster spot in 2014.
In my corner of America’s Middle-West, the leaves are falling with great frequency. There is also snow on the ground. If anyone needed a reminder of the demise of Summer, one need not look farther than my sprawling plot of God’s country. Certainly, the absence of Major League Baseball serves as another chilling reminder that — as I read in a book once — Winter is Coming. According to the Gregorian calendar, it is already here.
The popular Internet website “YouTube”, a video hosting and streaming service, is powered by a vast and powerful network of silicon and electricity. While it is possible for these machines to know a certain date numerically, the feel of a date is unknowable to these robots. How does one explain a gentle snowfall in bleeps and bloops? One cannot. Because of this fact, however, popular Internet website YouTube doesn’t know it isn’t baseball season. Therefore, it offers the embedded video without prejudice. And for that, we can be thankful. Hang tight, fair NotGraphs readers. We’ll get through this together. Unless I — or one of you — die. Then we most likely have bigger problems.
(h/t to ESPN’s Mark Simmon for the link.)
On Tuesday I asked you to recommend baseball-related media that I should consume, digest, and defecate into the port-o-john known as my brain. I received so many good recommendations that I will probably become overwhelmed trying to decide where to start, and instead re-watch MacGruber precisely one–thousand times. So way to go guys. (But seriously: way to go. I will consume so much of what you threw down in the comments)
However, I did notice that some of you bemoaned (or just kinda weren’t into) my desire to read certified masterpiece Juiced, by Jose Canseco. “What this book will lack in tact, insight, truth, and readable syntax, it will make up for in being written by Jose Canseco,” was my thought as I added it to the list.
It’s really, really, really, easy to make fun of Jose Canseco. I’m not so much above making fun of the man as I am too lazy to compile the relevant material. Given the wealth of quality material Jose generates, this should tell you something about how lazy I am. What this post definitively is not, then, is me making fun of Jose Canseco. What it is, is me letting Jose Canseco tell us two things:
Life holds a cruel ending for all of us.death
— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) October 8, 2013
Poop
— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) October 20, 2013
This has been Letting Jose Canseco Tell Us Two Things.
Also world peace, ability to fly, and a pony. RT @Ken_Rosenthal: #Mariners want Ellsbury or Choo plus SP.
— Benjamin Gibbard (@Gibbstack) November 6, 2013
Like other artists of note, Benjamin Gibbard didn’t become a towering figure within his chosen genre (in this case, American indie-rock music) by not suffering. In fact, signs point to him having suffered greatly in this life. The evidence is clear: Benjamin Gibbard is a Seattle Mariners fan.
The reader has perhaps heard of this team. An obscure outfit based in this country’s Oregon Territory, the Mariners have actually been an entirely active participant in the Major Leagues of Baseball since 1977. And while the reader would be excused for assuming that the club had taken one or three sabbaticals en route to the present, the record indicates quite clearly that Seattle’s membership has, in fact, been contiguous since the date of their enfranchisment.
Some two years ago, a split-finger fastball thrown by pitcher Freddy Garcia stumped experts by seeming to defy the Magnus effect — the force that makes a curveball curve. Physicists eventually arrived at an acceptable explanation, and published their theory in a leading journal. The case, it seemed, was closed. But for Mr. Garcia, as it turns out, it was merely the beginning.
Reached at home on Tuesday, the 37-year-old free agent said that “things got really weird” during the spring of 2012. According to Mr. Garcia, it was around then that he noticed something odd while brushing his teeth one morning.
“The sink drained clockwise,” he said. “Everyone knows it’s supposed to go the other way around.”
Son*,
This may be hard for you to understand, but there was once a time when the BBWAA award winners were announced at 2:00 in the afternoon, and you heard about them on the evening news, or read about them in a newspaper the next day, or, in later years, saw the results on the Internet, and there was simply a list of the players who got votes, and a ranking of how many votes they got, and you read the list, and it was sort of exciting to see who won but also which players got one silly vote from a hometown writer, and then you went about the rest of your life, perfectly satisfied with how these award winners were revealed and never even contemplating that there might be a way to milk this nonsense for weeks and make it extra-stupid.
See, son, back then there was no MLB Network, with 24 hours a day that they needed to fill with programming, and there were no shows where they counted down the top 9 players to ever choke on a hot dog, running sixteen times a day, and there was no need to create some sort of fiction where there are three “finalists” for every award. Son, there are no “finalists.” The voting still happens exactly the way it used to happen, where the writers vote for whomever the heck they want to vote for, except now, in order to squeeze an extra hour of programming out of the awarding of awards, they announce the three top vote-getters a week in advance, call them “finalists,” and pretend it means something.
It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just stupid.
Like a lot of things. I mean, on balance I guess things are a lot better for you now than they were for me, when I was your age. You get instant box scores. Your fantasy team statistics are computed automatically, without you having to add up long columns of numbers with your TI-85 graphing calculator. There are more games on TV than you can possibly watch, and for the cost of, I don’t know, a couple months of diapers, you can watch pretty much any game you want all season (which is the deal I’ll be attempting to make with your mother — let me toilet train you a couple of months early, and, if I do, I get to buy MLB.TV in 2015, or 2016, or whenever it is you’ll eventually be toilet trained).
But some things were better in the old days. And not having to read nonsense articles about the fake “finalists” for the MVP award is one of them.
—-
*Born 10/8/13. Yay!
Brandon H. told Jonah K. who told all the Internet which told the author of this post that Major League Baseball appears recently to have uploaded a number of archival-type videos to their YouTube channel — including (and, for the purposes of this post, limited to) one particularly hot and sexy and hot video featuring right-hander Pedro Martinez in the bloom of goddamn youth.
“¡Ay, caramba!” announces the reader who has watched this video and also came of age, probably, during the earliest seasons of The Simpsons. “Ai, caramba!” announces a different reader after watching this video, but mostly because he’s a native Portuguese speaker. Whether one is from Brazil or Mozambique or Portugal itself, however, doesn’t matter: this video provide full-body pleasure sensation every time.
Look at the headline. Then look at the URL.
Oops.
Poor Astrodome.
The referendum had called for creating 350,000 square feet of exhibition space by removing the interior seats and raising the floor to street level. Other changes included creating 400,000 square feet of plaza and green space on the outside of the structure as part of the project, dubbed “The New Dome Experience.”
The New Dome Experience sounds like the name of a prog-rock band.
(Songs on The New Dome Experience’s debut album include “Cage Battin’,” “Spheres of Leather,” and “Another Ad On The Wall (Part II)”)
