First there were t-shirts. Then there was FanGraphs+ and highly customizable leaderboards. Then there were various crowdsourcing projects. “What is next,” a FanGraphs reader might ask in the same way that, sure, someone might have asked what flavor of Doritos Taco Bell might use next for its line of Doritos Tacos Locos line of tacos, “in the long line of FanGraphs’ efforts to expand its reach and further please and integrate its reader-base?”

Well. The obvious choice would be to fire Carson Cistulli — every Francophilic, cholesterol-saturated bit of him. But FanGraphs, always eschewing the obvious in favor of the innovative, has gone in an entirely different direction.

So. FanGraphs is very pleased to announce the launch of FanGraphsCave™.

Starting with the 2014 MLB season, a handful of lucky FanGraphs readers can audition for the opportunity to participate in an immersive experience in a setting not unlike the mothers’ basements they already occupy for 20-24 hours out of every day.

Yes, ye acne-boiled stat-nerds, your dreams are finally coming true.

FanGraphs Managing Editor Dave Cameron speaks at the groundbreaking of the FanGraphsCave™ site.

Ground was recently broken for the FanGraphsCave™ site, at which FanGraphs Managing Editor Dave Cameron had this to say:

No expense was spared in the creation of the FanGraphsCave™. Great pains have been taken to replicate my own mother’s basement, wherein I humbly began as a baseball blogger. And while we hope to offer participating stat-nerds an environment in which they will feel at home, we also anticipate that they will meet the challenge of connecting with other stat-nerds, face-to-face, creating a real social life. Look at me: I now have a job, a wonderful wife, a young dog who is adored on several internets, and a basement of my own. I hope to encourage other stat-nerds to grow socially, perhaps marry another human being and own an adorable puppy, take videos of that puppy, and — who knows — maybe even appear on the television in a vest.[Emphasis inflected by Cameron.]

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This morning the finalists for baseball’s various Gold Glove awards — intended, nominally, for the best defenders at all the different positions — were announced by Major League Baseball. In the not very distant future, the identities of this year’s Silver Slugger award-winners — presented annually, in the form of a silver bat, to the best offensive player at each position in each league — will also be made public.

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The reader has likely consumed, at some point during Mariano Rivera’s farewell season, audio and/or visual of that very esteemed relief pitcher discussing his storied career. An experience to which the reader has likely not been treated, however, is Mariano Rivera discussing his storied career in the hushed and sincere tones native to American public broadcasting.

Conversation with Rivera begins at approximately the 14-minute mark.

“Will Maggie Lawson’s Terry get laid?” That’s the question at the heart* of this week’s episode of Back in the Game, the little sitcom that could that just got an order for two more scripts from ABC. So I guess I’ll be doing these reviews for a while longer.

*Heart, in this case, being loosely defined as a clump of spontaneously contracting  gray flesh that pumps a sludge-like mean-spirited toxic black goo throughout the body of the show.

That’s right, we live in a country where this amoral, unlikeable, thoroughly derivative affront to both the American Pastime and the concept of comedy not only outdraws NBC’s Parks and Recreation, but the people running it are encouraged to do more of their shitty work while the lovable underdogs of Pawnee are preempted by an SNL Halloween special and a live episode of The Voice. Fuck you, America. Freedom isn’t free, and you’re not earning yours. When we finally abandon our pretense of democracy and install a benevolent despot to rule us, he or she will make sure that those responsible for Back in the Game will all be shot, Michael Schur will get a medal for television, and an entire cable channel will be devoted to showing reruns of The Simpsons.

But back to the stupid plot for this stupid show. Despite this being a park solely devoted to Little League baseball and shirtless twenty-something body-hairless white joggers with rock hard abs who splash water from the drinking fountains in slow motion onto their chiseled pectorals, Terry is really into the mustachioed liquor distributor for the pizza place where she works. Fortunately, he happens to be at the park, helping to hang advertising for…liquor? I’m confused. It seems like he’s friends with Dick, the misogynist league president. Anyway, after some prompting, she asks him out awkwardly and he says yes. They hit it off, saying things that no real person actually says in conversation.

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Hatred! Is there any emotion more pure and blameless than hate? In my opinion: yes. All of the emotions are more blameless than hatred. Hatred is horrid, almost universally, unless directed at other horrid things, like poverty, hunger, rhino poaching, and pitcher wins. But boy is it fun to hate! And boy do we hate it when people tell us not to hate something. When people do that we start hating them, too! Hate is like an infection that spreads when someone points out to you that you have an infection. Imagine if influenza worked like that:

“Hey Tom, you’re looking a little under the weather today.”
*Tom coughs uncontrollably*
“Whoa! Sounds pretty bad. Want some Robitussin?”
*Tom vomits all over the office*
“OH MY GOD TOM YOU COULDN’T HAVE AIMED AT THE TRASH CAN!?”
*Tom’s body rejects his liver.*
“We need to get you to the hospital!”
*Ten thousand maggots devour Tom’s body*

Gross! This, in essence, is how hatred works, and we all have a little touch of it hiding within us. Most of us baseball fans have found a “healthy” way to exercise hate through sports fandom. As fans we choose our sports-hate toward a division rival, perhaps, and let it dwell in the part of our hearts classified as “games and pastimes” instead of the part classified as “people and their rights”. So that’s good. It’s better to be an A’s fan who hates the Giants than an A’s fan who hates people of a certain race/class/gender/sexual preference/body type/etc. Unfortunately those hates can overlap, or fan-hate can grow far, far, far, too intense, but I think for most of us, we’ve found a safe spot for our darkest inclinations and we let them reside there without it spilling into the rest of our lives.

What all this is leading to is that we stats-lovers—men and women who make love to statistics—are just as prone to rooting against a team as for a team when we don’t have previous affinities. What distinguishes us from the masses of internet-comment-wielding-haters is not our ability throw about prejudicial slurs, but our ability to pull statistics from our asses fangraphs.com. We are haters with data! And we will misuse it to form opinions!
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Whereas those assembled here unanimously agree that the unibrow is the noblest and best of facial accouterments, capable of enlivening and exalting even the most unfortunate visage, and

Whereas one Wallace Wade Moon is universally acknowledged to have been an unrivaled paragon of continuous brow hair, and

Whereas the undersigned have not yet met their annual quota regarding the aforementioned Mr. Moon, and

Whereas the undersigned regard the canon of Western art as their personal intellectual playground, to be debased and disfigured at will; therefore, be it

Resolved that the aforementioned Mr. Moon be aided in sharing his defining physical feature with those who have for so long done without.

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BOSTON — Before tonight’s game, MLB’s all-time saves leader, inventor of the game of baseball, and best human being ever will receive the Commissioner’s Mariano Rivera Achievement in Mariano Rivera Award, awarded to the best Mariano Rivera whenever he is best exemplifying what Mariano Rivera is and does.

The award, which consists of an unlimited number of future awards, is being awarded to Rivera for the ten thousandth time since it was created last week, and will be awarded fifty gazillion more times, only to Rivera, until the world runs out of awards. Then maybe it will be awarded posthumously to Jackie Robinson, because he’s pretty awesome too. And maybe we can find some time to give Babe Ruth some version of the award, although maybe not, because even though Babe Ruth was pretty cool, he was nothing like Mariano Rivera, and didn’t act Rivera-like enough to even be on the ballot, a ballot that consists of Mariano Rivera’s name written a thousand times, on a piece of parchment made from Rivera’s skin and scripted in Rivera’s blood, and containing the secret DNA that makes Rivera who and what he is. This ballot will, when science allows, be used to create Mariano Rivera clones who can continue to accumulate saves (and awards) in Rivera’s name, although they will never live up to the magnificence of the original, and when did this post become so strange and creepy?

Incoming baseball commissioner Mariano Rivera will present the award to himself, in front of an audience of adoring acolytes who have come under his mysterious, magical spell.

Meanwhile, Jeff Reardon is super-confused why there was no similar outpouring of affection for him during the 1992 offseason, when he was (very temporarily) the all-time saves leader. Poor Jeff. (He didn’t even win the Commissioner’s Jeff Reardon Achievement in Jeff Reardon Award, which went to Bruce Sutter.)

Some may say that the ball that fell between Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina in last night’s game was a mishap, a gaff, a whoopsydaisy. However, that’s only if you look at in the way time and gravity intended. If you shift your perspective by turning upside down or walking backwards or something — I’m not quite sure how the science works yet — then you’ll see that said play was revelatory, beautiful even. In this way, the ball is not falling to the ground to the disappointment of those surrounding it. It is being pulled to the heavens, having found the favor of the Lord. As the final stanza of the accompanying music implies:

Rise again, yea, thou wilt rise again,
My heart, in the twinkling of an eye!
What thou hast fought for
Shall lead thee to God!

Watch with intent while listening to a selection from the final movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “The Resurrection.”

Watch:

Listen:

(original GIF via @CorkGaines)

A poor call at second base by umpire Dana DeMuth during the first inning of Wednesday night’s World Series contest between Boston and St. Louis was overturned after DeMuth himself and the game’s five other umpires conferred (at the request of Red Sox manager John Farrell) and concluded that Cardinals shortstop Pete Kozma never, in fact, had possession of a feed from teammate Matt Carpenter.

The efforts of crew chief John Hirschbeck and his colleagues represent a commitment to reason and sense atypical not only of baseball umpires, but also of notable arbiters from history. Fortunately for all civilization, Wednesday’s Game One crew met at the conclusion of Boston’s 8-1 victory to reverse some other poor decisions from history.

Here are three examples of same, accompanied by John Hirschbeck’s comments regarding each:

Overturned Call
Socrates found guilty of corrupting Athens’ youth, introducing new gods.

Hirschbeck’s Comments
As a crew, we want to get everything right. Looking this over, with the facts at our disposal now, what we saw was less Socrates attempting specifically to corrupt young men and more trying to establish the basis for all of Western intellectual tradition.

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Note: the title of this post formerly referred to the player in question as Juan Abreu — because the author’s culturally insensitive intern took the dictation wrong, is totally why. The author, who is acquainted with all races and ethnicities equally, has corrected the mistake.

Neither the author nor scientists nor God Himself — who, as the pronoun indicates, is definitely a man, with all relevant male anatomical features — knows the answer: does the grainy footage embedded above depict a fiery ball of space rock cascading across the night sky or, alternatively, a ball hit off the bat of newest White Sox acquisition, Cuban émigré Jose Abreu?

Like the eyes of Tom Selleck from a Magnum, P.I. poster in your neighbor Mark’s basement, this question will now follow you around wherever you go — provided, mostly, that “wherever you go” is confined exclusively to your neighbor Mark’s basement.