Pseudometric of the Week: xBEPHYRGROTHHx

A few weeks ago I had you vote for a pseudometric I should create. It’s purpose would be to measure something purposeless. You, the doe-eyed reader, eagerly clicked your favorite meaningless metrics into existence, creating a three-way tie between MOIST, xBEPHYRGROTHHx and 2COOL. Last week I presented MOIST and this week I present xBEPHYRGROTHHx. I must warn you, gentle reader, that this gets weird. But you could have guessed that, since the initial idea for xBEPHYRGROTHHx is as follows:

Answers the question, “Which Major Leaguers would make a pleasing sacrifice to the Demon Lord xBEPHYRGROTHHx?” Players are credited for their potential to scream, writhe, and beg while chained to the Sacrificial Dais of OOberDROOOG, as well as for the volume, viscosity and arterial spurtability of the ballplayer’s blood.

If that’s what you’re into!!! BECAUSE I AM.

The Demon Lord xBEPHYRGROTHHx, as we all know, is the patron scourge of baseball. xBEPHYRGROTHHx (pronounced za-beffer-grawth, or simply beffer-grawth depending on what circle of hell you’re from) is responsible for everything that makes us scream baseball curse words, which are just the normal curse words but we actually, seriously mean it. He sweetly coos in your GM’s ear: “Sign Yuniesky Betancourt…. sign him…. he can play shortstop *stifles giggle*…. ahem… he… really can?…” xBEPHYRGROTHHx makes your manager make Adam Dunn bunt. He clogs the pee troughs at Wrigley Field and makes sure all organists only ever play the same songs all game, everyday, all the time. He corked Sammy Sosa’s bat, he smeared the steroids up A-Rod’s buttchute, he ruined the Expos, and he came up with the stupid pseudo-non-solution to instant replay in baseball. He’s a total dick, is what xBEPHYRGROTHHx is, but he’s a Demon Lord so I guess that’s his prerogative.

Which is why xBEPHYRGROTHHx needs to be appeased, clearly. We can’t just go around letting Demon Lords ruin the game of baseball. And we know what Demon Lords like, right? Obviously, like, duh. They love the fresh blood of the innocent, spilled on the Sacrificial Dais of OOberDROOOG Überdrög, and they’d prefer if the sacrifice would scream a little. And spurt from some assorted custom-punctured holes and such. And of course the sacrifice must be w… WAIT. Let’s just make a list of what Demon Lords are into:

• Innocence
• Blood
• Screaming, Begging, Writhing
• Worthiness
• A lil sumpin special

Ok, good. Let’s narrow down which ballplayer we need to sacrifice by looking at Innocence and Worthiness first. Innocence roughly correlates to youth and worthiness is approximated by WAR. So we need to violently end the life of a young, talented player, otherwise xBEPHYRGROTHHx might have “one of his episodes” and give Murray Chass another idea for a blog post. Or torture Grady Sizemore with something silly like hope.

Youth: I’m narrowing the field to the youngest ~25% of baseball players from the last three years with an arbitrary PA cutoff, producing an age range of 19-25.

Worthiness: WAR

A lil sumpin special: ISO, because everyone loves home runs.

Blood: Weight. The more body, the more blood, right?

Screams, Begs, Writhes: We’ll get to that.

In terms of the actual formula for xBEPHYRGROTHHx, well, it’s buried somewhere among the links and relinks and rerelinks on my excel spreadsheet. It’s bullshit anyway (shh don’t tell xBEPHYRGROTHHx!) so the exact formula doesn’t really matter. Essentially what I did was eliminate the older 75% of baseball players, then for the younger 25% I gave credit for youth again and WAR among the slimmed down population. I turned ISO into a factor that would favor those whose production came more from power-hitting and turned the body mass of the top 15 or so players into a similar factor. This allowed me to create the final top ten leaderboard in terms of how much a player would please the Demon Lord xBEPHYRGROTHHx, because that’s what we’re doing right now: we’re figuring that out. In detail. I rounded to the nearest hundred millionth for ease of readability:

Sacrifice	xBEPHYRGROTHHx
Mike Trout	11.46358422
Giancarlo Stanton	8.835657752
Bryce Harper	7.211254802
Jason Heyward	6.628044566
Yasiel Puig	5.040010236
Salvador Perez	4.959989764
Freddie Freeman	4.63288399
Justin Upton	3.441844608
Andrew McCutchen	3.242889589
Manny Machado	2.990094229

How unsurprising that an evil baseball-savvy being would want Mike Trout sacrificed to him! He’s only the best ever for his age.

But here’s the thing: We can’t sacrifice Mike Trout, because we can’t let xBEPHYRGROTHHx win. It’s not like we owe him anything, really. In fact, we should be sending the very much existing NotGraphs Demon Hunting Society (feat. Nicolas Cage) on a quest to track down and dismantle our unholy assailant. Unfortunately I hear the NGDHS is busy watching gifs (of Nicolas Cage) or something so instead we have to sacrifice someone. It just can’t be Mike Trout or Giancarlo Stanton or Bryce Harper. They’re much too important to the game we love. Instead I suggest that we plunge the Ebony Dagger of Gœretrix into the body of Salvador Perez! By using the infamous Ebony Dagger of Gœretrix we’re practically guaranteeing that Salvador Perez will scream, beg, and writhe to xBEPHYRGROTHHx’s content while chained to the Sacrificial Dais of Überdrög. That way I don’t have to decide a way to measure those factors! And that way, worst case scenario, we get to see what humiliating thing Dayton Moore does to replace him. Everybody wins! Even KC, because you guys still had George Brett and that should be enough. So does anyone have Salvador Perez’s agent’s number?