Some Useless Snack-Like Facts While We Wait

Things of substance are happening in Major League Baseball! Things like Prince Fielder and Ian Kinsler getting swapped. Things like A-Rod storming out of his arbitration hearing. Things like Chris Carpenter retiring. Who even KNOWS what kinds of substantial things will happen next?! Zowie! It’s the offseason! A time for sitting around waiting for things to happen! The American Dream!

BUMMER ALERT, THOUGH: One bummer about all the offseason substance is that we have to wait for it. We hate waiting! Take meals for example: We LOVE meals. Meals involve eating, and Americans are nothing if not prolific food-to-poop converters. If only we could have meals ALL THE TIME. Too bad our stupid bodies won’t let us consume 2300 calorie meals every five to seven minutes. Instead we’re stuck waiting for our lame-o corporeal vessels to “metabolize” that steak we had for breakfast. Luckily snacks exist! Snacks are the best. They let us use our mouths and tastebuds for 100% of the day. Check out this bitchin’ pie chart that I screen-captured from a freely available online slideshow on the state of the snacking industry:

What this pie chart shows is that we want something in our mouths at absolutely every possible moment we can have something therein. Showering? Have a Twix. Driving to da club? Have a bag of Doritos. Filing your taxes? Engorge thyself with some cracklin’ pork rinds. About to copulate with a comely dame? Engage in some Swiss Cake Roll foreplay.

Thus far this post has been a lengthy digression into snacks and snack-action fantasies. I’m happy with that, because my creative standards are wildly nonexistent. All I wanted from the snack digression was to draw a parallel between our need to snack all the time and our need to fill the space between substantial offseason events. Snacks : Meals :: NotGraphs : Real Baseball News and Analysis. So in the spirit of empty calories, I carefully-ish researched a bunch of useless stuff that may be almost true and doesn’t have any practical real-world application. Whereas some facts are nice things to know and can be brought up at appropriate times to shed light on a given topic of discussion, these facts are far removed from being memorable or relevant. They are the gas station snack aisle of facts. They are below, spatially:

Number of Helium Balloons Required to Lift Prince Fielder off the Ground
8800 Normal-Size Balloons

Number of Albatrosses That Would Equal the Mass of Prince Fielder
13.75 Wandering Albatrosses

Height of Mt. Everest in Pitcher’s Mounds
34,834 mounds, plus one stumpy 8-inch mound.

Number of Mt. Everests That Could Fit Vertically into Eddie Gaedel
0.00012

Number of Standing Humans That Could Fit Comfortably-ish into Fenway Park’s Outfield 
7990 humans

Number of Human Male Balls That Would Fit Into One Baseball
11.68 human male balls

Hexadecimal Color Code for Terry Collins’ Face in This Picture

#B25E2F

Number of Times the Word “Baseball” Appears in the Screenplay For Moneyball
68

Length of the 124 Ulnar Collateral Ligaments Removed From 2013 Starting Pitchers at Any Time Prior to the Season
2.19 feet

Weight of all Major League Umpires’ Eyeballs
3.5 lbs

wRC+ of an Almond Joy Placed on a Stool for 600 PA with an  Average Umpire’s Strikezone
-119 (.010 wOBA)

Approximate UZR of Spiderman Playing in Centerfield
146.7

Possible Defensive Alignment with Nobody On if Baseball Was Played with a Jellybean and Not a Baseball

Distance from Carson Cistulli to Cooperstown, NY in Smoots
3,391,178.51 smoots

Number of Times Managing Editor Dave Cameron Would Have Blinked if He Had Been Continuously Interviewed on Clubhouse Confidential Since the Beginning of the Universe
108,948,240,000,000,000 blinks