Roy Halladay is The Immortal

“That’s how we labeled him: This guy is The Immortal, we’re all just humans, and we’re lucky enough to play baseball with him,” said Cole Hamels, one of the Phillies’ aces who, postseason included, threw 262 1/3 innings in 2008 and remains awed by Halladay pushing similar boundaries annually. “He made it seem so easy, and at the same time, when the opposing team thinks it had got to him, he flipped a switch, and it was, like, ‘Nope.’ It’s like when you try to scare someone, and he knows you’re trying to scare him, and it doesn’t work. It’s embarrassing.”

Hat tip to Navin Vaswani for providing the above source with his Hot Internet Tweetage.

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Some Important Fart Quotes To Go With Bert Blyleven’s I Love To Fart Shirt

“If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.” – George A. Romero / Filmmaker

“Jerry Ford is so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.” – Lyndon B. Johnson / American President

“Bathroom humor, fart, and poo poo humor in movies gets a laugh. It’s a pretty easy audience, and that’s been around for ages.” – Selma Blair / Actress That My Wife Does Not Particularly Care For

“My philosophy of dating is to just fart right away.” – Jenny McCarthy / Model, Comedian, Actress, Vaccine Denying Psychopath

“I’d like to think I’d never do a gratuitous fart joke.” – Harold Ramis / Actor, Director, Writer, Gratuitous Fart Joker

“At my age, you sort of fart your way into a role.” – Donald Sutherland / Actor, Father of Kiefer

“I didn’t want to do a throwaway, mindless movie with fart jokes just to make 6-year-olds laugh. I want to provide my children with some substance.” – Fred Durst / Musician, Filmmaker, Creator of the Album ‘Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water’

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” – Kurt Vonnegut / Author, Smoker of Cigarettes

Special thanks to BrainyQuote, for doing the Lord’s work

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Minnesota Twins Stop All That ‘Pitch To Contact’ Talk, Are Done Taking Crap

The Minnesota Twins coaching staff is tired of taking crap. People keep bringing them all this crap and being all like, “Hey, take this crap.” And then the Twins coaching staff is like, “No, we don’t want that crap.” Then the people are like, “Come on, please. We packed up all this crap and carried it over here to give to you. We’d really like it if you would just take it.” Then the Twins pitching staff is like, “No, seriously. We will not take your crap. We have taken enough. We have almost literally a ton a crap, crap that various different people keep bringing to us. At first we were like ‘Yeah, OK, great. Thanks for the crap, we guess,’ we didn’t want to be rude to the fans or anything like that. But now, now we have way more crap than we even know what to do with and we’re done taking crap. We’re done taking crap from you, or him, or her, or anybody for that matter. No more crap. The Minnesota Twins coaching staff will no longer be accepting crap. End of story.” Then the people are like, “Fine, whatever, you don’t have to be dicks about it. We were just bringing you this crap. We thought you wanted it because you keep on talking about all this “Pitch To Contact” stuff and we always just assumed that anyone talking about “Pitch To Contact” was really just strongly hinting than they’d like crap to be given to them.” Then the Twins coaching staff is like, “We get it, alright? We understand the root of the problem. That is why, in addition to our new policy in regards to crap and whether or not we will take it (we won’t), we’re also ending all talk of “Pitching To Contact” and any iteration thereof. That should solve this whole ordeal once and for all. We thank you for being a loyal fan of the team and we now consider this matter closed.” You can read all about it for yourself, complete with mention of Mikhail Gorbachev’s birthmark in official Soviet Union Portraits:

The phrase “pitch to contact” has been deleted from the Twins’ lexicon. It is gone forever.

Like Mikhail Gorbachev’s birthmark in official Soviet Union portraits, it has been expunged. All traces have been removed and no one is allowed to speak of it. As far as anyone is concerned, the phrase, like the birthmark, has dissipated into thin air.

“I’m never saying it again,” Twins pitching coach Rick Anderson said. “I’ve taken enough crap for it.”

So there. It’s done. It’s over. “Pitch to Contact” is dead, it’s been striped of its quotations and capitalizations and now is just simply pitch to contact, decreed or said by no one—just three words in succession, officially black-listed and devoid of meaning within the friendly confines of Minneapolis, Minnesota. One has to imagine that the discussion with the pitching staff about this sweeping organizational change was enlightening:

Pitching Coach: So, listen here, Twins pitcher. That whole pitch to contact thing, we’re scrapping it.

White Pitcher Drafted Out of College Who Probably Throws a Bunch of  Two-Seamers or Something: Oh, really?

Pitching Coach: Yeah, really. It’s done. Just try and forget all that stuff. Carry on like you never heard it.

WPDOOCWPTABOTSOS: Ok, sounds good. Shouldn’t be too hard. It was always kind of a curious thing in the first place. I was always like, “Doesn’t contact usually turn into hits and home runs and stuff? And what if the defenders out there aren’t very good? I’m supposed to trust those guys to just catch everything? And what if they’re tired or hurt? Or just plain bad? What if the guy hitting is super fast and can beat out groundballs? What if he’s super strong and can turn normal flyballs into dingers? Wouldn’t a strikeout just be the better way to go? Just remove all that chance and luck and uncertainty and whatnot?”

Pitching Coach: You think too much, college boy.

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An Electronic Drawing of a Baseball

An Otter Dunking a Wiffle Ball

This GIF is related to baseball in that it’s not. I called the ball being dunked by the otter a wiffle ball in order to give myself the thinnest and most flimsy of pretenses to post about the GIF here. Because this is a baseball blog, remember? It sure is.

I don’t even want to write about this otter dunking this wiffle ball. I just want to watch it happen on a loop for the rest of eternity. Even now, as I’m typing these nonsense words, I can see the otter up above them, swimming, emerging from the water, gathering himself, and then launching up to place the ball through the hoop. I’m just watching it happen, this very instant. I’m hardly even thinking about what I’m typing and I’m not looking at the words or my keyboard because I spend a lot of time on computers and as a result can type at a respectable pace without any anchoring influence.

So just to be clear. I love that goddamned otter. I love that he’s dunking that ball that may or may not be a wiffle ball and may or may not be related to the sport of baseball in any way whatsoever.

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One Man’s Rebuttal of Another Man’s Rebuttal of WAR the Baseball Statistic

First, there was an article about WAR and it was called “WAR is the Answer” and the people, they talked about it. Sam Miller’s piece for ESPN Magazine and also ESPN the Website fanned the flames of the analytical/eye-test baseball debate, sparking all sorts of internet comments and tweets and probably some talking head yelling on some shows somewhere. But no matter how many concessions Miller made in his piece, no matter how many counter-arguments he anticipated and proactively disarmed, there were always going to be articles like this pile of garbage by Michael Hurley from CBS Boston. Hurley isn’t having all this WAR talk, and he has all sorts of facts and evidence on his side that he expertly employs in order to convincingly cast reasonable doubt on the whole framework of WAR and why advanced statistics may be more problematic than many believe. No, wait, he doesn’t do any of that. He just beats his chest and loudly regurgitates the same tired old bullshit of the ignorant and threatened, arguments Miller had already considered, discussed, and disproved in his piece. To be fair to Hurley, reading Miller’s piece more than like, one and a half times would have taken about 20 minutes, and that doesn’t even include all the thinking time that would have came after. In what follows, I’d like to highlight a few passages of particularly egregious nonsense, and discuss all the reasons why Hurley is so wrong. First, let’s start with zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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Happy Valentine’s Day from Ken Griffey Junior, Seattle Mariner

I remember having these in elementary school, back when you would take a box of Valentines to school and fill one out for every kid in your class and then walk around in circles, dropping them off one by one at each individual desk with its very own painstakingly handcrafted card-receiving paper receptacle. Ken Griffey Junior was a Mariner then. The world was less complicated and terrifying. It was pretty alright.

Thanks to betterthanbeckett.blogspot.com for the amazing compilation of Valentines

An Interview With Felix Hernandez’s Right Elbow

Reporter: I just want to start by thanking you for agreeing to do this. This is going to be really big for us. Anytime we can get an exclusive we’re all really excited, so thanks again.

Elbow:

Reporter: Yeah, so, we might as well just get down to it. Crazy last couple of days, huh?

Elbow:

Reporter: I just meant, you know, with the whole “complications” issue and everything. Has it been stressful, knowing that your health has been causing a hold up on a 175 million dollar contract?

Elbow:

Reporter: No offense or anything, it’s just that 175 million dollars is a lot of money. That kind of thing would weigh on anyone, or, anything. How have you been holding up under all of this scrutiny?

Elbow:

Reporter: Reports are that you and Felix will be heading to Spring Training and working on your regular schedule. That has to be a promising sign, right?

Elbow:

Reporter:

Elbow:

Reporter: Goddamnit, you guys, you said this would work.

Elbow:

Reporter: I mean, seriously, I’m talking to a fucking elbow.

Elbow:

Reporter: Yeah, yeah, hilarious. I’m the asshole—awesome, great. Let’s just pack everything up and get out of here.

Elbow:

Reporter: I hate all of you.

Elbow:

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Call to the Pen: Some Other Moves the Yankees Should Make / Blog Abyss (Don’t Do No Good to Get Angry)

My most recent post at Call to the Pen was about the New York Yankees and some baseball moves they should consider were the logic of Jon Heyman and some other mainstream writers to be mistakenly believed as sound. It was a wee bit satirical and there were some attempts at jokes and all that. It was also posted over a week ago. The day after my post I was contacted by a Call to the Pen editor-type and asked a series of questions in regards to my place on the site. Reading between the lines (I went to college, where I studied English and Creative Writing), it became readily apparent that they were very interested in internet-things like “relevant baseball news” and “traffic” and “page views” and all sorts of other insufferable garbage that I don’t care to understand or think about. Metrics, perhaps. Click-Through Rate. I was also able to glean from the electronic mail that I probably wasn’t the greatest performer when it came to all of this new and important stuff and that the editor-type wasn’t all that keen on my choices of blog content and writing style. Some people don’t find me funny or interesting, turns out. I’m just as shocked as you are. The end result is that I promptly tendered my resignation, or whatever, and the post you can click on and read right here will be my last at Call to the Pen. So it goes, a guy once said and continued to say for quite a long time.

I spent over a year at Call to the Pen. I wrote like, somewhere around 100 posts in that time. That strikes me as a lot. It was a lot of posts, and a lot of words, and a great deal more stress and anxiety and impending doom. The blessing of Call to the Pen was also its curse. I was expected to provide two posts per week. This kept me motivated, to a certain extent, and it forced me to write when I wouldn’t have otherwise. I think I fared ok, despite the panic. It also made me more than miserable on select days. Many days. I suppose part of the idea of this blog is to show someone, anyone out there that I’m a person with a decently functioning brain who likes baseball and can write about it on a certain consistent frequency. Call to the Pen allowed me to publicly present that ability, and to do so on a stage marginally larger than the one I’ve fashioned for myself here, with internet comments, and on Twitter. For that I am grateful, and I think fondly of many of my co-writers, and to the people who originally gave me the opportunity to contribute. Thank you, people who deserve it. You were nice, and we posted some baseball shit, and it was good more often than it was not.

And now here I am, back where I started, and it’s just fine. For one reason or the other, I felt a certain responsibility to Call to the Pen, a responsibility to cover topical subjects and newsworthy happenings, and I gave it my best shot and I wrote about things in such a way that I could live with myself. I was willing to write about a contract extension, or a free agent signing, or a steroids controversy, but I was going to couch it in a great deal of ham-fisted bullshit, and occasional satire, and a whole lot of tongue-cheeking, because I know what baseball news aggregation looks like and I don’t find it particularly compelling or worthwhile. Unless it pays, in which case, I fucking love it. I’ll give you Dan Haren’s career trajectory and injury history and WAR/$ all day every day. Now, I’m a free man, burdened to no website or news cycle or misplaced sense of responsibility. It feels good and also not good, because I can do whatever the hell I want. Most days, whatever the hell I want to do is not write a baseball blog post. I’ve sat around for a week, lived life, breathed easy after work between the hours of 5pm-10pm, and now I suppose I’ll attempt a return to the grind. Shit might get weird, or intermittent, or just plain awful. But writers write, and that’s the delusion I’m grasping at for a least a while longer.

Call to the Pen: Alex Rodriguez Tarnishes Legacy With Further PED Suspicions

Please click this internet hyperlink to read the entire post over at Call to the Pen

All across the expanse of the baseballing nation, scribes of the sport have begun to reckon with the reality of Alex Rodriguez: Fallen Hero. From CBS Sports, Danny Knobler is quite clearly struggling mightily to nurse a profoundly broken heart. To whom will Knobler’s children now submit their faith? What are we without our shining stars? Are we anything at all?

ESPN’s Ian O’Connor is faced with a similar quandary. Long one of the most vocal and public admires of Rodriguez’s prodigious baseball talents, work ethic, and integrity, how is O’Connor to move on? What sort of dishonor has he brought upon his station as sports journalist if he could be so gullible, the wool pulled over his eyes so easily? O’Connor was naive enough to believe in the innocent myth of baseball, that grown men could play a children’s game and stand for something more, something greater. He is left now with nothing but the devastated remains of his champion’s reputation—once clean, now soiled.

Ken Rosenthal was witnessed in the center of a busy thoroughfare on fallen knee, wailing towards the Heavens. Jon Heyman has not moved from his bed, or blinked, in over 36 hours.

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