It’s with great pleasure — and a blood alcohol content cheerfully north of zero — that the editoriat of NotGraphs announces the Double-Entendre of the Year for 2012: backdoor cutter.

The Double-Entendre of the Year is an award intended to celebrate a base-and-ball term that marries function with the slyly transgressive. It’s chosen by our Highly Reputable and Totally Real Think Tank during their annual team-building retreat to the coastal city and carnal playground of Dubrovnik.

A brief list of previous winners:

2011: Front-Hip Sinker

2010: Fisted Single

2009: Donger

2008: Fisted Single

2007: Fisted Single

From the Worldwide Leader:

I never watched Pete Rose play baseball. He was before my time. What I know about Rose comes mostly from books, most notably Joe Posnanski’s “The Machine.” Look, I don’t know much — I chose to become a journalist, after all. But I know this: Pete Rose belongs in Cooperstown.

The ESPN short makes me sad. Especially Rose’s quotes.

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Onions, indeed.

As we enter the 2012 season, many broadcasters will undoubtedly be looking — like the players whose actions they’ll be narrating — will be looking to bring their A game, give 110%, and leave it all out on the field (or, in the press box, as the case may be).

It goes without saying that the most expedient means by which a broadcaster might scale the heights of his profession is to author a truly memorable home-run call.

To that end, NotGraphs’ Highly Reputable and Totally Really Think Tank has produced the following — a list of 15 home-run calls that have never been used on any known broadcast. For reasons that are too obvious to explain, the calls here are divided into two categories — metaphorical and ejaculatory — and are freely available to America’s Broadcasters.

To wit:

Metaphorical
These are calls that depend on an allusion to a text or event.

• Much as Zeus, disguised as a giant swan, had his way with Leda, so does [batter's name] have his way with that [pitch type or "(count) pitch"] from [pitcher's name]!

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Your spectrum of adequacy, from regrettable to decent. Baseball writers, enjoy:

Regrettable
Who?
Participatory
Just a guy
Tolerable
Unobjectionable
Adequate
Passable
Sufficient
Mediocre
Ordinary
Average
Meh
Fine
Okay
Good enough
Respectable
Nice (little)
Nifty (little)
Dandy (little)
Decent

NotGraphs’ Highly Reputable and Totally Real Think Tank has personally informed me know that as 2011 ends, so too does our first full calendar year on the immaculate Internet. We had fun this year. We hope you did, too.

Thanks for reading NotGraphs in 2011, and I wish you and yours a most prosperous new year. Here’s to 2012. As Roy Halladay once oh-so-eloquently put it: “It’s only gonna get funner.”

Oh yeah: 2011, you’re gone!

On Friday March 4, 2011, shortly after 6:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, reader Matt. D. sent us a whited-out picture of Joe West, along with the words, “if you have some time, have some fun!” We had time. We definitely had fun. Today, Joe West is at home in the NotGraphs logo. Personally, I like to think that Joe West — and Dick Allen — own honorary NotGraphs degrees. (Even though we don’t award honorary degrees. That’s how exclusive they are.) Anyway, thank you, Matt. May your light shine brightest in 2012. And, on a somewhat related note, the original 2011 image up there comes to you via PSD Graphics and Development Horizons. Both of them. A real team effort. Thank you, too.

It’s well known — both to our readers and the IRS — that the majority of this site’s fluid assets are directed towards the funding of our Highly Reputable and Totally Real Think Tank, a collection of our era’s most capable scholars, intellectuals, and amateur pornographers.

While neither prolific nor sober — and while typically found attempting to play Hide the Salam with the innkeeper’s daughter — the Tank does occasionally produce something of note.

In this case, that something is what follows — namely, a list of actual injury designations from baseball’s past. Absent from the game’s earliest injury reports are any attempts at true anatomical precision. One finds no reference either to ACLs or rotator cuffs, but instead a more colorful, if way less helpful, medical lexicon.

A. Swamp Knee
B. Sticky Cleat
C. Mexican Hangover
D. Jagged Britches
E. Palsied Bat
F. Accidental Polygamy
G. Questionable Paternity
H. Emergency Divorce
I. Sprained Liver
J. Wrenched Liver
K. Entirely Ruined Liver
L. Spotted Dick
M. Whiskey Butt
N. Manifest Destiny
O. Secular Imagination
P. Black Face
Q. Death Breath
R. Dungaree Fever
S. Mal du Suisse
T. Mal du Spavinaw, Oklahoma

John Autin over at High Heat Stats Blog pointed out that the length of the average save is dwindling. Watch it disappear:

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There’s power in your pine tar.

The newest bombshell in social science is actually the oldest story in any book: dude made up his results. It turns out we don’t know any more about the relationship of power to infidelity, or the link between chaos and prejudice, than we did last year. It turns out that Diederik Stapel made up all his results.

A more serious corollary to the baseball world might take note from the social scientists on the matter — we might start talking about the danger of massaging data in general. We could talk about the pressure to find salacious results, and how that changes the way we look at our numbers. We could talk about all the biases that get ignored, and so on.

But that’s no fun.

Let’s instead open up that drawer in my desk where I hastily stuffed all my research as soon as this scandal broke. As you can see, Mr. Stapel has scared me straight.

More Pine Tar Means More Power: A study of the relationship of pine tar levels on batting helmets to isolated slugging percentage.

Green Means Go: Do team colors impact team statistics?

Strippers For Losers: A look at the impact of the availability of professional women of the night on the local team’s winning percentage.

High Socks Rock: Do sock heights alter four-component speed scores?

Mustaches a Must-Have for Closers: A correlation between facial hair and saves totals in major league baseball.

Ritalin or Greenies: A subjective study of baseball uppers new and old and their effect on hand-eye coordination.

A very lucky person’s backyard.

Men’s Health magazine went and ranked the luckiest cities in America earlier this month. Spoiler Alert — San Diego won, joining Baltimore as the only two cities in America with A+ luck. They defined luck as:

the most winners of Powerball, Mega Millions, and Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes; most hole-in-ones (PGA); fewest lightning strikes (including the fatal kind) and deaths from falling objects (Vaisala Inc., National Climatic Data Center, CDC); and least money lost on lottery tickets and race betting (Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Really, now we know that people in San Diego are rich enough to ignore lotteries, play a lot of golf, and stay indoors during the rare thurnderstorm. Is it really luck if San Diego is where people go after they win lottery?

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Dick Pole and Rusty Kuntz just came out with their position by position rankings of players with the best porn names from the 2011 season. The competition was especially tough in the outfield and among pitchers.

C: Dusty Brown
1B: Justin Smoak
2B: Nick Punto
SS: J.J. Hardy
3B: Justin Turner
LF: Lance Berkman
CF: Drew Stubbs
RF: Willie Harris

Starting Pitchers:
Phil Hughes
Doug Fister
R.A. Dickey
Josh Johnson
Chien-Ming Wang

Relief Pitchers:
Nathan Adcock
Charlie Furbush
John Danks
Kameron Loe
The Wood Brothers Triple Teamers (Kerry, Travis and Blake)