A book I have not read but shall at my earliest convenience …

A belt? I thought I told you not to wear anything complicated, you prepossessing jade!

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MLB.com’s Doug Miller has written a profile of FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron and his contretemps with stupid leukemia.

Along with what is a decidedly touching portrait of a person (i.e. Cameron) who is respected by readers and colleagues, Miller’s article reveals some other facts that will shock and/or amaze.

To wit:

• Cameron, who is obviously funny-looking, is somehow less funny-looking now that at any other time in his life. Photo evidence confirms this.

• When a 14-year-old Cameron asked Derek Zumsteg (his future USS Mariner co-editor) to remove David Pease from the alt.sports.baseball.sea-mariners newsgroup because he (i.e. Pease) was a “moron,” Zumsteg replied thusly: “[I]f we had a ‘No Morons Allowed’ rule, I’m afraid that would mean you couldn’t post either.”

• While thorough, Miller’s pieces is incomplete for its total omission of this image (courtesy Dayn Perry):

The handsome and besexed reader has no doubt been waiting, breath breathily bated, for news on the unfurling 2007 controversy surrounding the New Bedford, Massachusetts Youth Baseball League. To update:

- A 92-signature petition requesting the presumably blood-soaked removal of the league’s Executive Board has been filed with the Attorney General’s Office.

- Said Executive Board curiously won quite a large share of those league raffle dollars, in some instances, oddly enough, in increments roughly proportional to the amount of power wielded by each member of the Executive Board.

- Ejected coaches are supposed to be fined, and the coach of Manny’s Barber Shop totally was indeed fined upon being ejected. Not fined for being ejected, however, was Coach DeGrasse, who, it so happens, is a member of the Executive Board.

- Complain to the mayor about the conduct of the Executive Board, and you shall be relieved of coaching duties. At least that’s what happened to the former Coach Pereira.

- League Vice President Heather Rowan was allegedly “talking about vibrators in front of the kids.”

- Someone, someone possibly with allegiances to Ma’s Donuts, threw a rock and hit the parent of a player for Manny’s Barbershop, a team already the target of previous ruthlessness on the part of the Executive Board.

- As well, there is an almost palpable lack of “urgency from them [the big assholes of the Executive Board] to find out who threw the rock.”

- As well, there is an almost palpable “conspiracy to expel me [Coach Duarte, of Manny's Barber Shop] from the league . . .”

Developing.

Here’s the cover of Jaci Burton’s Changing the Game:

And here I am, moved to make a noun out of “gorgeous-dangerous.” This books is a gorgeous-dangerous that I wouldn’t mind reading while safely positioned over my parlor fainting couch. Consider these pearls clutched. Consider this bodice ripped. Now consider these selected Amazon reviews of Burton’s gorgeous-dangerous:

- “Like how can you start falling in love with someone when all you do is bang them.” – eestev

- “The sex scenes were incredible and boy of boy, do those Riley boys have stamina…” – Kindle Lover

- “The sex parts were my favorite. I had a very hard time putting this book down. I can’t wait for the next book. I hope it is released soon.” – kitten123

- “One of the best I’ve read this year, and yes, a cold shower is definitely needed after this one.” – Jolie Weber

- “This one will leave you wanting a cold shower!” – Donna

- “Don’t forget to prepare the fan, ladies, because just like the first one this book is going to make you sweat, trust me ;)” – Alaiel Kreuz

- “I felt reading this book came straight out of a porn movie and she just wrote it in words.” – Roo

- “Sex. Sex, sex, sex. Sex.” – Kelly S.

- “I was bored by all the sex – which must be the biggest crime for an author of erotic romance.” – NStort

- “Boundless humping. Shorn, sinewy torsos. Loin-moistener of the week. 8.4 WAD (Wins Above Dirty). Baseball.” – D_CameronY2K

Review copy along with gold bridal hand fan hereby requested!

It’s time for another installment of “Shorter Baseball Columnists,” in which we read mainstream baseball columnists and marginalized bloggers like Murray Chass so you don’t have to! Let us begin!

Shorter Steve Rosenbloom: This is why Adam Dunn struggled last season. Maybe. Or not. I don’t know, man.

Shorter Dan Shaughnessy: Get comfortable, lads, because this one is going to be about me.

Shorter Mike Lupica: Shame on Ryan Braun for making his failed drug test a public issue.

Shorter Murray Chass: Hold on to your funny bones because you can make a “twit” joke out of the word “Twitter,” which I hate. Twitter, I mean, not the joke I just made, which is gold.

Shorter Jim Souhan: Joe Mauer is a pussy.

Blogger Murray Chass, America’s Least Favorite Grandpa^TM, is famously promiscuous with his base-and-ball opinions, and his latest gumbo of a dispatch is no disappointment. His masterstroke comes when he recounts why he’s decided not to put the maximum 10 names on any Hall-of-Fame ballot regardless of the candidates’ merits:

Having 10 players enter the Hall at the same time would detract from the honor for each player. In addition, the induction ceremony would take forever and require a break for dinner.

Once more, for championship emphasis:

… and require a break for dinner.

And so …

As noted in these pages last week, I recently purchased A Baseball Winter: The Off-Season Life of the Summer Game, a day-by-day account — edited by Terry Pluto and Jeffrey Neuman — of the 1984-85 offseason of five clubs: the New York Mets, the California Angels, the Atlanta Braves, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Cleveland Indians.

As also noted, the book is written in a very compact, diary-like* format, which makes for an urgency, a feeling of being present, that’s very pleasant.

*Diary-esque? Diary-y? Is there an adjectival form of diary?

Here are some note on what I’ve read.

Contracts
Free agency was still a newish concept in 1984-85, and it’s clear from this text that a number of teams didn’t understand particularly well the level of risk associated with signing players — and particularly pitchers — to long-term contracts.

Consider some examples:

• Atlanta, led enthusiastically by owner Ted Turner, signed 32-year-old reliever Bruce Sutter to a six-year, $6.75 million deal — or, $1.125 million per year. A marginal win cost about $330 thousand in 1985, meaning $1 million ought to have bought ca. three wins above replacement. Sutter’s signing came after a precipitous drop in his strikeout rates, from the high-20% area in 1977-79 to about 16% in 1983-84. He would have had to produce roughly 20 wins to earn his contract. In fact, he produced 0.2 of them — wins, that is. His WPA over that same span was -3.79.

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Most of the things I did today are shameful, and concern for the reader’s modesty forbids me from recounting them (i.e. those things I did) in these pages. Among the less shameful activities in which I engaged, however, was to visit the very excellent Grey Matter Books in Hadley, MA, and buy the book you see pictured here, lying on a friend’s rug.

A Baseball Winter: The Off-Season Life of the Summer Game is an account of the 1984-85 offseason of five clubs: the New York Mets, the California Angels, the Atlanta Braves, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Cleveland Indians. As editor-authors Terry Pluto and Jeffrey Neuman note in the Acknowledgments, “its focus [is] on the backstage aspects of the game: contract negotiations, trade talks, in short, the games as it is played off the field.”

Having read the first 10 or so pages, I can speak to one of the book’s virtues — namely, that it’s written in diary form, with three- or four-page entries for each (or most) of the days of the offseason. The style lends itself to a sort of urgency, a sense of witnessing the events as they unfold, that’s very pleasant.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of the rhetorical fallacies committed by Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy in his most recent piece, in which he argues that the Red Sox are a “doofus organization” — which list is accompanied by a photo of an almost amused E.B. White. [Reference: Aaron, LB Brief (4th ed).]

• Begging the question
• Non sequitur
• Red herring
• Appeal to emotion
• Bandwagon
• Ad populum
• Hasty generalizations
• Sweeping generalizations
• Reductive fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Either/or fallacy

Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium was, provably and undeniably, the place where YouTube commenters gathered before there was such a thing as YouTube. As such, there are any number of ways to describe the angsty tincture of assholes and disimprisoned maniacs that prowled within its walls. And thanks to SI’s excellent and mustachioed Gary Smith, we have some championship examples of doing so.

First, a couple of warm-ups:

“It was San Quentin,” says Head.

“It was a circular concrete slab of crap,” says Boo.

Not half bad. But would anyone care to trump?

“It was a green dying turd,” says Dan Tarng, a first-generation Taiwanese-American fan who needs to meet Head and Boo.

In the course of stinking, meaningless human events, you might be tempted to describe Veterans Stadium in your own words. Do not. Instead, pay obeisance to Mr. Dan Tarng, who was through with it before you knew what to do with it.