Tuesday night, Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton became just the 16th player in major-league history to hit four home runs in a single game (box).

Here are notable reviews of those home runs by some of America’s most celebrated critics (with links to video of each individual home run).

No. 1
“Josh Hamilton’s first home run is taut, terse, brisk and immediately engaging.” – Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

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I was surprised, at the completion our offseason crowdsourcing project, to find that FanGraphs readers had ranked Houston Astros broadcasters Bill Brown and Jim Deshaies fourth overall among the league’s 31 television broadcast teams.

Of course, I could also be excused: there has been little reason for anyone to go out of his or her way to watch the Astros over the last couple-few years.

With a new, data-driven front office in place, however, and a team that’s currently ranked 10th in FanGraphs’ totally infallible SI.com power rankings, there are reasons to watch the Astros at the moment.

What I didn’t expect before turning on Sunday’s game between Houston and St. Louis was the degree to which Brown and, in particular, Deshaies could augment a fan’s viewing experience. The duo are both genuinely entertaining (not just “entertaining for baseball broadcasters”) and responsible with the numbers.

By way of illustration, here are five brief sound clips of Deshaies — literally all of them from the first three innings of that Sunday game against the Cardinals.

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Sometimes readers will ask me — on the present site, on Twitter, on the lawless streets of America — they’ll ask me, “Hey Carson, will you keep me abreast of products that might be of some use to me, as a consumer of base-and-ball?”

To which query I’ll respond: “You want me to keep you a breast of products like that?”

To which they’re like: “Yeah, abreast.”

At which point, I’m like: “A breast?”

And then they’re like: “Yes. Abreast. It’s a real English word, and has nothing to do with the female anatomy, like you’re clearly pretending it does.”

In any case, my answer to the original question is: “Yes, but probably only, like, a month after such a product has been released, because what am I, a machine?”

A thing that fits all of the above criteria was brought to the author’s attention over the weekend in the form of this tweet:

You know how the Red Zone channel only shows you all the important stuff? Check out MLB version here with mlb.com/fullcount

— MLB (@MLB) April 28, 2012

In fact, some cursory research reveals that the operator of the MLB Twitter account is not lying. MLB Full Count (link) is a video service (in collaboration, it seems, with Yahoo) that provides “look-ins” to games in progress — and, it would also seem, highlights of completed games. Also, it’s free.

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Nothing says baseball like David Baldacci’s novel, Zero Day.

I can’t give the book its needed credit, so here is the description from Amazon.com:

John Puller is a combat veteran and the best military investigator in the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. His father was an Army fighting legend, and his brother is serving a life sentence for treason in a federal military prison. Puller has an indomitable spirit and an unstoppable drive to find the truth. 

Now, Puller is called out on a case in a remote, rural area in West Virginia coal country far from any military outpost. Someone has stumbled onto a brutal crime scene, a family slaughtered. The local homicide detective, a headstrong woman with personal demons of her own, joins forces with Puller in the investigation. As Puller digs through deception after deception, he realizes that absolutely nothing he’s seen in this small town, and no one in it, are what they seem. Facing a potential conspiracy that reaches far beyond the hills of West Virginia, he is one man on the hunt for justice against an overwhelming force.

It is 448 pages of heart pounding action for the baseball fan, especially if you are at Kauffman Stadium watching the Royals lose their 11th in a row.

(h/t to focs at Royals Review and the NSFW version)

Like most of us, I knew him only as the almost spectral presence who delivered sex-drenched commands and remorseless taunts from on high. He paid us in corsair’s doubloons. He claimed to have invented new smells and colors. He lifted not barbells but paid whores left pliant from hours of driving coitus. He carried a razor in his sock. His voice was so gravelly that actual gravel spewed from his maw. If a man is something dimensionless and awful to behold, then he was man. He was David Appelman.

This past weekend, in the deserts of America, I met him. By way of introduction, he beat me with a cactus and then kissed my fresh wounds. Such is his power. Such is his malaise. Like someone from a Garcia Marquez novel, Appelman is followed everywhere by a pack of menacing tarantulas. “My spider-sons,” he calls them. His appetite for illegal drugs and sex as locus of control is both boundless and without bound. As he ravishes you on whim, the only consoling knowledge is that whatever he’s doing to you at that moment is but a taste of the horrors ahead. You can always buy another bodice, he tells you. I saw him brawl with Christ. David Appelman is an animated urge.

We are not equipped to remember our births, which is a necessary survival device. We are also not equipped to remember the precise things that David Appelman does to, at and on us. We cannot, lest we combust from vice and rot. Every so often, though, the gossamer parts, if only for a moment, and you remember something about him. He is hairy beyond plausibility. His member is untold and prehensile. It turns out there is an eighth deadly sin.

I am in need of physicians.

One fine day I got a notion that reviewing baseball video games – in an effort to find the best ones of all time – might be a cool idea. After showing one to Mr. Cistulli, he agreed relented. Thus today I bring you another video game review, this time a more timely review, of MLB ‘12: The Show, which was released Tuesday — or midnight Monday if you were lucky like I was.

Photo:

Well, it’s not that I don’t want this watch because I don’t like the watch itself. I’m just saying, I have a ‘dope interchangeable’ Modify Watch of my own, and I like it better:

Say what you want about the pitcher and his persona, but his man-merkin can adorn my wrist any day. And when I want to go orange, I can. Somedays I feel whiter than usual. Because the timepiece comes with many different looks, I’m good.

Something about the waterproof wristband and the sleek, iconic face works for me.

Perhaps you’d like one with pinstripes?

To win this watch (and two alternate bands), you must satisfy only two rules:

1) You must mention Derek Jeter.
2) You must amuse me.

Now, considering that I am not necessarily a fan of the Yankees, you’d be right to focus on the second requirement. But, oh, don’t forget the first. And denigrate the subject too much and I might find you undeserving.

Walk that tightrope! Walk it!

Gerald Laird not included.

I was surprised to find, this afternoon, that the $119.99 I’d been saving for really expensive drinks tonight at a really exclusive club had been removed from my PayPal account, courtesy MLB Advanced Media. This maneuver is one that (a) I find slightly irksome and (b) is probably, at some level, technically my fault, owing to how there’s undoubtedly a box I’ve left checked somewhere in my account that gives MLBAM the right not only to withdraw funds from my PayPal account, but also to perform all manner of experimental medical procedures on my person.

Some cursory research on the product having been conducted, here are some other statements about this year’s iteration of MLB.TV that are probably not not true:

• MLB.TV Premium is listed at $124.99 per annum (with the basic MLB.TV package costing $109.99).

• This year, a subscription to MLB.TV Premium includes the At Bat app for iPhone. (Said app cost $14.99 last year.) This ensures that you can watch baseball even as your — or somebody else’s, if you’re into that — wife lay sleeping beside you.

• The spring training schedule for MLB.TV — which starts March 3rd and is available here — seems considerably more robust this season. In fact, I don’t know that there were any spring training games available via MLB.TV last year.

• A subscription to MLB.TV is required to view games on connected devices (i.e. PS3, Xbox 360, Roku, etc.).

• There actually is some (literally) fine print regarding the autorenewal process, to this effect: “Your yearly subscription to MLB.TV or MLB.TV Premium will automatically renew annually on or about March 1 each year at the prior year’s regular full yearly price.”

Welcome to you, too, CBS Sports ULive.

The college baseball season began this past weekend and, owing to a conspicuous absence of the professional game available for public consumption, I resolved that finding a collegiate game between two talented programs would serve as a serviceable antidote.

After reading Baseball American Aaron Fitt’s preview of the weekend’s games, I settled upon the series between No. 10 Vanderbilt and No. 2 Stanford as the one I’d most like to watch.

As one might expect, the viewing options were quite limited. The series was not broadcast by ESPN, or even ESPN3 (which appears not to carry any sort of collegiate baseball until a pair of games on March 2nd).

I could, however, access an online feed through the sites of both the Stanford and the Vanderbilt baseball programs.

In both cases, I was redirected to the Stanford Videos page — which appears, in this case at least, to serve as a sort of Stanford-themed “skin” for CBS Sports ULive, what I gather to be the streaming arm of the CBS Sports College Network.

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I got a late start on everything, I think. I didn’t kiss a girl till I was 20; by the time I actually listened to an entire Pavement album, they’d broken up; I’d never heard of Bill James until I read Moneyball in the autumn of 2003; and I’d managed to make it through an entire Bachelor’s program in English (concentration in poetry) without even hearing of poets like Charles Olson or Alice Notley. I was introduced to these poets and myriad others only after taking a job at Woodland Pattern Book Center, probably the greatest poetry bookstore in the United States. It was at WPBC that I finally found Tom Clark’s Baseball – over 30 years after it was published.

I’ll cut to the quick: Baseball is a – perhaps the – must-read book for those who appreciate the NotGraphs approach to fanaticism.

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