On May 20th, the Tampa Bay Rays broadcast team is going to invite a former STATS Inc. intern, a Stanford economics graduate, a former All-American athlete, a College World Series record holder, a diabetic, a man with a Wikipedia page containing over 6,300 words in it, a man who eats bullets washed in the tears of his enemies and a few of his friends, and an active major league baseball player in the booth.

Figured it out yet?

THEY’RE ALL ONE PERSON.

That’s right, Mr. Super Sam Fuld will be joining the Tampa Bay Rays broadcast team in the booth to talk about sabermetrics. What?! That’s right. Those fancy acronumbers and oozer ratings.
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Went to the Brewers-Reds game last night at Miller Park. Decent amount of Reds fans there in a modest crowd (27,000-ish).

Often, I make a point of taking noticing the most popular jerseys worn by the visiting team’s fans. Joey Votto was pretty popular, of course. Saw a few Johnny Bench‘s. Strangely, I don’t recall seeing any Brandon Phillips jerseys.

But I did see this:

I sought him out to shake his hand.

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“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Jane Austen once wrote, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an impossibly elegant and sophisticated Franco-Italian heiress who is also a former supermodel.”

Milwaukee Brewer outfielder Ryan Braun, known to be a great admirer of Austen’s work, clearly agrees, as indicated by this totally undoctored image (courtesy the NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team) of Braun and French first lady Carla Bruni walking hand-in-hand in front of people whose lives are less important than theirs.

The timing of the episode is notable, as Bruni’s husband, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, enters Sunday’s elections about eight percentage points behind Socialist candidate Francois Hollande.

More on this story as it develops.

If you’re really, really into fat jokes and/or subtle invitations LOL, man do I have some shirts for you!

Is it wrong that I like and use twitter, and even follow baseball players there, and yet find these to be an atrocious sin against the heart of baseball / love / life? If someone could explain myself to me in this regard, I’d appreciate it, because I’m not really sure what I’m so offended by anymore. Brett Lawrie, everyone! Pantalones!

( H/T to Reddit )

The following image, snapped and developed inside the camera itself by a Hollywood Polaroid at the Coachella music festival, which sounds just awful, contains truths. Foremost among these truths is that the Baltimore Orioles are the team of the those with big studio contracts at RKO Radio Pictures:

What does a young starlet need besides lifeless eyes and the love of a misunderstood Morrissey-Vampire? She needs for Hollywood’s hometown nine, the Hollywood Orioles, to win that base-and-ball match.

The Orioles name is surely on the list, won’t you check again? The foul line is really a healthy dusting of cocaine, and the Orioles will have some in the bathroom like now.

The Orioles just touched home plate, and home plate is Buddy Ebsen Karate Movie.

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)

The NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team recently stumbled upon some exciting news for Blue Jays fans who are still smarting from the loss of hope that Toronto-born Joey Votto – who recently signed a $200 million+ contract extension with the Cincinnati Reds – would sign for a few million loonies to play with the Jays once he hit free agency.

The Blue Jays front office is gearing up to throw millions and millions of dollars at free agents during the 2012-13 off-season. How is this possible, you might ask? The Jays have discovered a new (and seemingly massive) source of revenue. No, it’s not a new television deal… or a licensing agreement with a sporting apparel company.

It’s hotdogs.

With this clear-cut winner of an idea we are certain that the club can count on at least an extra $30 million dollars to throw at the likes of Josh Hamilton, B.J. Upton, Zack Greinke, and Cole Hamels.

If the Blue Jays are looking to further dive into the supermarket wars, might I suggest one more item:

Clearly there is some money to be had in selling sardines.

(A special thank you goes to my wife who looked on with embarrassment while I photographed hotdogs and sardines at our local supermarket)

The reader might be inclined to argue with the premise of this post — namely, that the gentleman pictured above (from this compilation of Louis CK clips of the early 90s) is Lenny Dykstra. Before doing so, however, he (the reader) would be well advised to consider that the consequences for being wrong in this matter are almost non-extant, while the spasm of joy produced by believing that said individual is Lenny Dykstra is pretty decent so far as joy spasms go (although decidedly less substantial than other joy spasms, which will go unnamed and nameless).

Furthermore, we must consider the ancillary value present here: that the gentleman pictured — even if he be a Pseudo Dykstra — has created a pretense for the rendering of the phrase joy spasm into electronic print. As if this weren’t already the best of all possible worlds!

The grainy image embedded here (the sort of image that one could, if one were so inclined, embiggen merely by clicking) is intended to indicate not only that (a) the author is a lifelong subscriber to The Good Life, but also that (b) MLB.TV now appears to be live on PlayStation 3 — which, by the Transitive Property of Home Electronics, suggests that it’s now available on other connected devices (Apple TV, Roku, Xbox 360), as well.

The audio options appear to be functional, too: I listened to part of Tuesday’s Red Sox game with the audio feed from Red Sox Television, and then switched over later to Red Sox Radio.

First, Karim Garcia was Baseball America’s seventh-overall prospect. Then, he played on at least 11 different teams in at least four different countries. Then he hit a single in the bottom of the eighth inning of his team (Obregon’s) Caribbean Series game against Puerto Rican club Mayaguez, and currently resides at first base on a baseball diamond in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.