I spotted this typically hilarious and explicit post about Jose Bautista on Drunk Jays Fans yesterday and figured I’d chime in, not because there’s any obvious New York connection or because there’s much to be said that hasn’t already been said about Bautista’s amazing surge or for any good reason at all besides that I want to. Site’s called TedQuarters.

Last weekend, I was flipping between games on MLB.tv with some friends and we kept coming back to the Blue Jays-White Sox game just to see if Bautista was batting. It’s like that now: Bautista’s plate appearances are events.

This hitter, just some guy as recently as 2009, has a 1.276 OPS. He’s getting on base more than half the time. It’s Ted Williams stuff.

And so, because Bautista was just some guy as recently as 2009 and is now doing Ted Williams stuff, obviously — obviously — people speculate something’s awry. Things like this don’t normally just happen, so he must be taking some sort of performance enhancer.

Now look: Even though Bautista is subject to a battery of drug tests like all Major Leaguers these days, it’s certainly possible he’s taking some not-yet-detectable performance-enhancer, just like it’s possible that every other Major Leaguer is taking some not-yet-detectable performance-enhancer.

But let’s think about this for a second. If there’s some undetectable subtance that could turn the almost perfectly league-average 2009 Jose Bautista into the thus-far historically awesome 2011 Jose Bautista, why has no other player enjoyed a similar spike in performance? Wouldn’t lots of baseball players want to take that?

Putting aside the facts that in that time span Bautista’s swing has noticeably changed and his body hasn’t, why would anyone assume that only Jose Bautista has access to this wonder drug? Did he discover it himself? And in that case, do we even know if it’s illegal and/or bad for you?

Rhetorical questions!

I feel stupid writing about this because I’m sick of hearing bluster about steroids in baseball and I realize that taking any stance only serves to perpetuate the talk. Plus Bautista’s a grown-ass man who can speak for himself and it’s not really on me to defend his honor; I’m just here to enjoy his awesome hitting. But it’s funny to me that so many of the media types who do seem to get upset over performance-enhancing drug use in sports would rather point fingers and idly speculate than actually do the work to investigate what it is that players are currently doing to cheat.

I guess what’s most annoying about dismissing or trying to partly explain Bautista’s sudden emergence as the product of chemistry is that it represents a woeful oversimplification of the type of magnificently perplexing baseball happenstance that makes the sport so damn awesome.

99.9999% of the time (or something, I haven’t checked the math), the 28-year-old fourth outfielder with the 91 career OPS+ will never emerge as the game’s most dominant hitter. That in and of itself is pretty awesome. But then on extremely rare occasion he does, and that’s ridiculously awesome.

Paul passed along this photo of Cole Hamels. What do you think?

On one hand, that shirt’s ridiculous. On the other, Affliction shirts are pretty much the official off-field t-shirt of Major League Baseball, and I’m really in no position to judge what the kids are into these days. And while every picture of Cole Hamels is reasonably embarrassing, I think it’s important to maintain a pretty high standard for the Embarrassing Pictures of Cole Hamels archive.

But I’ll let you decide.

[poll id=”25″]

I play in a pickup baseball game in Brooklyn on weekends. I’ve mentioned this before a few times, at greatest length here.

I’m a terrible defender but a decent hitter, at least for level. I usually manage to put the ball in play, and since errors abound, I often end up on base. I don’t have much power but I handle fastballs pretty well. There aren’t many regular pitchers in the game who can blow one past me, and I’m usually patient enough to lay off or foul off offspeed stuff until I get something straight to hit. Plus I got off to a hot start this spring — seeing the ball well, driving a couple legit extra-base hits to the gaps in the first few games, poking some singles over infielders’ heads.

On Sunday, though, I guess I came in to the game with a little too much confidence. We switch up the teams every week, and I wound up facing the game’s lone lefty junkballer, a shrewd musician with a frustrating array of breaking stuff.

I’ve faced the dude enough times to know how I should approach him — wait and wait and wait and wait. Don’t bother trying to drive the ball because it’s not going to happen. Just take pitches until he’s forced to throw a strike, then try to go with a pitch or work out a walk.

But screw that, I roped a double last week! I’M BIG-TIME POWER BRO! So in my first at-bat I dug in and crouched deep like a fool, prepared to put a hurting on one, eying that 320-foot left field wall as if I’ve ever hit a home run in my damn life. On my third huge, awful swing, I tapped out to the pitcher.

Humbled, I decided to adjust my approach the second time up. I stood up a little straighter, trying to use the wrist-hitting style I honed in years of dedicated backyard Wiffle-ball play. Still couldn’t hit him, though. I managed to foul a couple off and wound up walking, but the whole time I felt generally uncomfortable.

Before my third plate appearance, the southpaw grew wild and got pulled from the game, and our opponents turned to a hard-throwing righty that I’ve hit OK in the past. He got ahead of me quickly, though, and after five straight fastballs he struck me out swinging on a 2-2 curveball that fooled me so thoroughly it had me laughing out loud before it reached the plate (and somewhere midway through my flailing off-balance whiff).

I came up for the fourth and final time with one out, nobody on and my team down 7-3 in our last licks at the plate. Another new pitcher was on for the bad guys, a guy who throws almost exclusively fastballs, mixing in the occasional curveball that he struggles to control.

By now, though, I’m lost in the batter’s box. The first pitch waes a pin-straight fastball down the middle, and I just looked at it. The second was a fastball low and inside, but I swung anyway and fouled it straight down into the dirt. The third pitch was obviously a wild curveball from the moment it left his hand, spinning toward my front knee. For some reason, as I stepped out of the way I took a godawful hack out of it. But the barrel of the bat made solid contact with the ball, smacking it down the third-base line for a single.

A few batters later, we wound up with a walk-off win. Baseball is awesome like that sometimes. Most times, really.