Michael Donato passes along links to work by the awesome photographer Alan Sailer, who photographs various familiar items exploding in various ways. Check out his stuff at 500px, Laughingsquid.com and on his Flickr stream.
Featuring baseball!
Justin Verlander confirms his Taco Bell order: Buried in an otherwise long and very interesting feature about Justin Verlander’s career and love life comes confirmation of his standard pre-start meal. The best pitcher in baseball prepares for his outings with three Crunchy Tacos Supreme, a Cheesy Gordita Crunch and a Mexican Pizza. Verlander has Tweeted the same:
Like your boy, me, he always requests no tomatoes on all his Taco Bell items. Unlike your boy, me, Justin Verlander probably never actually ends up with tomatoes on his Taco Bell items, because who would dare screw up Justin Verlander’s pre-start Taco Bell order?
For all Verlander’s successes on the mound, his Game 1 start in San Francisco may afford him the opportunity to do something he has never done before: Get a hit. In 35 career plate appearances in Interleague and postseason play, Verlander is 0-for-26 with no walks, 15 strikeouts and nine sacrifices. I went through Verlander’s game logs and determined that — unless he has at some point been inserted as a pinch-runner — he has actually been on base twice in his career: Once during the 2006 World Series and once earlier this season, both on fielder’s choices. I mention because…
“Steal a Base, Steal a Taco” promotion revived for 2012: Seriously, how sweet would it be if Justin Verlander, amazing pitcher and lover of Taco Bell, got his first career hit then immediately stole the first base of the 2012 World Series to secure free Doritos Locos Tacos for everyone in America? How can you possibly be reading this blog and not rooting for that to happen? It was cool enough when Tacoby Bellsbury did it back in ’07. Verlander doing it would elevate the promotion to a whole new realm of awesomeness. The person in Taco Bell’s marketing department that reads this blog and won’t acknowledge it will now have to scroll through the rest of this post with his or her fingers crossed. (Also, no hard feelings, bro or ma’am! Email me! We can make this happen. Crunchy red strips!)
Saturday Night Live produces fake Taco Bell commercial: This would probably be funnier if I were familiar with the original Brad Pitt ad in question before I saw the parody version. But the Dr. Zizmor one is pretty good regardless. Is Saturday Night Live funny again?
Don’t mistake this for me suggesting the Giants won Game 7 of the NLCS by nine runs last night on account of sheer luck. That’s obviously not what happened. For one thing, they played way better defense than the Cardinals — a big factor in the following number. But check it out (allowing for my inevitable math hiccup):
Cardinals’ Game 7 batting average on balls in play: .269
Giants’ Game 7 batting average on balls in play: .419
Such is baseball, and baseball rules. Really, outside of Brandon Belt’s homer when the game was more or less decided, how many balls did the Giants hit hard? Did Matt Cain actually look as dominant as the 5 2/3 shutout innings in the box score suggest? Certainly the Giants outplayed the Cardinals, but did they dominate them the way the final score says? And could anyone other than Hunter Pence have been responsible for this type of game-changing hit?
Our man Carlos Beltran exits another thunderous postseason with a whisper, earning a bloop single and a walk, with one late fly ball seemingly stifled by the San Francisco wind. Beltran’s 1.252 career postseason OPS, if you’re tracking at home, is still good for the best by anyone ever.
Over at MetsBlog, Matt Cerrone weighs in on the Mets’ pending negotiations with R.A. Dickey and polls readers on how the club should approach them. Cerrone hears the Mets could expect “two top prospects” in a trade for Dickey this offseason, but, of course, that could mean a very broad range of things with varying implications for what the Mets should do with Dickey (i.e. depends on the deal).
If the two prospects are Major League ready position players that look likely to become franchise cornerstones, then peace out, R.A. and best of luck with the book and everything. That’s not likely to happen, though, since few teams have two Major League ready position-player prospects likely to become franchise cornerstones, and fewer still would be willing to deal them both if they did.
So I’m curious. Dickey is under the Mets’ control via a $5 million for 2013. And I’m not looking for what you’d hope to get for Dickey, since that would obviously be both the guaranteed championship and the power of invisibility. I’m looking for the least you’d be willing to accept in return for him:
I went away for a few days and got so buried in nonsense this morning that I almost forgot: Cole Hamels continued his mission to bring back the old school baseball by learning to rissole scallops on Bravo’s Life After Top Chef on Wednesday. You can check out video from Hamels’ appearance here.
Predictably, Hamels embarrassed himself in his own lovably goofy way, but the show didn’t produce many overwhelmingly embarrassing images of Cole Hamels. This one, after he stumbled over chef Jen Carroll’s name for the second time, was pretty good:
And there’s this, a closeup of an apron-clad Cole Hamels smelling some cheese:
To Hamels’ credit, cheese is delicious and often smells so. And there’s nothing really embarrassing about cooking.
Plus, no screengrab I snatched of Hamels could possibly live up to the image of Jonathan Papelbon presented within the first few seconds of the above-linked clip. He appears absolutely terrified to be seen on Bravo, and it looks like his wife is consoling him. This is a dark day in the Papelbon household:
Anyway, what say you:
Alex Belth passes along this post from Food 52 debating the best variety of apple. Experts queried therein suggest winesap, honeycrisp and mutsu but completely ignoring amazing gala apples. Gala apples are everywhere, so occasionally you’ll get one too thin-skinned or too mealy. But I’ll put up a good gala against any more highbrow cultivar in a blind taste test. It’s gala or GTFO.
Pink ladies are pretty good also.
Well this is awesome. Not to get all nerdy with it, but I’m pretty sure they’re referring to Tecmo Super Bowl here and not the original Tecmo Bowl or else they’d surely note the utter dominance of the Chicago Bears. Tecmo Super Bowl was the superior game, though, and the first Nintendo game I was aware of that managed to keep stats. I’m still not clear on how that worked. Contained inside: Video of Christian Okoye watching his own video-game dominance.
This site has been open in its appreciation of former Georgetown Hoya hero and current Indiana Pacers center Roy Hibbert, one of our nation’s most awesome individuals. Check out his appearance at the Pacers’ Meet the Rookies event at an Indianapolis-area shopping mall. My understanding is that no one was expecting this.
That’s impressive footwork for a 7-foot-2 man.
Via Scott.
Over at Beyond the Box Score, James Gentile dives into Retrosheet data to investigate whether 10+ pitch plate appearances ultimately pay off for the hitter more often than they do for the pitcher. It’s a very interesting read complete with handy tables, but as Gentile admits, there are some sample size issues. Also — and this would be impossible to do in any meaningful way given the sample of data we have — I’d love to see such a study broken down by starters and relievers and the innings in question; I wonder if a 12-pitch plate appearance against a starter in the 2nd inning less frequently benefits the hitter than one against a reliever less accustomed to throwing so many pitches, and so on (though I suppose fouling off six pitches three hours into a game can be pretty exhausting, too).
Anyway, I link it here for a couple reasons: First, the extra-long plate appearance is generally credited to the batter, even though it always means the pitcher has induced a ton of weak contact — a good thing, even if it’s all going out of play. It turns out maybe that’s right, likely to the chagrin of the Mets fans certain the team’s patient approach killed its offense in the second half of 2012.
Second, the frivolities noted at the end of the post: The three longest plate appearances since 1988 belong to Adam Kennedy, Alex Cora and Ricky Gutierrez. (Remember Ricky Gutierrez?) None finished his career with an on-base percentage higher than .338 or an OPS above .711, and I suspect — hilariously tiny sample-size caveats noted — that’s not a massive coincidence. Albert Pujols probably doesn’t see a ton of pitches in a plate appearance very often because he doesn’t frequently swing at pitches out of the strike zone and doesn’t often see 10 pitches near the strike zone that he can’t hit fair.
Also, I’m sad I missed Gutierrez’s 20-pitch tilt against Bartolo Colon in 1998. That at-bat, culminating in a strikeout, came in an otherwise efficient eight-inning, 112-pitch outing for young Colon. The Astros got 28 plate appearances against Colon, and Gutierrez’s marathon occupied 17.9 percent of the righty’s effort.
Tedquarters 