Ember Nickel of the often e-less Lipogram! Scorecard! offers up the latest Celebrity Rogue contribution to the swelling cavity of hardball knowledge that is the Rogue’s Baseball Index. On tap, there’s the basic delusion of old school broadcasters, and a melancholy marker of a favorite done moved on.
Keeping Score at Home consists of, while at home, filling out a scorecard to keep track of a game being watched on TV or, more romantically, listened to on the radio. In the days before pitch-by-pitch updates online or through cell phones, this might have been an eminently worthwhile undertaking. Nowadays, the belief that some people might be Keeping Score at Home propels radio announcers to repeat themselves, sometimes by using numbers to represent fielders in a way that lends a smug sense of superiority to a small group of listeners. This all takes place despite any evidence that anyone is actually Keeping Score at Home.
The One That Got Away is the player whose career with one single team spans, if not multiple decades, the early years of your childhood fandom. After he is past his peak and/or your market is too small for his salary, he is traded for several prospects or goes unsigned by a general manager whose shrewd sabermetric knowledge far exceeds yours. When The One That Got Away gets away, it causes you to resent said general manager with a child’s self-righteousness for years, when you could have been doing more productive things.
Stay tuned for more tales of baseball madness and sorrow, as our Celebrity Rogue week continues…
Two RBI entries this go round, this time from Paul Catalano of the blog And A Player To Be Named Later. Paul brings us one term to describe a franchise gone over-protective, and another to describe the personal favorite who lets you down.
Jobawacky is a state of being that surrounds treatment of the pitcher-as-long term investment. All of the worst traits of pitch-counting and arm-swaddling and New Age crystal-reading come to bear in the early career of this Bonus Baby. When a team goes Jobawacky, the pitcher in question has his innings pitched and daily velocity and injury history scrutinized and deconstructed by fans and the media to the point of absurdity. The pitcher will start games upon the harvest moon but never after the hunter’s moon, and he may only throw the number of pitches that equals the square root of his birth date cubed.
The inevitable erratic performance of the pitcher will lead said pitcher to act strangely. When the pitcher throws a strike, for example, or gets lazy can of corn with one out and none on, he may react as if he just struck out Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial and Ted Williams on nine pitches to win the World Series in four games single-handedly. Such behavior, and the overall ineffectiveness of the pitcher, will call into question the future of the franchise. The manager gone Jobawacky will demand a recalibrated horoscopic inquiry, and the pitching coach will angrily snap his diviner’s rod in half.
The term derives from the New York Yankees’ treatment of young pitcher Joba Chamberlain.
The Curse of the Giambino occurs when you like a baseball player simply because you and he share a cultural heritage, hometown, high school, tattoo, etc. You tout this player up to all of your friends like crazy. Then he turns out to suck and be a disgrace.
For more of these gems, don’t forget to visit the Rogue’s Baseball Index.
Eric,
September 21, 2009,
Kicking off our week of all things Rogue’s Baseball Index, our first celebrity rogue term comes from Orel Hershiser, that famed Son of Steve Garvey, whose contribution touches on the twerpier side of baseball:
The MSB is a pejorative term for a tiny, annoying player, often a middle infielder. The Mini Sirloin Burger at Jack in the Box? Tasty. Getting beat by a player who looks small enough to fit in Ryan Howard’s back pocket? Like a mouthful of ashes. Such annoying players can be identified by these media-friendly descriptors: Pesky. Grit. Hustle. (The non-media-friendly version? Pain in the ass.) The MSB rarely puts up impressive numbers, but always seems to be knocking in the game-winning run against your team — on a bloop single, naturally.
Current MSBs include:
* David Eckstein (listed at 5’7″)
* Craig Counsell (amazingly, listed at 6’0″)
* Maicer Izturis (listed at 5’8″)
For more of these gems, don’t forget to visit the Rogue’s Baseball Index.
We here at Pitchers and Poets are very excited to announce a new web project that we think you will enjoy. We’ve spent weeks in deep meditation in the nosebleeds, pecking away at the telotype exchanging correspondences with fertile-minded PnP friends, building the vitamin-enriched, high-in-fiber, and brand spanking new Rogue’s Baseball Index.
The Rogue’s Baseball Index (or RBI for short) is what we have deemed an alternative baseball lexicon: it’s a baseball dictionary, if Merriam was Mike “King” Kelly and Webster was Bill “Spaceman” Lee. Eric and I thought that baseball needed a new glossary, full of terminology that describes today’s baseball, from the life of the modern fan and the tics and tendencies of the modern player, to the strange ways of the GM and the creepy capers of the ballpark mascot. This is the game that you know deep down, from the rogue’s mouth to your ears.
To celebrate the launch of RBI, we have an excellent week ahead. We’ve asked some of our best web friends contribute terms and definitions to RBI, and starting today we’ll post several of these sage suggestions per day, incrementally exposing you to the sharp-witted wisdom of the baseball crowd.
The first contribution we want to highlight is that of badass artist Mark Penxa, who generously offered up his time and extensive talents to create a beautiful RBI logo:
So have a visit to the Rogue’s Baseball Index, and check back with PitchersandPoets.com daily (and multi-daily) to see the latest contributions. Hopefully you will enjoy reading RBI as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it all together.
Sincerely,
Eric and Ted
Proprietors, PitchersandPoets.com & RoguesBaseballIndex.com
