We're into the waning seconds of regulation in the NFC championship game, all tied at 28, the Vikings have the ball, and they are on the precipice of field goal range. Now...wait a second, Minnesota just received a penalty for 12 men in the huddle. That will cost them five yards of precious field position.
Joe, that's because Brett Favre is so focused on the game. A lesser quarterback might have noticed there were too many players on the field, but Brett has a one track mind, which is what you really need in a winning quarterback.
I agree, Troy. Now the Vikings will try to get back into field range. Favre drops back, he's got some room to scramble, but he decides to throw for some reason, and the pass is picked off by Tracy Porter. Do you think that was a good decision, Troy?
Absolutely, Joe. What you saw there was Brett Favre trying to make the big play. He thought he could bounce a pass right off of Porter's helmet and into Bernard Berrian's arms. That kind of circus catch would have taken the wind right out of the Saints' sails. It didn't work out, but you can not blame Brett for trying. You simply CAN NOT.
Indeed, Troy. Brett Favre is not to blame here. Not for anything, ever. But that pick means we go into overtime. New Orleans wins the coin toss, so they will receive and try to drive down the field for the winning score.
Watch Brett Favre watching the game on the sideline. That is the way a true champion sits and watches. Head up, looking at the action. Not to the side, or above or below, but at the action.
You wanna talk about a champion watcher, Brett Favre is every bit of that. Oh, and Garrett Hartley nails a 40-yard field goal to win the game for the Saints. Now, Brett Favre will rise from the bench and head down the tunnel into the locker room.
This is a player who KNOWS how to walk into a locker room. One foot in front of the other. We are watching a professional.
It is just a joy to watch him walk. He walks like a little kid out there! And now he's in the locker room, and he's taking his socks off. And he's placed one of his socks on his right hand, and he's talking to it. And now the sock is "talking" back to him, like a puppet.
Again, this shows leadership. I don't know any other QB in the NFL who can talk to his socks like that. He is truly greater than Jesus.
Now he's popped the top off of a AA battery with his brute strength, and he's pouring the battery acid down his throat. Do you think that was a good decision, Troy?
I do, Joe. Most coaches in this league will tell you they don't want their QBs ingesting caustic chemicals, as would most doctors and rational human beings. But Brett Favre didn't get this far by listening to the so-called experts.
We'll take a break. When we come back, live coverage of Brett Favre lying on the floor, convulsing and foaming at the mouth. And if we have time, a few shots of the team that is technically going to the Super Bowl.

I had an old Uncle Morty who used to be in show biz. He represented small-time acts--dog tricks, plate spinners, head thumpers, that sort of thing. Oh, the stories he could tell!

When Uncle Morty passed away, he left me about 40 years worth of copies of Variety (along with a bunch of bills and unsettled paternity suits, but that's a whole other story). His will stipulated I could not recycle them or throw them out, so I flip through them now and then.

Earlier this week, I came across a fascinating story about a biker movie Frank Sinatra tried to make in 1966/67 that eventually fell apart. Here's the article from when the deal was first announced. I'll post subsequent articles as soon as I can scan them.

I received The Fireside Book of Baseball as a Christmas present, probably not too long after it was published in 1987. There were three earlier editions of the book, published in 1956, 1958, and 1968, respectively. The cover photo has a wide-angle picture taken at Shea Stadium during the 1986 World Series (if I had to guess, I'd say either game 1 or 7, since it looks like Ron Darling is on the mound). It's an anthology of baseball writing, arranged alphabetically by author, and including all types of pieces. There's reportage, profiles, biography, fiction, poetry, parodies, and even some cartoons and photos to accompany the action.

I dig this book out at least once every year, because it's one of the best baseball books I've ever read, and probably ever will read. The Fireside Book's basic philosophy is, Here's a buncha stuff about baseball. Enjoy! It's not meant to be read in order, or all in one sitting. Just flip to a page, and chances are you will find something great.

Like "The Age of the Muffin", a history of post-Civil War baseball by Robert Smith (not the cure frontman). Or Bill James, in a very un-Jamesian piece, probing the story of a mysterious gambling ring in an obscure Louisiana semi-pro league in the 1940s. Or an excerpt from the autobiography of Japanese home run king Sadaharu Oh. Or a poem comprised of the rules for a women's softball league. Or an all-too-brief glimpse of Moe Berg in old age, the former major league catcher who doubled as a spy for OSS in the years before World War II.

It has contemporary accounts of famous games, with a heavy emphasis on the 1980s. Like Moss Klein's account of game 5 of the 1986 ALCS, and The Curse of Gene Mauch. Or Murray Chass's first-hand account of The Pine Tar Game (proving that he wasn't always a crabby, bitter douche). Or the magnificent Roger Angell's take on game 6 of the 1975 World Series.

It has fiction, like a chunk from Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, one of the greatest and least-appreciated baseball novels ever. And there's excerpts from works of fiction that aren't strictly about baseball, like William Kennedy's Ironweed and Phillip Roth's The Great American Novel.

There's even transcriptions of legal documents, like the offical DH rule, and the motion to dismiss that struck down Charlie Finley's sale of Rollie Fingers and Joe Rudi to the Red Sox in 1976 (and which contains a convoluted and fascinating dissertation on MLB's antitrust exemption). And a poem consisting of the names and nicknames of 269 players both famous and obscure.

Some pieces have the traditional starry-eyed, childlike wonder associated with baseball. But there's also plenty of failure in this book, too. And regret. And skullduggery. I like a book that can admit there are plenty of shitty, weird, and wrong things that happen in the game, without seeming cynical in the process.

Unfortunately, this book is out of print now. A fifth edition was published in 2000, but I have never seen it, so I can not vouch for its contents (plus, it too is out of print, so the point is moot). But if you ever spot the 1987 edition of The Fireside Book of Baseball in a used book shoppe or thrift store, snatch it up immediately. No price is too high.

For other Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter, click here.

Last night, I finally took a tour through my site's stats for the first time since I did a ground-up reboot in December 2008. (My first "new" post was on December 7, a date which will live in infamy.) I was surprised by two things. The first was the amount of unique hits I've gotten since then (which I won't reveal because I'm afraid it's not actually a big number at all and you'll all laugh at me).

For the first time, I saw concrete, non-anecdotal evidence that people are reading this thing. So thank you, mostly anonymous well-wishers. I am truly grateful. I'm pretty sure at least 55% percent of you aren't pron bots, and those of you who are have been very tasteful about your Britney vids and bang buses.

So I dug deeper to suss out some other details hitherto unknown to me. For instance, the most often used term on this site is "Tom", thanks to The Best Show Logs, which reference that name quite frequently. The four next most popular keywords are "scratchbomb", "christmas", "joe", and "baseball". Where does "joe" come from? Your guess is as good as mine.

But what really knocked my socks their ass? The number one search term on this site since its reboot a year-and-change ago: STEVE PHILLIPS. Yes, that Steve Phillips. Ex-Mets GM, ex-Baseball Tonight "analyst", current unemployment line occupant. I knew I'd raked him over the coals a time or two on this site, but I had no idea my not-at-all disguised contempt for him would be so popular.

Granted, this could very well mean nothing. Because I also discovered that the top three search terms of the last week were "rudolph the red-nosed reindeer",  "danzig", and "shaved dick". This last one baffled me, but a quick Google search by the wife showed me that I have a post with one sentence ending with "shaved" and the next with "dick". I sincerely hope this is the explanation, because if it isn't, I don't want to know what the real one is.

Nevertheless, seing Steve Phillips' name so prominently featured caused me to grumble about his feckless, agenda-driven analysis. But then I remembered: We won't have to see Steve Phillips at all this year!

Yes, now that the hair-helmeted philandering douchenozzle has been kicked to the curb by ESPN, we won't have to hear him expound on how much he knows about baseball and how to build a winning team. You know, all those things he failed miserably at when he was the GM of the Mets. With Phillips gone, ESPN's baseball coverage upgrades from Unwatchable to Merely Insufferable.

And who's in his place at The Worldwide Leader this year? None other than Bobby Valentine, the genius manager who was run out of New York when he couldn't cover up for Phillips' failures. Oh sweet irony!

I don't know about you, but this thought caertainly warmed me up this cold January morn.

I wrote about Flip Flop Fly Ball last June, but in case you missed it the first time 'round, why not check it out? Flip Flop Fly Ball is a site where artist Craig Robinson creates baseball-centric infographics. The latest: a visual representation of how Alex Rodriguez's annual salary would look if converted to pennies and stacked on on top of the other. So simple, and yet, so profound.

But I think my favorite feature of the site remains its 8-bit header, a Nintendo-esque graphic that contains many references to famous baseball icons past and present, real and fictional. The Shea Stadium home run apple, the old Yankee Stadium Schaefer Beer sign, the White Sox emerging from the corn field...it's amazing that someone can evoke these things with such a limited palette. Kudos, sir.

Now that Jason Bay has signed with the Mets, I can report that the Red Sox were never really interested in him. You see, Boston gave him an MRI midway through last season and discovered he had some knee issues, thus rendering him useless as a cog in the Sox's grand scheme.

Why didn't the Mets' doctors see the same issues when they examined him? Because they couldn't have, and neither could any other team. You see, the Red Sox are at the cutting edge of all aspects of the game: scouting, sabremetrics, proper allocation of resources, and medical equipment. They have a state-of-the-art MRI machine that can not only diagnose ligament and deep-tissue injuries in split seconds, but can also cause them!

But this machine doesn't cause injuries immediately. It implants a special subcutaneous chip that resonates to a very special frequency that only the Sox's MRI machine can emit. If the Sox sign a player after examining him, they remove the chip. If not, they emit the frequency and cause maximum damage.

In the case of Jason Bay, the Sox plan to be as benevolent as possible. They will not evoke their right to destroy his knees by mysterious remote waves before the first 18 months of his current contract. After that, all bets are off. The Sox also won't say whether they will simply cause Bay's ACL and MCL to deteriorate slowly, or if they will make all three knee ligaments blow out simultaneously and catastrophically.

As for other players the Sox have examined but not signed, they would not say how or when they would be crippled. However, it is highly suspected that if Jon Lackey hadn't gone with Boston, they would have given him a torn labrum, and possibly mad cow disease.

Republican Scott Brown has triumphed in the Massachusetts Senate race, and Democrat Martha Coakley has failed. Among many factors in Coakley's defeat was her Red Sox-related gaffe last week, when she erroneously identified Curt Schilling as a Yankees fan. In the Bay State, where the Sawx are held much more sacred than any other institution, that was a huge mistake.

I don't know if anyone's choice of candidate was actually influenced by this specific misstep. By all accounts, she ran a spectacularly inept campaign. The Schilling goof was simply indicative of the laziness she exhibited throughout her Senate run, which was actually more of a sleepwalk.

But if anyone, in all seriousness, did not vote for her because she didn't know enough about the Red Sox, go get hit by garbage truck. And then catch on fire. And then get hit by a garbage truck on fire. I hate you so god damn much right now.

What's more important, folks: the fact that your Senator knows all about The Bloody Sock, or the fact that your Senator will send a death knell to any hope of reform and change for at least the next two years?

I love the Mets. I think about them and write about them and worry about them way beyond the point I should for something that has no direct bearing on my happiness and well being. One of the big reasons I've never liked Rudy Giuliani is because he's the epitome of the obnoxious, blowhard Yankee fan (being a crypto-fascist made it easy to hate him, too).

However, if there was a candidate who was exactly the same as Rudy in his fandom but the exact opposite politically, versus a guy who was a diehard Mets fan but Giuliani-esque in his world view, I'd vote for the Yankee fan in a second. BECAUSE SPORTS ARE DUMB GAMES AND POLITICS CAN FUCK YOUR LIFE UP FOR DECADES.

If nothing else, hopefully this incident wakes lefties out of the torpor that's set on them in record time. Yes, Obama hasn't done everything we wanted. Yes, he has been slow to act in certain respects (most infuriatingly, on gay rights). Yes, even before Brown's election, the health care reform bill was less than ideal. Yes, there are still mounds of problems in this country that have yet to even plateau.

But if I may return to baseball for a minute, you almost have to think of Obama in 2010 as Jackie Robinson in 1947. There are too many people for whom the mere idea of a black man being in the national spotlight is too much to bear. Obama can't be as aggressive or fiery as some people would like, because there's too many people waiting for him to lose his temper, do something rash, and fail his way out of the Oval Office.

Like when Joe Wilson yelled LIAR at him during a Congressional address. Why did Wilson do that--because he's a nut? Yes, but also because he hoped Obama would fly off the handle and yell at him, thus alienating half the country ready to think of him as a Scary Black Man. So even though Wilson thoroughly deserved to be punched in the mouth, Obama kept his cool because that was ultimately more important than the immediate desire for retribution.

Obama needs to weather the storm of his first few years and prove to The Haters that he knows what he's doing and that him being in power isn't the nightmare they think it is (or want it to be). It's totally unfair, but it wouldn't be the first time a black man had to work harder than his white counterparts just gain some respect. And after this "trial period", like Robinson, he can start fighting back against the Ben Chapmans of the world and slide in spikes up.

Ask yourself this: Looking at the Sarah Palins and the Glenn Becks and the Bill O'Reillys (a fascist Mets fan) of the world--who are clearly at the vanguard of the Republican party--do you really think there's no difference between Dems and the GOP? I'm not the biggest fan of the two-party system. But for right now, today, what's our best hope for rising out of the shit eight years of Bush dumped us in--Obama's slower-than-you'd-like agenda, or the Republicans' obstructionist paleoconservative nihilistic non-agenda?

Oh, and Curt Schilling? Go get fucked sideways with rusty rake.

I found The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth, and Subtext completely at random last winter, on the shelves of a Borders in Queens of all places. I'd never heard of it before, or its author, Richard Grossinger, or even the small imprint that published it (Frog Ltd.).

But the title grabbed me, as it was aggressively anti-dumb jockery, reminiscent more of a college textbook than a work on baseball. And the back cover didn't have the typical sports book blurbs. Sure, it had some praise from NY Post scribe Mike Vaccaro. But it also contained blurbs from Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster, two of my favorite novelists. That should give you some idea of the audience this aims to reach.

This is a book written by a fan that does not fit into the typical Fan Writing Mold. Most fan writing these days falls into one of two categories. It's either the chest-thumping, dick-swinging style of comment sections, as if the only point of sports is so you can talk shit to anonymous people. Then there's the Woe Is Us style, which says that because your team hasn't won a championship in X amount of years, you and your fellow Fill in the Blank Fans have known a suffering that no one else can appreciate and thus your fandom is spiritually superior to all others.

Grossinger, an ethnographer by trade, looks at his favorite team differently. The book is made up of a series of essays, most of which try to focus on one specific era. But really, he sees the Mets' history as one long continuum, and each piece touches on every other period in one way or another, as if it was all one long game. Witness the first essay in the book, "Endy's Catch", in which the titular play in the 2006 NLCS sends Grossinger on a mental tour through all the Mets players he loved over the years who, for one reason or another, were traded or let go and never seen again.

He seems to have a soft spot for players whom the Mets never gave a chance. The book's centerpiece, "Playing Catch with Terry Leach", discusses his obsession with the once-promising sidearmer who had a hard time catching on in the majors. Leach's funky delivery and cerebral nature made him the odd man out of the Mets' rotation for much of the 80s, until a rash of injuries forced him into the spotlight in the troubled summer of 1987. Grossinger referred to Leach's saga as "a bit of Jean Valjean, Jude the Obscure, Billy Budd."

Will everyone enjoy this book? Not unless everyone enjoys detailed studies of obscure Mets of yesteryear like Hubie Brooks and George Theodore. Its audience is probably limited to Mets fans, and a very small subset thereof. Rather than a baseball book proper, it's more of a rambling ethnography whose subject happens to be baseball. This book is not meant to please anyone. It seems unconcerned with pleasing anyone but itself, which is probably why I like it so much.

For other Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter, click here.

As I've written here before, Joe Posnanski is one of my favorite baseball writers. I'm hardly alone in that opinion; in fact, it seems redundant to sing his praises because so many people have already done so. He pens lengthy, digressive columns, yet his work is such a pleasure to read, it never seems all that long. A bit like Bill Simmons, his writing takes full advantage of the freedom afforded by the internet. Except he's a hundred times the writer Simmons is, and doesn't fill his columns with the same 5 pop culture references over and over again.

Posnanski is great when reacting to news--his recent assessment of the whole Mark McGwire situation at SI.com was one of the best takes I've read, if not the best. But he's even better when tackling general issues, as he did last week in a speech given to Sports Turf Management. The talk was ostensibly about playing surfaces in baseball and how they've changed in the last 30 years or so. But of course, it was about a lot more than that.

The speech was transcribed and posted to Posnanski's blog last Friday.  It may not sound like the most interesting subject in the world, but he could write about lint weave a compelling story around it. Read it and you shan't be disappointed.

For other Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter, click here.

Earlier this week, the Nerd/Baseball Venn intersection was all a-buzz with an amazing project done over at Wezen-Ball.com. Larry Granillo had gone through all the Peanuts comic strips from 1950 through 1970 and, based on the documentary evidence, calculated a whole slew of stats for Charlie Brown's legendarily awful team.

By this point, I am the twelve billionth person to blog about this, but I'm posting about it anyway, on the slim chance that some of you may not have heard of it yet. And also, its awesomeness warrants as much exposure as possible. Charlie Brown and baseball are my two earliest obsessions, so this insane project is right in my wheelhouse. It also includes tons of scans of and quotes from classic Peanuts strips.

Now if someone would track down all the stats for Joe Shlabotnik, including his managerial stint with the Waffletown Syrups, I'd be a truly happy man.