Torii's Nuts

are bigger than yours.

What? It's true.

(I'm incredibly sorry. I have nowhere to write about baseball, and... umm, the A's are good and stuff, right?)

The sloths are out in full force. They scour websites and hunt statistics, they do it all from their bedrooms, greedily devouring information and Kit Kats, in what they think is a noble quest for Ultimate Knowledge.

Many of them were left off the team in tee-ball because mom couldn't keep the Mars Bars in the purse.

I'm talking about these rogue writers, these bloggers of the current age. They give us a level of coverage that the lumbering beasts of mass media could never hope to accomplish. They provide so much insight, so much analysis of game events, and free! Oh, happy day! Little to no pressure, evidence-stacked posts, discussions that delve into every debatable point in the entire sport. Shit, some of them rock photoshop and put smiles on faces.

But eventually, bullies clean up the mess these geeks get themselves into.

It happens every so often, these sniveling grinches in the dark of their caverns, the faceless masses of human cast-offs, they go too far. They debate too much. They use too many statistics. Yes, that's right. There IS such a thing as too many statistics. There IS such a thing as subjective reasoning. And managers know more than you. They just do. They have played baseball for their entire lives, they know every single thing about the game. They are paid to fucking run the game, not comment about it. Managers in baseball are the smartest baseball people in the world. Writers are not smarter. Bloggers are not smarter. GMs are not smarter.

Oh, but don't we think that we could do better? Sure, well, that's natural. Let it flow. But if you dumb down this sport, if you make the entirety of your pursuit that unattainable goal that is the Ultimate Knowledge, you're not going to have any fucking fun. You and your online buddies can talk all you want about Torii's ankle, his situational hitting, his VORP, his Isolated Power, and all the rest. It won't matter. Because when he pulls his nuts out, two things happen. You were proved wrong, and the ball goes really far over the fence.

Doubt him. Yes. That's right. Woof any amount of bullshit you want. Throw the twisted numbers, claim to have "seen things". We've all done it. But my eyes, they lie. They lie and tell me that he's done, that the whole fucking team is done. They lie and tell me that everyone's tired, and it's just not going to happen.

But then that ball goes screaming over the fence.

The world of information is perfect, it is essential that it remain without fail. The only problem that ever occurs is human meddling. How can one possibly debate statistics? They exist as truths, how can you debate truths? Can one thing be true and untrue at the same time? No, but our little minds (made smaller by Li'l Debbie) bend and warp things to fit into our own agenda. The framework is there, we pass it through like a fucking credit card. So we can ALL go out on websites and read numbers and make the case for WHATEVER we want. That's not healthy. Debate in and of itself is not a good thing. The expansion of ideas, there's the money. Go after that. I appreciate what Bill James is doing, it is admirable simply because it is growing our knowledge system. It is adding another algorithm to play with, another corner of the grey exposed.

But you bloggers have all gone too far. You've done too much with not enough information. You've stopped going to games and drinking beers, you've stopped taking smoke breaks during the Twins' halves of innings during a Santana start (because, christ almighty, you know you want to be back to watch Him). You've told yourself that this is a legitimate way to watch sports, that your passive mentality in life can bear fruit in this pursuit of some sort of knowledge about baseball.

Ah hell, what the christ. It's probably my fault for paying so much attention to it. I just can't help the information I take in, it's like a spigot above my ears.

The nerds, they take over. They breed in themselves, molecules gaining speed and violence. The collisions create more, the laziness is viewed as a virtue.

I still raise a glass to this team and this town. They follow their boys, they care, and if I was comfortable doing this and only this with my time, that might be enough.

But goddamn it, when 48 is launching pigs into the September night, I could give a good goddamn if his range factor is lower since his injury.