Thread: James: Groundball pitchers and injuries

Originally Posted by edavis0308

This is all sorts of awesome, but what does it say - "Pitcher Strikeouts are ???????"

Decadent. If it's meant as a takeoff on Bull Durham's line that strikeouts are both boring and fascist, it kind of misses the mark. But maybe Lenin or someone like him had some similar quote about decadence that makes it more apt than I know. Even without fully getting the joke, I love this piece of art.

I put the post together earlier this week. It wasn't meant as a dig at Terry Ryan, but as I tend to do at 3 AM, I have bizarre musings on Twitter and it developed into a fun conversation. Essentially, I suggested that it would be very entertaining if one year, a team taht knew they were going to be pretty lousy, did a whole tongue-in-cheek dictatorship theme year, in which they do stuff like simply declaring wins and announcing that people should ignore MLB's official propaganda. Some of the other baseball writers still up chimed in and we had all sorts of cool ideas what a team could do in this vein, like introducing players with fictional achievements and announce that they plan to annex the Tigers and liberate Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander from the imperialists.

So I made a little poster to commemorate the occasion. The pitcher strikeouts are decadent references Bull Durham, but it also is a reference to the communist theory of decadence, which was very popular early on. Essentially, the belief was that capitalist countries had taken capitalism as far as it could go and were descending into a mire of moral decay and self-indulgence. Since the Twins haven't been the biggest pitching strikeout team, I imagined a bizarro dictator version of Terry Ryan, fuming about the obsession that other teams have nowadays with K rate thanks to FIP and the like and wanting to bring pitch to contact back to the proletariat.

Originally Posted by DSzymborski

Essentially, I suggested that it would be very entertaining if one year, a team taht knew they were going to be pretty lousy, did a whole tongue-in-cheek dictatorship theme year, in which they do stuff like simply declaring wins and announcing that people should ignore MLB's official propaganda.

Sounds Veeckian. MLB is a little too buttoned-down for that even if a Veeck were on the scene. But maybe he'll take the idea and run with it for his Saints.

Welcome, Dan.