#this might be super common in pitchers and i’ve just never noticed

[andielion]

Something extremely funny to me about how much bigger Sho’s forearm is on his throwing side

[elizabethemerald]

Dreams of Drowning: Chapt 3

Jim has a cold. Nothing major, completely common. But during a call with his mom, someone notices his absence from work and is concerned. 

AO3 Please reblog if you like!

Jim shuffled morosely around his apartment. The cold had come on suddenly. On Sunday he had been fine. Then he woke up on Monday and knew he couldn’t go into work. His nose was alternately running and completely clogged. He had a cough and a fever. He was sure that if given a day or two of rest he would be perfectly healthy.  

As he groggily fixed himself some tea with lemon and honey for his throat he checked his phone. He almost had a heart attack when he saw he had two calls from his mom at two in the morning! Was she ok? Had she been hurt and he slept through it? Then he remembered that she was currently in France. She had probably forgotten about the time zones and called as soon as she landed. He sniffed loudly and called her back. After a moment of ringing the phone was answered. 

“Hey mom! How was your flight?” Jim said. There was a slight pause on the other end, almost long enough for Jim to think the call had dropped. Then a voice he recognized but not his mother’s voice answered. 

“This is Doctor Lake-Nomura’s phone. May I ask who’s calling?”

Jim rolled his eyes. “Zelda can you put my mom on the phone?”

“What you’re not going to call me mom too?” Zelda said. Jim groaned. “Why not? You mother calls me mommy sometimes.”

“Why would my mom call you...mommy.” The realization hit him at that moment. “Ug, gross Zelda! Gross. I don’t want to hear about that!”

Zelda’s laugh was loud and long on the other side of the phone. Jim grimaced. After a couple minutes of him trying to get a word in edge wise past her laughing, she took a breath. 

“Here is your mother Little Gynt.”

Jim could still hear the sound of his mom’s wife laughing as she handed over the phone. He could also hear his mom talk about the view and tell Zelda to go look at it. 

“Hello, This is Doctor Lake-Nomura.”

“Hi mom. How was your flight?”

“Oh hi Jim! The flight was super long. Since it was our anniversary Zelda got us business class seats, so it wasn’t too bad thought.” It sounded like she was walking around the hotel room while she spoke. He suddenly heard a big uptick in background noise. She must have stepped out onto the balcony of her room. “The view is amazing. We can actually see the Eiffel Tower! Can you imagine? Waking up and seeing the Eiffel tower first thing in the morning?”

“That sounds amazing mo-”

“Just a minute Jim.” His mom muffled the phone. He could still her talk for a moment with Zelda, then what he presumed was a kiss goodbye. “OK, I’m back. Zelda is going to get us some breakfast. She’s so amazing, I’m so in love with her.”

Despite the other woman’s dirty jokes Jim couldn’t help but smile. He loved hearing the way his mom gushed about her wife. He was just glad that she was happy, and able to do all the things she couldn’t do while she had been raising him by herself. He was about to say so when he sneezed explosively. Several more sneezes followed. 

“Jim! Are you getting sick?” His mom asked. 

“Yeah. It came on real quick. I think I’ve probably been going to bed with my hair wet too often.” He laughed past his stuffed up nose. If he was going to keep dreaming about Claire he was going to have to start taking a towel to bed. 

“Have you been taking some medicine?” Barbara’s concern heavy on her voice. “Do I have to-”

“Do you have to end your vacation early to come and give me cold medicine?” Jim laughed even louder at that. His eyes and head felt heavy for some reason. “I don’t think your wife would ever let me live that down!”

His mom said some reply but he couldn’t focus on it. He felt so overwhelmingly tired. 

“No I’m going to be fine. Don’t…” The words were a struggle to get out. “Worry…” The phone slipped from his lax fingers, dropping to the floor. “...be fine…”

The words barely breathed out. Then he felt the floor rush up to meet him. Distantly he could hear his mom on the small speaker. 

“Jim? Jim are you ok? JIM!!” Then it was gone. 

Jim opened his eyes under water. The strange purple water pressed all around him. He could barely take in this fact when the current dragged him forward. He turned in time to see Claire reaching out to him. 

She wrapped his body in a hand as large as he is and brought him through the water close to her face. She carefully turned his body this way and that inspecting it closely. Jim swore her face showed the same concern as his mom’s voice. The thundering words in his head seemed to confirm her concern. 

“Hurt? Hurt? You hurt? You? Are you hurt? They hurt?” The repeating symphony of her words, overlaying on each other, filled his head. He could hardly concentrate. He clapped his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. For a second that did nothing to stop the flood of words in his brain. Then there was silence. 

He carefully opened his eyes. Claire was holding him close, but didn’t say anything. He was close enough that he could see through her skin. It looked like she had a similar flow under her skin as the water around him. Her eyes were pure white, shining down on him. 

“Hurt?” The single word came to him, so softly he could barely feel it. 

“No. I’m not hurt.” He had never questioned how he could breath, speak and see in these dreams while underwater but he realized he could. 

The water around him changed. He felt without knowing how that he was seeing something from earlier in the day. The food mixture he had been making for her fell into the water. He could feel Claire’s emotions roiling off her. Joy. Disgust. Surprise. Fear. 

He interpreted her meaning easily. She had been excited for his cooking. But one of the other cooks must have covered his shift and went back to the old recipe for her food. But what was this being that seemed to be so powerful afraid of?

Claire must have picked up on his thoughts. She tapped his chest with a finger. 

“You nice.” Then her hand went to her own chest. “I afraid.”

“They hurt you.” She was afraid someone had hurt him. He was suddenly aware again of the massive chains. Before he could focus on a thought she spoke again. “Why gone?”

“I was sick. Just a regular cold. It’s not sanitary to be around food when you are sick. I couldn’t come into work today.” Jim tried to explain. 

Jim felt more than heard Claire release a relieved giggle. She shook her head back and forth, her hair floating out around her. She tapped his chest again. 

“Not sick anymore! Never sick again.” She laughed. Jim felt warmth move up his arms and down his legs, filling his head. 

He tried to focus, to put his concern into words, or at least thoughts. The chains. She had been worried about him getting hurt. She thought “They” would hurt him. He tried to ask the question, but the spreading warmth was distracting him. She stopped laughing and looked at him her held tilted to the side. 

“Jimbo! Jim you need to wake up. Come on Jim!” The voice pulled him away. Away from her. Jim reached out for her. “Jim, your mom is going to kill me if you die! Please wake up.”

Claire reached out her hand and Jim was able to grab her finger for just a second when he was suddenly whirled away. 

Jim coughed and sputtered, water pouring out of his mouth. Toby’s hand on his back helped him finish coughing up the rest. 

“Geeze dude!” Toby said, still patting him on the back. “Next time you are going to collapse, don’t drop a full pitcher of water when you do! You could have drowned while unconscious.”

“What are you talk-” Jim looked around. He was sitting in a massive puddle of water. He looked in concern at his friend. “What are you doing here? Don’t you have work today?”

“Your mom called me. From France I might add. I raced here. Paramedics should be here in a few minutes to check you out.”

Jim sat up and rubbed his face. He should feel miserable. The cold, the water, passing out. All this should add up to him feeling awful. But he felt better than he ever had. 

* * *

It had taken a lot to convince Toby that he was ok. It had taken even more to convince his mom. The EMTs had come and checked him out. He followed up with his regular doctor, only because he was a close personal friend of his mom and she would find out if he didn’t. The doctor gave him a clean bill of health. It had taken multiple calls to France to tell his mom the results, but between him and Zelda they were able to convince her not to end her anniversary early and fly back home. 

In truth Jim felt better than he had in years. Probably since back when he was a kid and always felt invincible. The cold had disappeared completely. Even a few of the joint problems he was starting to develop from a life time on his feet and in kitchens were gone. But he couldn’t explain to anyone else what had happened. He could barely understand for himself what Claire had done. 

He went to work the very next day. He wasn’t going to risk Claire panicking again if he missed a second day of work. When he made the food he was pretty sure was for her he put extra care and love into it. To thank her for fixing his cold. And to make sure she knew he was the one making the food. 

It was his third day back when 49B was rocked by a small earthquake. He was born and raised in California. Earthquakes had been a common occurrence throughout his life. This one didn’t even seem that bad. He calmly stepped back from his rack of knives as the room shook and rattled. It seemed to last longer than most small earthquakes he was used to, but soon ended. 

Jim did a quick safety check around the kitchen to make sure nothing important was damaged and helped restack some of the goods in the walk-in freezer. He couldn’t help a feeling of disquiet following the tremor. The feeling lead him to double and triple checking the kitchen. 

There were several more after shocks throughout the day. Each time his feeling of disquiet grew. When he got home he checked the news but didn’t see anything about the tremor. Must have been a localized earthquake, he tried to rationalize. 

He couldn’t shake the feeling though. That there was something off. Something wrong. It could have been his imagination but he swore he could hear someone screaming each time the building shook. None of the other cooks mentioned it or even seemed to notice. Maybe it was someone in the building who wasn’t used to living where earthquakes were frequent?

* * *

Jim sat alone in the empty cafeteria. Another lunch rush come and gone. He sat with his own simple lunch untouched in front of him. There hadn’t been any more earthquakes. But they also hadn’t been reported at all on the news. He pondered this problem while he stared at his food. 

It was Friday. Another week gone past at this new job. He hadn’t any dreams since Claire cured his cold. He was wondering what triggered them. He couldn’t help but think that he might be losing his mind. That his brain was making these dreams appear. His mom would be home tonight, maybe he could talk to her about it. 

As he was thinking with his head down, a few drops of water fell on the table in front of him. He looked up in confusion and almost fell backwards out of his chair. 

A woman he had never seen before was standing in front of him, leaning over the table. She looked like she could be latina, with tan skin and dark brown eyes. Her hair was dark brown as well except for a small strip that was dyed purple. Her hair was also dripping wet, like she had just spent a couple of minutes in the rain. Though it was summer and hadn’t rained in three weeks. 

He smiled at her a little awkwardly. She mimicked his expression. 

“H-hi. Can I hel-”

“Thank you for the fish.” She said. 

“Oh you’re welco-” He hadn’t cooked any fish today. He had cooked a vegan option, and the meat option was beef. There hadn’t been any fish on the menu. The strange woman continued to smile at him, her hair dripping onto the table. He realized she was wearing one of the long lab coats the researchers wore and not much else. “Wait. Claire-?”

The door to the cafeteria slammed open and Jim whipped his head around to look at it. He was pretty sure the two people who walked in were the head of security and the head of research, though he had never spoken to either of them before. He turned back and the woman who had been in front of him was gone. He could see on the floor a trail of small drips leading out a different door. He got up and followed it quickly. Neither of the respective department heads paid him any mind. 

The trail of water lead down the hall and around the corner. He noticed that along with the drips from her hair, there were also small wet footprints. He raced around the corner and saw the trail led into a mechanical room. Inside he found the pump room the other cook had mentioned.

The pump was truly massive. And on the floor there was a small puddle of water and an abandoned labcoat. The back and shoulders of the coat were damp from her hair. 

Jim carefully examined the pump room but didn’t find anything else. The only other sign was one of the access panels on the pump was sitting slightly askew. 

“Claire.” Jim whispered softly. “What are you?”

[junker-town]

Dorktown: The three-ball walk, and other counting failures

We’ve got a new episode of Dorktown for you, as well as a bonus conversation between Jon and Alex about our occasional societal failure to count to four.

Hope you enjoy the above episode of Dorktown! Below is a conversation between Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein about what went into it, as well as a couple of weird things that didn’t quite make it into the script.

Jon: So as we said in the video, we weren’t the first to find this phenomenon of umpires and everyone else getting the count wrong, but you stumbled upon it independently. How did you find it? Was it just in the course of one of the millions of Sports-Reference searches we run?

Alex: Yep! While in the process of working on the Kirby Puckett Dorktown post, I was exploring the percentage of time the batter is ahead in the count or not when home runs are hit. In running this search, thankfully my eyes happened to veer enough to the right of home runs to notice nine walks that occurred with an even count. My eyebrows immediately launched into outer space. Were these walks on 3-3 counts? 2-2 counts? Didn’t know that could happen in baseball! I’m afraid I could not refrain from taking a deep plunge down this rabbit hole.

Jon: I feel like this is how our story selection comes about at least half the time. We’ll be digging around in Stathead looking for Thing A, only to spot something weird or funny that ultimately becomes Thing B. In most cases, Thing B is something we file away in our top-secret list of episode ideas. That’s the case with the next episode of Dorktown we’re working on right now – no spoilers, but it’s all about something we first found about two years ago. We just let it sit for a long time and waited until we had the time and space to tackle it.

Not the case with this one, though! I remember you dropping a wrong count you found into our Dorktown chat, then another, then another. Some of the others in that room, regulars like Graham, Seth and Kofie, were as confounded as I was. I was just like, “man, you want to just put everything else on pause and do this now?” Which you did, so we got going right away. This phenomenon was so damn weird that I just didn’t want to wait.

One thing that folks might find interesting is that story selection process, what it is that makes us give a thumbs-up to a particular project. How would you explain that to somebody? Like, to you, is there a signature quality to a particular story that makes it the kind of thing you know you want to talk about?

Alex: There are a few things that I look to identify from the outset of potential projects. Finding stories of things that simply should not happen I’d say is a common theme — and that can be a very malleable concept. I think this is a good example in that for my entire life I’d taken for granted that anytime a baseball player walked, there must have been four balls, and any time a baseball player was still in the batter’s box, there must not have been four balls. The idea that there’ve been exceptions is hysterical to me. Certainly not a thing that happens every day.

And of course, in telling that story, you look for it to lend itself to the ability to craft charts that underscore just how bizarre what we’re seeing is. I wanna see charts that feature bars towering over others, scatter charts with outliers in their own solar system, etc.

Jon: Yeah, that’s actually a really interesting observation that I don’t think I’ve put into words. A good qualifying question that determines whether or not we talk about something is, “is this gonna pop on a bar chart, scatter plot, timeline, whatever?” It’s all about the outliers. Sometimes we try to fold it into part of a greater narrative, but sometimes it’s just self-evidently worth talking about, like “look at this weird shit.”

Speaking of, we were running a little long on the episode and we ended up largely cutting out something we found pretty damn weird – the phenomenon of so many players being involved in multiple wrong-count incidents, despite those incidents only coming around once in a blue moon. This was really strange. Can you lay it out?

Alex: So the genesis of me noticing this phenomenon originated from a September 2020 Nats-Phillies game. Not only did that game feature a delightful four-ball non-walk, the pitcher involved was actually a position player: super-utility man Brock Holt, on the mound for the second time in his career (meaning catcher is the only position he’s never played).

The first time was actually five days earlier, and he allowed a homer to his first-ever batter faced. But lest you think allowing a first-batter homer would be the most eventful story of Holt’s pitching career, guess again, while carefully observing the count at the time of the pitch to Philly pinch-hitter Mickey Moniak.

Amid my amusement that even the novelty of a position player pitching couldn’t attract enough focus to keep track of the count, it dawned on me that the first baseman in the field at the time was Asdrubal Cabrera, who himself had previously been the beneficiary of a three-ball walk. Not anything noteworthy on its own, but it opened the door for me to realize the weird extent to which there are common bonds within these phantom counts.

Both Cabrera and Logan Forsythe were also in the field for this Max Muncy five-ball walk, then reconnected a few years when each happened to wind up with the Texas Rangers in 2019, where Cabrera batted in front of Forsythe when the latter was victimized by a four-ball non-walk. Forsythe also of course was a central figure during the broadcast when Will Venable wasn’t able to extract a walk out of four balls.There’s also Yunel Escobar and Chris Stewart, plus Kurt Suzuki was the catcher behind the plate for both Escobar plate appearances, though unfortunately the Nats didn’t start him in the Holt/Moniak game.

Speaking of Escobar, in that very first example we show with Jon Jay, Escobar got kicked out of that game a few innings earlier, and was replaced by Forsythe, who was in the field at the time it went down. Oh, and just for fun, our good pal Brandon Guyer took this Randy Choate sinker to the hip a mere 12 minutes prior to that Jay plate appearance.

Jon: That is so bizarre. It’s not the first time in Dorktown history that it’s felt like certain individuals operate on some sort of chaotic frequency that disturbs everything around them.

The last question I have for you concerns what we’ve referred to as The Escobar Incident – that plate appearance in 2014. Losing count and forgetting the pitch existed was funny to begin with, but once they actually put on headsets to review the plate appearance with the league office and STILL got it wrong ... I mean, that’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen in any sport. Do you think this takes the title of Weirdest Thing In Dorktown History? Can you think of anything else we’ve covered that approaches it?

Alex: I think it’s gotta be. Any and all excuses go out the window when you soak up three minutes of everyone’s life to look at six pitches and come away as though you only looked at five pitches. An inability of an entire umpiring crew and MLB suits to count to six within the paused confines of replay review is something that I will forever wonder about. Perhaps the only thing that could come close is if David Bell actually walked on a ONE-ball count in the 3rd inning here, though we chalked that up to perhaps being a ball in play that was mis-recorded. I still hope to one day track down the footage of that game to observe, just in case.