If you read through my archives or listen to me talk for any decent length of time, you'll probably read or hear me say one or several times the phrase "There's something to be said for ... ." You know, there's something to be said for making your own ice cream. There's something to be said for having a cat on your lap. There's something to be said for batting your best hitter second overall.

I thought I would make a nonexhaustive list of the things for which there is nothing to be said.

1. Intentional walks
2. Beanball wars
3. Yuniesky Betancourt
4. Coors Light, especially at the ballpark
5. The All-Star Game mattering
6. Draft pick compensation limits
7. Hazing rookies using imagery that implies that to be female is to be lesser
8. The fake-to-third, throw-to-first move
9. Moral judgements based on on-field results
10. Fans running onto the field
11. The eight-man bullpen
12. Getting all uptight about asking an innocent softball question about beer
13. Teddy Roosevelt

More from y'all?

I don't think enough attention is being paid to what Adam Dunn is doing right now. I wrote about it once before, but that was more than a month ago, and it's only gotten stranger since then.

 Yesterday afternoon, Dunn went four plate appearances without putting a ball in play: one walk, three strikeouts. The walk was his 53rd of the year, the strikeouts his 102nd through 104th, He leads the AL in walks and leads all of baseball in homers (by one) and strikeouts (by very many). The White Sox have played 40.7% of their scheduled 2012 games, and if you prorate Dunn's numbers out on that basis, he's on pace for 56 homers, 130 walks, and 255 strikeouts -- that last number is nearly 15% higher than Mark Reynolds' existing single-season record of 223.

If you're into the Three True Outcomes, you've got to love what Dunn's doing. According to South Side Sox two days ago, Dunn's 62.5% TTO would shatter the current record (58.2%, set by Jack Cust in 2007); of course, his 100% performance on Sunday helped, and he's now up to 63.1%. Must be tempting for, say, a left fielder to mentally sit a play out whenever Dunn steps to the plate, knowing that there's only about a 1-in-3 chance that any one of the nine gloves on the field will end up being necessary.

Thanks to the strikeouts and a .279 BABIP, Dunn's batting just .227 -- but the full slash comes out to .227/.372/.572. His 150 wRC+ and roughly 151 OPS+ are both eighth in the AL, No hitter has ever accumulated enough plate appearances to qualify for a batting title with a batting average under .230 and an OPS above .900 (the closest would be Carlos Pena's 2009, at .227/.893); Dunn's at .954. No hitter has ever managed an OPS+ of even 135 with a batting average below .230; Dunn's over 150.

I think a lot of us expected a nice return to form from Dunn this year, but he's less "back to" his old self than he is "portraying a ludicrous caricature of" his old self. He's doing good things in a way that no one else has quite been able to do them before, and I have no idea if it can be sustained, but it's been a lot of fun so far. 

-Bill

Hey, thanks to Craig Calcaterra at Hardball Talk, we at The Platoon Advantage have identified yet another suspected plagiarist.  Sadly, this plagiarist is just a measly blogger; some punk kid named Murray Chass who probably writes from his mom’s basement.

Chass wrote about what he saw as a burgeoning conspiracy to hold back information about whether Mike Piazza used “PE”Ds until after the Hall of Fame vote:

Maybe Simon & Schuster has innocently planned the Piazza publication for soon after the announcement for marketing purposes, but it might just as easily have agreed to a post-election publication to insure that the book would not keep Piazza out of the Hall.

If, on the other hand, the book includes a steroids admission, all I can say is shame on Piazza and his publisher. With that possibility in mind, though, the voters would be wise to withhold their votes from Piazza until a future election. He will have 14 more chances.

Now, Chass’ evidence that Piazza used “PE”Ds has never consisted of anything more than seeing the catcher’s back acne in the locker room when he was playing.  And now the timing of this book, which, as Craig pointed out this morning, comes out just before Spring Training, when virtually every single other baseball book is published.  If you’ve read The Common Man’s work, you know what he thinks of people who toss around steroid allegations (or insinuations) without evidence, and who advocate for not voting for HOF players based on that lack of evidence.

The Common Man thinks those people are probably using this controversy to distract the world from their ongoing unsuccessful attempts to prove they aren’t plagiarists.  We see through you, Murray Chass.  We know what you’re trying to do.  But you can’t make us forget that you’re suspected of plagiarizing every single thing you ever wrote for the venerable New York Times.  Prove the widely held suspicions that you’re a plagiarist (a conclusion we’ve come to based on the same evidence you use against Piazza) wrong, and maybe we’ll take your non-accusations seriously.

And around the rest of the league:

On Tuesday night, I tweeted* that it seemed the Red Sox/Marlins game had been on for "like six hours now." Always a fan of hyperbole, it was more a statement to the fact that Mark Buehrle was pitching in a game that was now over the three-hour mark. While most understood the point I was making, @rRaindog63 (also known as Bill outside of cyberspace, a quick Googlin' tells me) felt the need to challenge by hyperbolized comment with one of his own:

@CeeAngi In part, you can thank the D.H. rule for that. And once they add Instant Replay to every other play, the games will get even slower

— Bill Miller (@Raindog63) June 13, 2012

I feel like I know Bill well after reading his 140 character self-description of himself. Bill is a father, a Mets fan, a history teacher turned librarian, and a writer. I'm not sure which library he works at, so I can't confirm he's actually a librarian, nor have I read anything he's ever written—but let's assume all of these things are true, including the Mets fan part. Small sample size, but Bill is wearing a Mets hat in his Twitter avatar, so let's assume that Bill does, in fact, watch the Mets and by proxy more National League baseball (Bill, if you're listening, since you're in Greenville, South Carolina, you should go check out the Drive, the Class A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox and their ballpark that is a replica of Fenway Park).

When my grandfather passed away last spring, the family had to clear out and sell the wonderful little house in northern Virginia that he had lived in (with my grandmother, until 2008) since sometime in the sixties. Among the few things that I ended up with, being the baseball guy, was my pick of whatever I thought was salvageable of a large, worn stack of sports magazines that had belonged to my dad and uncle -- primarily SPORT Magazine, with some Sports Illustrateds, Sporting Newses and Athlon Baseball Season Previews mixed in -- with dates ranging from 1963 to 1969. 

I ended up keeping most of them, and I've been saving them in a stack in my basement, sure I would want to look through them and write about them eventually. And I'm still sure I will, but what brought them to mind just now was this: when they focused on baseball (as most issues did, with much less competition in those days), their covers were dominated by two men. Two men who, by that time, were old news. 

Start with any given issue of SPORT (or so it seemed to me -- what follows is an exaggeration, but seriously, I'm not far off; check the actual list here), and Willie Mays might be on the cover. The next month, it was probably Mickey Mantle, then the month after that, it could be Mantle again. Then maybe there's a month where it's Hank Aaron or Sandy Koufax or something about football or boxing. Then Mantle again, then Mays again. Mantle and Mays were plainly the two stars in all of sports at that time. And the bulk of the magazines I have are from 1966 through '68, when both were fifteen-plus-year veterans in their mid-thirties -- Mantle was essentially done, and Mays was pretty clearly slipping.

I bring this up because Jeff Sullivan has written a characteristically good piece over at SBNation, titled "Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, And What's Sadly Fleeting," in which he likens baseball fandom's current relationship with Bryce Harper and Mike Trout to the early, "discovery" stages of a romantic relationship, and -- more illustratively, I thought -- to something called the Three Bite Rule:

The first bite you have of something is the best. The second bite confirms the first bite, the third bite is to be savored, and then it all comes down. After three bites, whatever it is isn't special anymore. The rule seems a wee bit simplistic, but, in general, it's easy to believe.

It is, and I think in most cases, it's right on. Great new things seem to fascinate us less because they're great than because they're new, and once we're used to them, they could be just as great as ever, but they become a lot less interesting. And that's probably going to be true for Trout and Harper, too. 

Probably, but not necessarily. And I'd like to think about another possibility for a second. What if it's Mantle and Mays all over again?

Gaaaah!  The Common Man’s computer was a common piece of crap this morning and ate all of his work on the Thursday Morning Cram Session. And on such a historic night too!  TCM is livid.  Anyway, here’s an abbreviated version, since The Common Man has an 8:00 meeting this morning:

Pitcher of the Night: Matt Cain, Perfect Game, 14 Ks

What a terrific performance.  You can slag on the Astros all you want, but that shouldn’t take anything away from Matt Cain.  Nor does TCM buy the notion that no-hitters and perfect games are becoming less special today.  It’s essentially the pinnacle a pitcher can reach in any given game; it’s impossible for them to do better, so the relatively few guys who achieve it deserve to, and will continue to be celebrated.  As TCM wrote in his guide to perfect games after the Humber perfecto, this relative explosion of no-hitters and perfect games is due to an increase in opportunity (there are more teams, and more games than there were for much of baseball history), a downturn in offense (which is cyclical, and will eventually reverse itself) and more strikeouts and better defense around the league.  But all that doesn’t change the fact that Matt Cain is an absolute beast.

By far the best thing to come out of last night was Bryce Harper’s Q&A after hitting a monster home run in Toronto last night. One reporter asked him if he was going out for a celebratory beer afterwards, since he’s of legal drinking age in Canada. Harper, rightly, refused to answer the question. But then he followed it up with the now famous, “That’s a clown question, bro.” Other pressing clown questions:

Me: Hey Bryce, how many people are you going to fit into that VW Beetle?Bryce Harper: That's a clown question, bro.

— The Common Man (@commnman) June 13, 2012

Me: Hey Bryce, wanna smell my boutonniere?Bryce Harper: That's a clown question, bro.

— The Common Man (@commnman) June 13, 2012

Me: Hey Bryce, what's funnier, a pie in the face, or seltzer?Bryce Harper: That's a clown question, bro.

— The Common Man (@commnman) June 13, 2012

Me: Hey Bryce, will you come to my son's birthday party?Bryce Harper: That's a clown question, bro.

— The Common Man (@commnman) June 13, 2012

Me: Hey Bryce... Bryce Harper: Bro,twitpic.com/9vzdiy

— The Common Man (@commnman) June 13, 2012

Me: Hey Bryce, you gonna play that? Bryce Harper: That's a Homey the Clown question, bro.

— The Common Man (@commnman) June 13, 2012

Me: Hey Bryce, what can you do for me?Bryce Harper: That's a brown question, bro.

— The Common Man (@commnman) June 13, 2012

Me: Hey Bryce, how do I get out of this box?Bryce Harper: Bro, that's more of a mime question, actually.

— The Common Man (@commnman) June 13, 2012

Me: Hey Bryce, how do I get out of this box?Bryce Harper: Bro, that's more of a mime question, actually.

— The Common Man (@commnman) June 13, 2012

Incidentally, Bryce Harper's clown name is Droopy BonBon the Clown, according to the Clown Name Generator. Ok, on to last night's action:

Sorry that so many of us have been away for so long, and posting has been light lately on The Platoon Advantage.  There's been a lot of upheaval in all of our lives, and we're getting through it.  But The Common Man figures it's time for a new feature, that we'll try to do every weekday here on TPA: The Cram Session.

This is where The Common Man crams everything that happened last night that you need to know about into predetermined categories.  Hence the name.  What are these categories, and what will this look like?  So glad that you asked.  Behold!

Pitcher of the Night: Josh Johnson

Boston’s pitching may stink, but its offense is top notch, so The Common Man will take Johnson’s 7 strong innings with 7 strikeouts, and just a run, a walk and four hits allowed over Ivan Nova’s seven shutout innings over Atlanta.  After scuffling through his first six starts of 2012 (0-3, 6.61 ERA), Johnson has been his old self (3-1, 2.95).  He’s been especially tough in his last two turns, striking out 16 and allowing just 3 runs in 14.2 innings.

When I got the offer from Henry Holt of a review copy of "an extremely readable page-turner that is part biography and part in-depth reporting on the way Ozzie [Guillen] approaches baseball and life inside the dugout and out," by Rick Morrissey, well, how do you say no to that? I don't know, maybe I should have.

Let's evaluate some of the claims made in the advertising copy:

• extremely readable? Very much so. It feels like a newspaper column, and newspaper columns are not known for their daring experiments in style and form. The book is mainly made up of quotes, many from Ozzie (as the book calls him, not "Guillen") himself, and many from certain players, from Kenny Williams, the White Sox GM, and occasionally from other writers.
  
  The thing is, I'm not sure "extremely readable" is a virtue for me. I like to be challenged a little bit more than Morrissey did in this book. That's a personal view, though. Maybe when you're reading baseball non-fiction, you want it to go down easy, to get at the information the book is conveying more than the experience of reading it. If so, then I'd chalk "extremely readable" up in the plus column.

Remember when I wrote about how we should leave other fans alone when they're doing basically anything? How it's really silly to get frustrated or superior about someone saying dumb things or doing The Wave?

Well, I'm about to take a brave stance and put another item into the carve-outs of behavior that we are allowed to judge: this stuff. If you really feel very strongly about not clicking a link: basically, Craig Calcaterra noticed that Jon Rauch re-tweeted a bunch of people on Twitter saying horrendous things to him (Rauch) after he (Rauch) gave up a walk-off homer to Russell Martin.