IT'S "FORMAN ET FILS" ONCE AGAIN

Sean F.'s unerring eye

We are holding back one more day on the Ptolemaic MVP (it's best to have those results absolutely "fresh" in the mind when the officious--oops, that's "official"--announcement is made on Thursday...and we know that the average attention span in America has atrophied by 19% in the past twenty years--almost 1% a year, the pundits wail...!), so consider this to be our hedge against mental deflation.

NOT Mrs. Forman...at least not Sean's
"Mrs."--though she is named "Forman,"
and the kid (now out and available at stores
near you...) was named "Sean."

In lieu of that, we will dance like a Cossack while trying to avoid a fate that involves swimming with the fishes, and take this opportunity to announce that we are finally going back to describing the indispensable Baseball Reference site as Forman et fils. (No, we don't think Mrs. Forman has just emerged from the delivery room: this change involves professional personnel, not tiny folk in search of swaddling clothes.)

Those who have been paying attention (ahem...) will recall that we dropped the "s" on "fils" despite its grammatical/phraseological (and, let's face it, political) incorrectness when we learned that the employee roster had been trimmed awhile back. (In fact, our information was incorrect as well: the total number of B-R personnel did not decline down to just two. Our apologies for having created this misrepresentation.)

Since it has come to our attention that a few fey folk (in the usual fey locations...) were suggesting that this monicker was due to a less-than-ept mastery of foreign language construction, we are delighted that Sean F. has brought more folk into his fold so that we can officially remedy this perceived gaffe with (uncharacteristic) good cheer.

Note to Darren Viola: kindly
cue up the John Cale track...

Of course, we could greet this welcome "new hire" news with a laundry list of items that need to be implemented in order to make the pre-eminent sports stat site into something even greater (possibly even post-eminent), but that's something that should be handled in a different way--possibly by the denizens at the Baseball Think Factory, where crusty Tango Love Pie™curmudgeons can launch more posts than Rossana Podesta as Helen of Troy: an extended "want list" created by committee would be a lot more useful to the number-ist baseball community than all that neo-sabe "sword and sandal" sophistry.

So, congrats to the new "sons of Sean"--may they take us even deeper into the data than we had ever dreamed possible. The brave new world of baseball knowledge is, as Mr. T.S. Eliot once noted, "...spread out before us /Like a patient etherised upon a table." So go for it, Forman et fils--we beseech you to help rouse us from our collective stupor...