It's Giffmas, my friends.

Well, hello there, fine people. My apologies for being gone five days, but I've been pretty swamped with work. Oh, and I was also so damn excited after Wilson Ramos' walk-off HR on Tuesday night that I ran to downtown Rockville to celebrate with the other three Nats fans. We were hooting and hollering, and then it turned into a riot donnybrook pathetic display.
We got all boisterous and flipped over a cop car motorcycle moped. Then we stared lighting huge bonfires sparklers. Fucking good times. I didn't make it home until 11:15, so I was dog tired. No energy for punching the keyboard at all yesterday.

But, I'm back, and today I present to you three Gifs. Two of Mikey Mo*, and one of El-Drew-K. 

(*Bill Simmons-esque footnote! I grew up playing a lot of baseball, and even played in some adult leagues until my shoulder finally gave out. (I play softball occasionally, but it's just not the same without the take-out slides, destroying catchers, and popping greenies and roids.) With this baseball playing, I collected, and used, baseball lingo over the years. "Hitterish" wasn't anything new, but I thoroughly enjoyed it being brought back. What's my point? Well, I'm kicking myself for not using "Mikey Mo" before The Contract® mentioned it. I mean, God dammit, I used "Mikey Mac" for Mike MacDougal, and even "Mikey Rizz" for Mike Rizzo back in '09. How, then, could Werth beat me to something so obvious? Maybe I'm losing it in my old age. Let's see if Jayson can keep up w/the nicknames when he's as old as I am, though. Shiiiit, his nickname for the new center fielder Eury Perez is gonna be "Eury Perez" when he gets to be my age in a couple years.)

Okay, first gif. I noticed last night that Mikey was repeating a motion before stepping into the batters box. It's just to remind him of something in his swing, but hell if it don't look like he's getting down to "Take On Me" like the rest of us.

 

The other two gifs are after the jump, as I don't want anyone's computer locking up loading the gifs from the front page. I mean, I may act like I don't care about you guys, but in truth... I do.

Ahhh.... /sniffles. GROUP HUG, MOTHERTRUCKERS!!!

While I do have a BEAST MODE shirt up for sale in my store, it wasn't my initial BEAST MODE shirt idea. Nope, the first one I was designing looked like this about the time I decided to switch to the current, simpler (rip-offier?) design. I present to you, in another edition of rejected shirt designs, the original Michael Morse BEAST MODE shirt:

 

Yes, it was originally going to be a play off of the old 8-bit video game systems with their "power ups" given to characters. After getting as far as the design above, and showing it to a few folks, I decided it wasn't conveying what I was feeling* enough. The two regular Morses and two BEAST MODE Morses just didn't seem to show the "power up" effect to the folks looking at it. Which brings me to my next gif, which is lamely just the two Morses on the shirt. Yup, I'm making you look at a crappy-ass gif to appease my artistic* side. This is what I imagined people thinking when they saw the shirt. Apparently I'm useless at this medium. 

 

(* Please punch me in my douchey face for using those terms above. Thank you.)

And, finally ("Yay! Get off the stage, bozo!") we have Mr. Filthy, El-Drew-K, The Fur-Faced Assassin, Senior Ciento himself, Drew Storen. The pitch he threw to strike out Franklin Gutierrez last night was just down right sick. I mean, like, sweaty forehead, green-skinned, stinky pukey-lips sick. Check out the two-seamed fastball below, paying particular attention to the "Oh. My. God." late movement on it.

 

 
 

  When he threw it last night, I turned to my lady friend and asked if that was a "fucking screwball." But, it flashed 95 MPH, so there went that idea. Nope, this was just good old fashioned heat with the most fantastic movement I've ever seen*.

(*Full disclosure: To say I love Drew might be the truth. To say his breaking balls (when on) are great is also the truth. But I've never seen this movement on his fastball before. It reminds me of Daniel Bard's insane two seamer, but I must admit I can't make a decision on whose is better without my bias getting in the way. Sorry, Drew! I'll buy you a sno-cone to make it up to you?)

So, you can call that fastball anything you want, "good," "great," "the best," whatever. Me, though? I'mma call it "Fur Boots." Why? Cause all fur boots do is make you look like stupid, just like this pitch will if you're the batter.