Joes

Thanks to Kei for putting me up on this blog and to Jenni for extending the invitation to contribute. Regrettably I don't believe I have the background in baseball fandom as anyone else who's posted so far, as I mostly stopped paying attention between the strike year of 1994 and last year when my fantasy football leaguemates convinced me to join their basketball and baseball leagues as well. As it is, most of my knowledge of current players stems from the little pictures that appear on their profile pages of Yahoo! Sports. I've found these pictures to be as important an indicator of fantasy value as actual statistics, and they've helped sway decisions on whether or not to pick someone up/target them in trade.

Sometime around six weeks into the basketball season, I was surprised to find that Yahoo! updated the profile photos for everyone. Assuming this will occur as well in baseball and being a Joe myself, I've decided to preserve the images of Joes that I found interesting. In the absence of large easy-to-see photographs, I've attempted to present these in a yearbook-style layout:

Again, my analysis of these players is limited to a year of looking at box scores and their profile images.
José Valverde - I like his rosy cheeks and teddy-bear like demeanor
Joe Blanton - similar young-fat-kid appeal as Bobby Jenks? I needed five images to match the page width
Joel Zumaya - pleasing (but not extraordinary) beard, fastball reaches up to 104MPH, and injured playing Guitar Hero
Adam Jones - wouldn't be a yearbook image without this
Joe Smith - chin and adam's apple appear almost perfectly symmetrical

If I had to choose a favorite player based an appearance, I'd have to go with Max Scherzer of the Arizona Diamondbacks. He doesn't yet have a profile image on Yahoo! so I had to Google image search these:



Apparently he's got heterochromia. I imagine it would be quite unsettling to be standing in the batter's box against him.