Before we write a post at Baseball Prospectus about a Joe Maddon eccentricity, we always run it through the Joe Maddon Newsworthiness Checklist, adapted from a similar checklist useful to many entertainment reporters. Let's see whether this GIF of Joe Maddon having an actual conversation with a fan in the middle of play during the bottom of the sixth inning of a one-run game Monday applies.

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A few days before the season started, I wrote about Marlins manager Mike Redmond’s decision to consider batting Placido Polanco in the cleanup slot. Most of the article was about where Polanco would rank among historically terrible cleanup hitters, but it ended with this:

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You could have an intro here, or we could go straight to the sweet and sexy pitches. Nobody pays for the intro (literally, in the case of BP's paywall), so forget the intro. To the pitches!

3. Matt Moore, fastball, against Asdrubal Cabrera, in which Moore eagerly unveils the new slider he's been working on; "guys," he tells everybody before he throws it, "it's such a swell slider, sliding all over the place and real hard like, so I can use it on two strikes and it'll break way out of the zone and batters will swing at it because they don't anticipate how much it's going to slide," upon which Moore proceeds to throw it and everybody tells him that, as far as sliders go, it actually breaks the wrong way, that clearly Moore is doing it wrong, sending Moore into a funk until he figures "ah shucks to it all, I'm going to throw it anyway."

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Benny: The sandlot was in a rough part of the San Fernando Valley. It wasn’t a great place to live, but it wasn’t on fire or anything either.
Smalls: It’s the kind of place that your parents are proud to be able to move the family to, but that you’re real glad to move away from later on in life.
Timmy: Me and my brother Repeat found the sandlot. We lived in the house right up behind it.
Repeat: Our parents hated that field. It was always covered with trash and dirty underwear from the hobos.
Hobo: It was a real good sandlot for hoboing in.
Repeat:  But we never played much ball at first. Then one day we had to find something to do to keep busy for the day.
Squints: My dad drank a lot. And back then it was just basically accepted that adults would hit their kids.
Benny: Such a weird time.
Squints: Such a weird, weird time. Not idyllic like in the movies at all.
Repeat: So we needed a place where Squints could hang out until his dad drank himself to sleep.
Benny: There were only six of us at the time: me, Ham, Timmy, Repeat, Squints, and Bertram, and the others came later. We couldn’t decide what to do. Timmy and Repeat thought they had figured out how to go the speed of light.
Timmy: Mixing water and electricity.
Benny: So they wanted to run experiments in the bathtub with a bunch of curling irons and transistor radios.
Repeat: I didn’t want to do that, but I was locked into a bad cycle at the time of just repeating everything my brother said.
Ham: I wanted to shoot guns.
Benny: Everybody had guns back then. Kids just had guns. So weird, that time.
Bertram: We were going to get two BB rifles and then see if we could shoot two BBs into each other. Two guys facing each other and firing at the same time at each other.
Ham: And if the BBs hit they would smash up.
Repeat: I actually wanted to shoot guns, too. But, again, the repeating thing.
Benny: And Squints wanted to go to the library and pretend to have a seizure.
Squints: And when the librarian comes to resuscitate me I touch her on the boob.
Hobo: I just wanted to get a few quarters together and buy a drink.
Benny: And I wanted to play baseball.
Ham: And Benny always got what he wanted.

***

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One of the most controversial scouting practices is the use of The Good Face. Ken Funck once wrote about The Good Face in these very pages: 

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On Saturday, one of the most electric young arms in baseball faced one of the best in-his-prime hitters in baseball. Shelby Miller's Cardinals came out of it with a win over Buster Posey's Giants, but the matchups between Posey and Miller were more interesting than just an outcome. 

Pre-existing narratives
Posey, the 2012 MVP, received his award before the game Saturday. Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Jeff Kent, and Kevin Mitchell were in attendance to take part in the ceremony. Posey’s 172 OPS+ led the NL in 2012, and is the second-highest ever for a catcher.

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