Frame it: GIF is Your Word of the Year!

Associated Press

As far as the English language is concerned, the word – or acronym, really – GIF is extremely young.

Having been coined in 1987, the term is used to describe a file for looping images to create a short, simple animation. GIFs have gotten so popular on the Internet recently that Oxford University Press on Monday named "GIF" its Word of the Year for 2012.

"The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace,” said Katherine Martin, head of the US Dictionaries Program at Oxford University Press USA in a press statement.

GIFS certainly have been popular on baseball blogs and websites the past several months. How many times did you watch the GIF of Hunter Pence's broken bat "triple-double" from the National League Championship Series?

Addicting, isn't it?

Well, here's something else to latch your eyes to: Ben Lindbergh at Baseball Prospectus has written an excellent article, complete with eye-popping GIFS, demonstrating Jose Molina's extraordinary knack for framing pitches. Those framings, some of which on pitches that were more than a foot and a half outside the strike zone and still called strikes, led to the catcher, according to a Baseball Prospectus statistic, saving a total of 50 runs for the Rays this season.

Now, that's value.

The lengthy article and the GIFS, which must have taken a lot of time and patience to construct, are well worth your time. It's the type of brilliant baseball nerdery I love reading, but never in a million years could ever write.