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.

Three "Pence" Hits and the Cards are Out

At first glance I thought Pete Kozma was slightly out of position.

Then on the replay of the Hunter Pence's three-run, seeing-eye double in the bottom of the third inning, I thought Kozma got a bad read on batted ball and broke the wrong way, toward third, from his short stop position.

Neither of my observations was correct.

As you can see from the 5,000-frames-per-second super-slow-motion replay and the MLB's animated GIFs, Pence's bat hit the ball and broke. The severed portion of Pence's bat slapped the ball twice more, the third time creating a hellacious spin that sliced the ball slice from Kozma's glove.

"The read I got was that it was going to the hole," Kozma said.

Three runs scored on the play – the runner from first went home on center fielder Jon Jay's throwing error – giving the Giants a commanding 5-0 lead over a Cardinals team, whose hitters over the past three games, became very Yankee-esque.

Pence, whom we learned yesterday rides to work 20-mph on a motorized scooter, of course, didn't see or feel the bat break.

"That's in super-slo-mo. I didn't even feel that," Pence noted. "You couldn't see that with your eye. It broke my bat and I thought I had just stayed inside it. I guess fate just found a way."

So, here's a question… and I'm just thinking out loud here, but… if Major League Baseball had a more extensive replay system, and let's say the Cardinals had coaches in the booth or somewhere looking at the Fox broadcast replay, could the Cards' Manager Mike Matheny had then, to borrow terminology and practice from the NFL, tossed a challenging red flag out of the dugout?

I'm all for replay in baseball, but I'm wondering if that's where we eventually want to go with a replay system.

It turns out, as my good friend (ok, I've never, ever met the guy) Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated explains, MLB rules would have upheld Pence's triple-batted ball.

Verducci explains:

Rule 6.05 (h) states that a batter is ruled out and the play is ruled dead with no advancement by the runners when the batters hits a ball a second time in fair territory. But the rule does include a comment specifically to address the circumstance of a broken bat causing a double hit. It states, “if a bat breaks and part of it is in fair territory and is hit by a batted ball or part of it hits a runner or fielder, play shall continue and no interference called.”