In Which I Ponder the Four Versions of Dayn

We're 15 or so hours away from Dayn Perry's Baseball Prospectus chat, when the normally reclusive (terrified) (of me) Perry pokes his head out to receive the adulation of his public. We're going to be waiting for him, right? We're going to flood him with questions about his imaginary girlfriends and wishing that the Nats crash and burn and his total misunderstanding of the stadium situation. Hell, while we're at it, we may as well express our displeasure with BP in general and make fun of Will Carroll. With the Nats way the hell over on the other side of the country and American Idol bereft of contestants who have slept with Paula Abdul, I've had a lot of time to think about my li'l buddy Dayn, so here's a brief monograph.

As a writer, Dayn has several personae, none of them good. We all know Greasy Pervert Dayn, of course. GP Dayn has gotten most of the press around here, and for good reason. GP's writing is the kind of thing I wouldn't believe if I hadn't seen it. Who can forget this gem?

We make love to the throbbing Tejano beats of the barrio. I adore her for her swarthy charms, nasty inclinations and tamale skills. She adores my money.

That's him fantasizing about dating some actress, in case you need some background. And that's the one without the venereal disease. Then there's what I like to call Talk to the Hand Dayn. TotH Dayn is similar to Greasy Pervert Dayn in that both take their inspiration from Maxim magazine and the Man Show. TotH Dayn is the one that threatens to hit people with a shovel and takes notes during Pepsi commercials.

Less easy to mock is Wannabe Rob Neyer Dayn. Rob Neyer, for those of you unfamiliar, is a perfectly innocuous baseball columnist for ESPN who quite rightly gets credit for introducing sabermetric ideas into the mainstream. When Dayn's trying to write seriously about baseball (picking the A's every year because of Moneyball, starting up to five consecutive sentences with some limp qualifier like "similarly" or "on the other hand"), he sounds like Rob Neyer. It's really dull, and I've lamented before how WRN Dayn limits my opportunities for entertaining invective, especially now that WRN has almost entirely replaced GP and even TotH Dayn. It would be delusional and megalomaniacal of me to claim that this was my doing, so go ahead and say it for me in the comments. Thank you.

Recently, though, Dayn has adopted a new persona, his worst yet: Guy Who Makes Sense About the Nats. I was expecting some real bullshit out of Dayn after his New Year's outburst. But check out the Nats entry from this week's Power Rankings:

Don't be tempted by Cristian Guzman's ten-game hitting streak; he's still lugging around an ungodly .265 OBP. His signing was one of the worst in recent history. In a span of five games, Brad Wilkerson's SLG has dropped from .616 to .505.

Shit, makes sense to me. Last week?

A -12 run differential drops them quite a bit, but there are promising signs here. Vinny Castilla will most assuredly come back to earth, but Nick Johnson has reached base in every game this season, and Brad Wilkerson's playing at an MVP clip. Expect a move upward in the coming weeks.

True and very disturbing. Earlier I accused Dayn of stealing my stuff like I was Bono and he was that little weasely fuck from Coldplay. I hope that's the reason Dayn sounds like this, because it's kind of flattering and the alternatives are much worse. Do I sound like a Neyer wannabe? Or is this whole blog some kind of post-modern literary experiment where it turns out I'm Dayn or Dayn doesn't exist and the whole thing is in my head? So you see how plagiarism is actually a best-case scenario here.

I hope you learned something. See you tomorrow at Baseball Prospectus. Bring your nastiest shit.