Author Archive

Nickname Seeks Former Player: “Museum of Questionable Medical Devices”

What we are doing is assigning cool nicknames to players rather than the opposite, which is a bloodless tradition that has been with us too much and too long.

So how does this running feature differ from the dear, departed exemplar of the genre? “Nickname Seeks Player” was devoted to active base-ball-ists, while “Nickname Seeks Former Player” is the province of those who no longer play this fine game because they are dead in spirit and perhaps also dead in the corporeal sense. Boileryard Clarke? Eligible! Sal Maglie? Eligible! Fred Lynn? Eligible! Dontrelle Willis? Eligible!

You may surmise from this that almost the entire sprawl of baseball history lies before you, like a sexy patient etherized upon a table. So prepare yourself to plumb both depths and heights as we ponder fitting candidates for this week’s name to nicked: “Museum of Questionable Medical Devices”!

Implications and Intimations

The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices was an actual place in, as you might have already guessed, Minnesota, where love is made without ceasing. That there was ever a real thing called the Museum of Questionable Medical devices is to be celebrated as unceasingly as love is made in Minnesota. But what of the nick ‘o name “Museum of Questionable Medical Devices?

It calls to mind leeches and liquor-as-anesthesia and bone saws. It calls to mind a base-ball-ist who was tough enough to have played despite having an amputation wound field-dressed before continuing to fight on for God and country. Or perhaps he seems the embodiment of something a phrenologist would use to false-cure a desperately ill member of a Western-Ohio temperance league.

With those guidelines foremost in your mind, please do nominate the dead or retired.

So who, citizens of sufficient origins, should be nicknamed “Museum of Questionable Medical Devices”?


Nickname Seeks Player: Vote on “Iago’s Balls”

The nomination process, which was a thicket of sexy possibilities, is now complete. In accordance with established standards, empaneled racists have whittled the list down to a manageable ledger of 10, from which you are to choose the one most worthy of the nickname “Iago’s Balls.” Remember: This player is not only evil, like Iago, but also foul-smelling, like Iago’s hairy giggle-beans.

So, those who quarter soldiers in peacetime, you may now cast ballots on who — or what! — should forevermore be nicknamed “Iago’s Balls” …


Thank you for exercising the franchise.


The Lion in Winter, Roaring Still

Think of anything that challenges your moderating instincts, any signifier of the good life lived. Whatever that thing is, Dick Allen was through with it before you knew what to do with it.

Now shut up, sit down, genuflect, and watch as your better heaves a ceremonial first pitch for a strike as effortlessly as he once flicked aside mewling baby racists during the Hale, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Hale Administrations …

And now a relevant excerpt from Philip Kaufman’s screenplay “The Right Stuff,” adapted from the Tom Wolfe opus of the same name:

Unknown: Is that a man?
Jack Ridley: You damn right it is.

Wampum.


Nickname Seeks Player: Iago’s Balls

What we have done is assign cool nicknames to players rather than perpetuate the tired, lamewad practice of assigning cool players nicknames. This is the last time we shall do this. Why, multitudes ask? Because we shall soon introduce a new, equally insipid series called “Nickname Seeks Former Player.”

First, though, another glance at our Hall of Honouur, which is so stately, so regal, so much itself a celebration of the Norman Conquest, that an extra British-English unstressed “u” is required for proper spelling …

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Nickname Seeks Player: Nominate the Final Nickname

What we have been doing is assigning cool nicknames to players rather than perpetuating the tired, lamewad practice of assigning cool players nicknames. We will soon stop doing this because all things — even things like this which are hopelessly played out and have been driven remorselessly into the ground — must come to an end. But not before one last dance, my love!

First, though, another glance at our Hall of Honouur, which is so stately, so regal, so much itself a celebration of the Norman Conquest, that an extra British-English unstressed “u” is required for proper spelling …

Read the rest of this entry »


The Twitter Habits of Derek Holland

Rangers baseball pitcher Derek Holland seems like a lovely young man. Part of that loveliness — a necessary part, I would submit — is that his Twitter predilections are as nude of airs and fronts as something that is just … nude, with silly, floppy genitals brandished like … something silly and floppy that has been brandished.

Witness:

You know who follows McDonald’s on Twitter? Yes, exactly: a gentleman secure in his tastes and station. Now let us McD.L.T.


Advice for the Outraged Internet Sports Commenter

While what follows does not apply to Algonquin Roundtable/Bloomsbury Group that is the NotGraphs commenting collective, it does apply to those who inhabit more brutish corners of This Our Internet.

Does that guy’s multiyear contract make you scream at your children? Is the latest outrage outrageous? Do all-caps value judgments make your heart and loins leap? Should pretty much everyone on that team go to jail? Were you serious about what you just said? Would you be able to play through that injury … for free? Can you discern a political morality play in a humpback liner? Do you have racist dreams?

Then this is for you …


Poem: Drinking with Boileryard Clarke

Boileryard, you’ve risen above things,
But you’ll never be above
Slipping into the accent of
A tenement Catholic
Who brawls over gruel,

Who wanders over a brick-strewn lot
Where the tobacconist’s burned down.
Where the indigent defeated now
Fuck like choleric bears.

A name like that means
You weren’t fated to greatness
But to rankest survival,
By dint of knuckled guts.

But enough of that.
Shall we alight from safe places,
Have too much absinthe
and insult a colonel?

Who needs a heart
When you’ve got a spleen
With a vena cava?

We’ll promise to bury you
At Druid Ridge, but only if you promise
Not to outlive that snarl.

For your pecker is a grinder’s wheel.
For your balls are a civil war.

But this, Boileryard,
This is a hymn.


Brian McCann Glimpses the Unthinkable

Abhorrence of Abhorrences lurking behind the potted palm, Brian McCann sees you. If it’s any consolation, Abhorrence of Abhorrences, you are absolutely as mortifying as you think you are. At least to the quaking likes of Brian McCann …

Know this, Brian McCann: whatever you have seen is absolutely not as scared of you as you are of it.

(Thanks to MockSession for the initial image and, thus, the walking tour of the abyss.)


The “W.J.” Anthology Grows

The tenured reader — glistening from freshly completed coitus and trying to remember where he placed his fashion eyewear once passions overtook him — will recall this writer’s enthusiasm for one W.J. Slattery, crafter of prose and invader of boudoirs.

It so happens that, in the process of utilizing the best and most emergent features of the HotBot search engine, I stumbled upon one W.J. O’Connor, who shares not only leading initials with Mr. Slattery but also a dedication to the muscular prose of better days. Mr. O’Connor had this to say of a certain game in 1917, when men were men and women were, at best, “handsome” and “well preserved.” Writeth Mr. O’Connor:

“He [Johnson] first fielded it with his chest, and knocked it silly at his feet. He then laid a prehensile paw on the pill and came up with ample time to assist [George] Sisler with the out. But he suddenly lost his prehensileness, and tossed the ball over his shoulder like a superstitious person throwing salt to avoid a fight.”

Yes indeed, Mr. O’Connor. Yes indeed …