Please, over-sexed readers, compare and contrast the following entities.

Austria-Hungary …

Vis-à-vis Astros who are hungry …

Similarities? Differences? Pleasing felicities? I count thousands. You?

Mercifully presented without comment, the Meme-ing of Yuniesky Betancourt …

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! Dave Parker? For the ladies!

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: “You Shall Die From It Or With It”!

Before we proceed, though, let us remember those who have previously survived this crucible of sturdy ghosts. Last time out, John Rocker and Curt Schilling tied in the balloting for “I Denounce This Man.” I broke said tie by voting for Rocker because who gives a shit. So John Rocker and his World Net Daily columns shall forever be known as such.

So now let us — snifters in hand, cardigans beswaddling our mortal parts — gaze upon The Fireside Mantel of Reposed Fortune-Hunters:

“Museum of Questionable Medical Devices” – Ted Williams
“A Garbage Truck That Runs on Lightning” – Matt Stairs
“Colonel Sanders’s Drinking Buddy” – Charlie Manuel
“America’s Step-Dad” – John Olerud
“Man vs. Bible” – Carl Everett
“Actual, Literal Brick Shithouse” – John Kruk
“I Denounce This Man” – John Rocker

And now … “You Shall Die From It Or With It”!

Implications and Intimations

While driving around the streets of Chicago U.S.A. in my luxury motorcar, I heard a radio interview with a gentleman who helms an association dedicated to the eradication of an awful disease that shall remain nameless. He said of that disease and those it afflicts: “You either die from it or with it.”

This raised a necessary question: Which former ballplayer do you die from or, failing that, die with before you can die from? Please note that this phenomenon — dying from an incurable someone or dying with an incurable someone before that incurable someone can snuff you out — can absolutely be a good thing. “Look at him play baseball. The beauty of it,” you might say. “I want him to be the cause of my extinction.”

Or it can be because he is a baseball disease to which you succumb while in hospice or from which you will be spared only in the event that a thief shoots you in the lungs or I cut you down with my luxury motorcar.

So who, citizens of sufficient origins, should be nicknamed “You Shall Die With It Or From It”?

There is no ballplayer named Ptolemy Beans Doogan-Beans.

The urchin will sell no more newspapers.

The gentleman, otherwise fulfilled in his life and work, will soon be known to all as “patient zero.”

The archbishop now doubts his own certainties.

The wife looks up from the dishes and knows at once she cherishes nothing.

The man sits at the formica table and stares. He is waiting for the gloaming to advance across the yard.

What else is he to do?

She attributes the awful thing the boy said to the caprices of youth. He will say it to her again in 20 years.

The man rises for work each morning in the same way that the tides are yoked to the moon.

At this one moment, all across what was Gaul no one is making love. Not even her.

The wine has turned.

At the market, he thought for a moment he saw his dead father. He knew then he would not mail the letter.

He maintains the affair because it is a different drudgery.

She decides to tell her grandfather that she’s heard all his stories before.

Look at your own face: Are you not a Walker Evans subject?

At the tavern, it is late, and all the glasses are empty.

For there is no ballplayer named Ptolemy Beans Doogan-Beans.

Alive or dead, there is no Ptolemy Beans Doogan-Beans.

Sorry, Bobo Polaroids or whatever your name is, but Brian Harper is going to have to take this call …

It might be regarding the waterfront development project, or it might be regarding one of the countless opportunities for high-level arbitrage of which Brian Harper chronically avails himself. Just know that Brian Harper needs to talk business right the crap now. You can snap your little Donruss picture or whatever the hell this is all about later, but right now Brian Harper is seeing to the business of taking a business telephone call regarding the dollars.

“What do you think I should do?” Brian Harper is asking of his broker or minority partners. It’s a rhetorical query, of course. For Brian Harper knows exactly what the shit he’s going to do, and that’s because when the subject is U.S. American business, Banknotes Harper is the final word on the last word. “That’s what you think I should do?” says Banknotes. “Fuck you. Do the opposite.”

Banknotes Harper knows his way around a racket much like he knows his way around the sex closet at the American Airlines Admirals Club at … well, pick your hub airport of choice and Banknotes Harper knows his way around the sex closet at the American Airlines Admirals Club at that particular hub airport.

Baseball, you see, is but a revenue stream for Brian Harper. Buck Banknotes takes the money he makes from baseball and plows the shit right back into kick-ass interest-bearing vehicles that nobody even knows about yet. Maybe this call is about that. “Pay down the principal?” Brian Harper Buck Banknotes is wont to say. “I’m the principal, and I’m calling you to my office so as to beat your cheeks with a wooden paddle. Dollars.”

When not parking his Duesenberg in his heated garage, Lord God Cabbage Brian Harper is parking ducats in interest-bearing offshore accounts that no one even knows about yet — this is ground-level shit — and realizing boundless capital gains before the next call comes in. And the calls are always coming in. “Margin call?” Coin Skins Mazumah Brian Harper often says. “Call me back on my cutting-edge portable horn when your margins are sufficient to waste my time trying to talk treasure to the hairy treasure chest.”

Brian Harper would tell you it’s just going to be a moment, but it’s not going to be a moment. “Time is money?” Bread Property Doubloons Brian Harper says to you, even though you didn’t say “Time is money” to him.

Then he says something else about a pending stop-limit order, at which point you decide to go take Tim Laudner’s picture instead.

When it comes to fighting his own battles, above-it-all Aaron Sele can scarcely be bothered. If he happens to prod and poke George Bell to the point of brandishing soup-bones, then, well, perhaps someone else more comfortable with the thankless toil of beating ass will do above-it-all Aaron Sele’s work for him. Luckily for above-it-all Aaron Sele, Mo Vaughn, whose chest is a barrel made of boulders and also filled with boulders, is preternaturally delighted by the prospect of taking out the trash …

Have we just witnessed an example of “taking out the trash” or “making love the Mo Vaughn way”? Yes.

Most of all, file under “Classic Fu*king Brawls.”

Do not blame Greg Luzinski for being a killing machine: For he is but a hostage to his factory settings. The pits of his eyes are pellucid only at the moment of the kill. Stare into them — moments before he makes a deadly cudgel out of one of your de-socketed limbs — and you see nothing more than the clicks, clangs, grinds and clatters of an industrial sense of mission. It follows, then, that Greg Luzinski is a killing machine.

As you might imagine, he is amoral in the extreme. The sense of compunction he feels at the clinically detached slaying of, say, a grandmother who has finally come to believe that, insofar as Publisher’s Clearinghouse is concerned, the fix is in; or the child who witnesses the indiscretion of a diplomat; or the shareholder who is too promiscuous with grievances toward the board fails to register on even the most finely tuned instruments of detection. It follows, then, that Greg Luzinski is a killing machine.

Depending on circumstances and externalities, Greg Luzinski’s Boolean programming commands him to kill with a muzzle-loading firearm or the cutlass he wears on his hip or the nearest load-bearing beam. Failing those, he will use his barrel-hinge knuckles to choke the insurrectionist until his isthmus of a throat turns to blood and dust.

Do not blame Greg Luzinski for the warehoused pallets of the over-murdered. You’d just as soon blame the tempest for the ship’s wreckage. Greg Luzinski’s one and only locus presses him onward, and so he annihilates by rote.

The only reason Greg Luzinski isn’t taking back the streets at this moment is that he never surrendered those streets in the first place. Another reason is that he isn’t taking back the streets is that those who mind his switches haven’t yet received written orders — signed in triplicate — instructing them to command Greg Luzinski to take back the streets. But if they do, he will. And don’t you know the storm drains shall be choked with a thickset gumbo of human organs.

Greg Luzinski, you see, is a killing machine.

This is a photo …

This is a caption of said photo, with red arrow helpfully added …

And this is the day you learned of a man — a base-balling man — named Lean Boswell.

As droned on about at torturous length during the most recent Perry-Cistulli Hootenanny of the Preposterous, history teaches us that Pope Stephen VII tried the decaying corpse of Pope Formosus way back yonder in the year 897 — when even those who weren’t coconuts were coconuts. However, as the history of history teaches us, it was not Pope Stephen VI but rather Charlie Got Damn Manuel who presided over the Synodus Horrenda.

So stand down, Stevie Seven, Charlie’s got it from there …

Dead Popes of the world, be admonished: Charlie Got Damn Manuel will get to the bottom of this yet.

As you have no doubt learned by now, I recently was the winning bidder of the Sotheby-auctioned marijuana bong that formerly belonged to Walter O’Malley. Please do admire my purchase:

Lost to history is just what a relentless weed smoker O’Malley was. Sure, every baseball fan knows that Walter O’Malley burned through a lot of herb, but none but the most devoted historian recognizes the depth and breadth of his beloved habit. But that’s not why I was happy to secure ownership of the bong at a cost of $6.28 million in unmarked bills.

You see, upon O’Malley’s cherished bong, which for years served as the Dodgers’ “Vice President of Velvet Easy Time,” is the patina of not only heavy and unqualified use, but also the forces of consequence. As William Manchester wrote in his 1971 opus on the life of O’Malley, The Felis Leo of Our Brooklyn Hearts, Times and Honor and Valor, it was O’Malley’s zeal for the kine bud found in the roadside ditches of the Inland Empire that prevailed upon him to move the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. Manchester writes …

Much as Walter O’Malley could never resist the invitations of a stupendous doobie, so it is that I am unable to resist an artifact such as this.

I shall admire Walter O’Malley’s marijuana bong stationed upon my mantel and think fondly of his listening to Steely Dan somewhere in tangled Heaven.