Archive for Naming Names

Owing largely to the symptoms of oppressive ennui, this scribe and his open sores have assembled an All-Star team of players based upon the calculated inversion of the first letter of said player’s first and last names. Please regard the following outputs:

C – Krik Eratz
1B – Gaul Poldschmidt
2B – Greddy Falvis
3B – Yevin Koukilis
SS – Cack Zozart
LF – Yelmon Doung
CF – WeWayne Dise
RF – Byle Klanks
DH – Billy Butler
RHS – Foug Dister
LHS – Hole Camels
RHRs – Fanny Darquhar, Beath Hell
LHR – Plen Gerkins
Top prospect: Mommy Tendonca
Emeritus: Few Lord (citation: @neal_kendrick)
Manager: Suck Bhowalter

This has been the Stupid “All-Inverted First Letters of Names” Team. Thank you for your squandered time.

I recently Photoshopped the head of Toronto mayor Rob Ford — who’s better known in proper circles as “Melvin Nosotros Good Times” — onto the body of famed baseball halfling Eddie Gaedel. I surveyed my work and thought it stupid.

But then David G. Temple, the handsome Muay Thai expert with wind-swept hair and a far-off look in his eye, posted some Photoshoppage of a pizza on top of Tropicana Field. Upon viewing Mr. Temple’s contributions, I thought, “My dumb work has been sanctioned.”

Here, then, is Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s head sloppily placed on Eddie Gaedel’s body:

At this point, the reader will note that, unlike Mr. Temple and his post, I can scarcely be bothered to construct a false meta-narrative around my lousy photo. For I am Dayn Perry, practitioner of lassitude.

In the interest of redemption, though, I leave you with one of the sky-scraping tweets of our century — one that carries with it the whiff of our baseball …

#Hero #NeverForget

I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of Mickey Kefauver’s forthcoming biography of Hack Wilson, The Aching Beauty of an American Sot. Kefauver’s work contains multitudes, and among those multitudes is a walking tour of Wilson’s gut. By “gut” I do not mean any sort of belt-straining protuberance, but rather the life and ultimately self-immolating work of Wilson’s innermost innards.

Let me share a couple of passages. First, this medical revelation upon Wilson’s being hospitalized in 1933, for drunkenness in general and suspected Catholicity in particular:

It turned out that those medical professionals were wrong: the man had “auto-brewery syndrome.” His stomach contained so much yeast that he was making his own in-house brew, literally.

Hack Wilson was a drunk, but he was a drunk not of his own volition, you see. A bounty of yeast had turned his belly parts into a craft brewery, and so the gut-beer flowed without ceasing, like the prayers of the already damned.

Second comes this, when Kefauver, in the service of a more soaring narrative, shifts momentarily to the second person and in doing so snatches the reader up by his tailored lapels:

But he was dying when he called you, from a progressive fibrosis of the lungs brought on not by smoking — he never smoked — but, 
apparently, by years inhaling the alcohol fumes that surged up from his gut.

It was indeed the gut-beer that killed Wilson, but not by daily sieges upon the liver or even the boozy crash of a motor-car. You see, Hack Wilson died because he was overtaken by stomach fumes without ceasing, like the damnations of a prayerful man.

Yesterday in these electronic pages, Dayn Perry, that foe of the human race, submitted to the readership notable returns from decidedly juvenile Baseball-Reference player-name searches.

With a view towards accounting for the full width and breadth and maybe even depth of that same readership, the present author submits here a complement to Perry’s post from yesterday — namely, of results from B-Ref player-name searches featuring words and phrases most relevant to the experience of this nation’s seniors.

Tommy Glaucoma:

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Offered up with little introduction — and even less discretion — I present to you following decidedly juvenile Baseball-Reference player name searches …

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Roy Howell is oral tradition.

If you are of a certain age, then you may believe you have seen Roy Howell play our baseball. You did not because he did not.

If your grandfather tells you of seeing Roy Howell kick the third-base bag to dislodge the loam from spikes after smiting a triple, then call your grandfather the liar he is.

For Roy Howell is the boy asking what the graveyard is as the car whisks past it and he is the mother driving the car who aches for quiet and he is the dead stevedore buried in that graveyard and he is the dosage of gruel spooned into his mouth each night at assisted living before he wound up in the graveyard that the boy is asking about.

You did not see Roy Howell play our baseball. If you are a dried old river, you may have read of Roy Howell in the etchings upon the basalt, but you did not see Roy Howell play our baseball. Do not call him spectral. You may call him the moment the specter was created, but don’t you know he is not even that. If you are a limestone cave, then the stalactites and the slow raindrops that made them may have told you about seeing Roy Howell play, but they are as empty of truth as any grandfather who said he saw Roy Howell play.

For Roy Howell played only in stories. Once the stories stop, Roy Howell will go on playing our baseball, but then only the stories will tell stories. Roy Howell is the words squaws used to soothe their children. The roaming trappers stole those words and gave them to brute soldiers who told them to their sons who had sons of their own who became stevedores buried in graves yoked to the seasons by the roadside. And every word they used was about not having seen Roy Howell play our baseball.

For Roy Howell is oral tradition.

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.

The world is still trembling, one imagines, at the scientific discovery the present author made on these very pages on June 6, 2011. In said article, the illustration in which I reproduce here because you are assumedly too lazy to click a link, it was established that the offensive performance of a baseball player was correlated with the length of his last name.

The Chinese Baseball Club of China has taken this inefficiency to heart and elevated it to heretofore unheard of letter-to-name ratios. For a recent but specifically unspecific WBC contest, they wielded the following starting lineup:

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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.