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! Pete Rose? Asshole!

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: “Colonel Sanders’s Drinking Buddy”!

Before we proceed, though, let us remember those who have previously survived this crucible of sturdy ghosts. Last time out, Matt Stairs made love astride trash and claimed the nickname “A Garbage Truck That Runs on Lightning.” 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

And now … “Colonel Sanders’s Drinking Buddy”!

Implications and Intimations

Colonel Sanders dressed like landed gentry, wore his whiskers like Cardinal Richelieu and otherwise had the mien of a huge-ass racist. He carried a rapier-tipped walking cane and 11 herbs and spices with him everywhere. One assumes he enjoyed surveying his holdings from the breezy wrap-around porch with a vast bourbon toddy in hand. Sometimes, lonesome from drink, he would invite this ballplayer over to sit on the breezy wrap-around porch and wassail, most of the while encased in the silence of men.

“You’ve done well for yourself, Colonel,” the ballplayer would say.

The colonel would take a sip. “Reckon so.”

“Welp,” the ballplayer would begin. “Best be getting on. Got a ballgame.”

“Reckon you do.”

“Thanks for the hooch, Colonel.”

“God almighty damn.”

***

Who, citizens of sufficient origins, should be nicknamed “Colonel Sanders’s Drinking Buddy”?