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”?