The Feast of Ott the Undeservedly Obscure

Today’s contribution to baseball’s mostly new feast-day tradition is like ten works of art in just one work of art.

Life: Despite a career WAR of 116.1 that places him 14th all-time amongst field players, Ott’s legacy is a strange one. For example, he never once won an MVP Award in his 22-year career, and yet was a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Beyond this, anecdotal evidence suggests that modern fans are unaware of Ott’s dominance in his own time. Writing for The Hardball Times, Steve Treder attributes Ott’s lack of notoriety to his (i.e. Ott’s) mostly bland personality, the complications stemming from his home ballpark (the Polo Grounds), and his earlyish death at the age of 49.

Spiritual Exercise: Ask yourself, “What is fame?” Is it, as Socrates says, “the perfume of heroic deeds”? Or is it, as history suggests, merely a popular musical film from 1980?

A Prayer for Ott the Undeservedly Obscure

Mel Ott!
With your small stature, nondescript features,
and gruesome death at the hands of Javier Bardem
you represent the single biggest influence on the work
of American filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen.

In an interview with the Chicago Reader
they describe you playfully as the
Ferrari 308GTS to their Magnum PI.

In another, with Asian Banker magazine,
they ask, “What exactly is Asian Banker, anyway?”

It’s these simple but penetrating questions
that inform the Coen Brothers’ celebrated process,
and the sort of questions, too, which reveal
the crime that is your undeserved obscurity —
a crime, if not against humanity per se,
then certainly against some kind of local ordinance
in one of our country’s more enlightened towns.