Top 200 Major League Baseball Players Ever - #196-195 HANK GREENBERG and SHOELESS JOE JACKSON

#196 HANK GREENBERG 1B Tigers

1930-47

OPS+ 157

BFW 32.6

WARP3 77

Greenberg's at the bottom of the list and if you're waiting for Koufax, you'll be waiting a long time. This is a coincidence. My apologies for it. Greenberg gets this spot ahead of Norm Cash.

#195 SHOELESS JOE JACKSON LF/RF Indians/WSox

1908-20

OPS+ 169

BFW 38.3

WARP3 77.4

Joe Jackson could rake. Next best corner OF, not on the list, whose value was in his bat - Albert Belle. You got Belle/Shoeless Joe in the middle of your lineup, you're gonna score some runs.

Fox News is Still Who You Thought They Were

They have 2 1/2 minutes here to carry the water of the Bush Administration, and I think they established two things:

1. We can't send soldiers to college, because then they'd have options. And hey, it's not like it's WWII after all! Screw those guys.

2. Vitriolic is super hard to pronounce.

The Greatest Major League Baseball Players Ever, #198-197, KEN BOYER AND ANDRUW JONES

#198 KEN BOYER - 3B Cardinals

1955-69

OPS+ 116

BFW 20.4

WARP3 99.3

Had the glove you think with a slightly better bat; just a good, solid ballplayer; he made the list instead of Ron Cey

#197 ANDRUW JONES - CF Braves

1996-present

OPS+ 112

BFW 21.6

WARP3 92.6

Active ballplayers are going to get a bump on the list, not an excessive one, as it's not a projected list for the rest of their career, but a reflection of where they are at time of writing; but, you know, I am a farsighted decider, and within the possible range in which a player could fall, guys with more value left get the benefit of the doubt.

Jones's benefit is smaller than would it have been 18 months ago, but don't miss that his earlier career glove was very, very valuable. He's here instead of similar glove based CF like Kenny Lofton and Chet Lemon.

Revelation 6 - Fox News Is What You Think It Is.

Her name is Liz Trotta. If you can think of an analogy where a similar comment has been made on a news station about a major Presidential candidate, I'd love to hear it.

We live in a country where African-Americans who are poised to break major sports records are still bombarded with death threats. How do you suppose it will be as we near election day?

Revelation 5 - Henry David Thoreau Invented Raisin Bread

Yup.

Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail rather than pay a 1$ tax in opposition to the Mexican War and the author of the line "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desparation," also invented raisin bread.

Next, how Ralph Waldo Emerson dabbled in Smores. "So good," the father of transcendentalism wrote, "it makes you want s'more." "Get it?" "S'more?" "Get it?" "I kill me."

The Greatest Baseball Players Ever, #200-199, ELMER FLICK AND TONY FERNANDEZ

#200 - ELMER FLICK OF

1898-1910

Phillies/Indians

OPS+ 149

BFW 29.7

WARP3 92.8

Flick could mash; that's the 39th best adjusted OPS in MLB history. The Tigers offered a 20 year old Ty Cobb for him even up and were turned down, Flick got into a fistfight with Nap Lajoie and was the subject of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision regarding his jumping from Phils to A's. Plus, his name was Elmer. Like Fudd. And that's boss.

#199 - TONY FERNANDEZ SS

1983-2001
Blue Jays

OPS+ 101

BFW 20.9

WARP 3 106.2

He's who you think Omar Vizquel is. Fernandez didn't kill you with the stick, but his glove was way, way better than given credit for. His career is what makes this list valuable; identifying the All-glove men who deserve to be remembered as really terrific players.

You Can't Vote For Hillary Clinton

The substantive difference between Obama and Clinton on a policy level is fairly small (hell, the substantive difference between most of the corporately controlled Democratic Party and the corporately controlled Republican Party is significantly smaller than most recognize). The tactics of the Clinton campaign, however, demonizing Obama as anti-American, as elitist, as overly intellectual, as insufficiently masculine to be a wartime President pander to the worst elements of the electorate and embolden the type of Republican arguments which have turned "liberal" into an epithet. She has aped the oppressor, gathering a greatest hits collection of all of the worst Republican slurs (many of which had been thrown at her husband) and slathered them upon Obama.

I don't actually think Clinton is sending an encoded "still not too late to kill him too" message, but given the tonal similarities between Bobby Kennedy and Barack Obama, and the undercurrent of potential violence that must accompany the prospect of an African-American man becoming President of the United States, there is a level of ugliness in this reference that can't be overlooked.

You can't vote for her.

Not that it matters.

Senator Obama will be the next President of the United States.

Revelation 4 - Leave Those Kids Alone.

Revelation 4 - Old People Need to Stop Telling Young People How to Dress

A public high school in West Palm Beach, Florida required that girls who wished to walk across the stage at their graduation ceremony had to do so wearing pantyhose.

In 2008. Last week. Seriously.

Boys do not have to do this. Let me suggest that this is discriminatory, poor fashion, and given that it was 91 degrees in West Palm Beach this week, sadistic.

Gasoline is 4 bucks a gallon; we're spending 3 billion a week in a war that's now killed more Americans than 9-11, 1 in ever hundred family homes is currently under foreclosure in some American states, 46 million US citizens have no health insurance and Lindsay Lohan's mother has her own reality show.

The world in which these graduates are being sent is hard and mean and can choke the ability to live your own life on your own terms clean out of you. We are in a predicament, economically, environmentally, geopolitically, where as Americans we really should recognize we have approached a perlious precipice. We need as much brainpower as can be mustered thinking about the larger issues of the day, about our current circumstance, about how we can build the kind of world in which we want to live.

Stop telling young people how to dress. Yes, the droopy pants and the Beatle haircuts and the go-go boots annoy you.

Grow up. You dress for you. I'll dress for me.

Revelation One - Sometimes the Truth Comes in Verse

Revelation 2 - Ten Best Bradys Or Units Of Measure

With the bottomless bowl of truth at my disposal, you could imagine the difficulty of determining how to begin to dollup it out. Upon consultation with my spiritual advisor, it seems clear to me.

Below are the 10 Best Bradys or Units of Measure.

You're welcome.


1. Mike http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reed Mike Brady was the bizz-omb, yo. (1) he was gay, and that's cool, I would love to be gay.

(List within the list! Just like the mousetrap in Hamlet! I mean…it's just like that! Identical. Top 5 dudes I would totally bone if, in fact, I were gay. Which I'm not. I know I'm 37 and I live alone with a cat and I haven't brought a date to a family function…er…ever. But I'm not gay, I'm just painfully shy and really not very interesting in person, and I have a girlfriend who totally doesn't even go to our school and these are the top five guys I'd do nice and slow like if in fact, I were gay.


Which I'm not. Hi, ladies! How you doin'?

Let's go to the Boneyard!

1. Brent Musburger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Musburger

2. Jackie Martling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Martling

3. Billy Ray Cyrus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Ray_Cyrus

4. Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Hilton_Jacobs

5. Dean Martin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Martin But not when he was alive. Now. Oh yeah, Gay Jim likes to get his gay corpse freak on, daddy.)


(2) the toupee (3) he was the defendant in an important case I read in law school illustrating the contract remedy of specific performance (4) he gave all of his line readings with a sly smile, like, in his head, during virtually every scene, he was thinking, "Kill me, kill me, kill me – I am Mr. Fucking Brady forever. I would like to jab a pencil into Alice's fat neck. Kill me."

2. Marcia. http://www.celebritysmackblog.com/2007/09/21/marcia-and-jan-brady-bumped-clams/
-Cause, you know. Mmmmm.

Actually, while Maureen McCormick was supercute, I'm too young for the Marcia Brady thing, I've found that girls on the TV don't translate as well to the young boy demo in reruns (which is why it was important to see Charles in Charge during its glorious first run. Bastards ruined Willie Aames's life – and he will be avenged!) – and yeah, I'm too young to have seen the Brady Bunch except in reruns. I know that shocks you that I'm too young for anything, but there you go. You know who was awesome, though and also before my time – Laurie Partridge. Young Susan Dey. The things I would do to young Susan Dey. The greasy, painful, illegal in Mississippi things I would do to young Susan Dey. She's gotta be in her late 50s now. Think she'd go for a way younger dude of questionable sexual orientation?

3. Candela
-The measure of light, the candela is the luminous intensity of 1/600,000 of a square meter of a cavity at the temperature of freezing plutonium (2,024K). Alternatively, the candela is the luminous intensity, in a given direction, of a source that emits monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 × 1012 hertz and that has a radiant intensity in that direction of 1/683 watt per steradian. It was the favorite unit of measure of the homosexual playwright August Wilson and his wife, Raquel Welch's daughter Tahnee. They actually included a reference to it in their vows.


Homosexual Playwright August Wilson: Tahnee, I will love you with the intensity of the positions where the scotopic meets the photopic on the V-lamda curve.


Raquel Welch's Daughter Tahnee: And I will love you as long as 1 watt second equals 10 ergs to the seventh power.

4. The Brady Bill http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/lobby/3447/bradybill.html Cause I'm not a big fan of the guns. We shoot too many people in this country. The second amendment can blow me.


5. The long ton (2,240 lbs)
-Same as a gross ton, it's from the British unit of weight, which is avoirdupois weight, like a dram (27 11/32 grams) or a hundredweight (100 pounds). Of course, it's usually the 2000 pound short ton that's used in the U.S., but the long ton was the principal measure used for anthracite coal (in Pennsylvania), for certain iron and steel products in bulk, and in estimating customs duties.


6. The second Sure, you think it's boring, humdrum, overly serious Jividen without any sense of goofy play whatsoever putting the second on this list (yawn) but, actually, the second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation associated with a specified transition of the cesium 133 atom.

And that's bitchin'.

Here's why that turns me on. Because absolutely everyone knows what a second is. There's no one above the age of 1 you'll meet who doesn't know what a second is.

Except nobody does. You know?

Everybody knows. But nobody knows.

7. Matthew http://www.mathewbrady.com/ Famed Civil War photographer. In 1862, Brady shocked America by displaying his photographs of battlefield corpses from Antietam, posting a sign on the door of his New York gallery that read, "The Dead of Antietam." This exhibition marked the first time most people witnessed the carnage of war. The New York Times said that Brady had brought "home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war."

And he was killed by a vampire. True story. His last words, "You shall not feast on me you unholy creature of the night!!!"

But his plaintive wail went for not. And now he is among the undead, doomed to walk the earth for all eternity now that they've cancelled Buffy.

Buffy was a good show. Everything good ends, kids.

8. Carol http://www.sitcomsonline.com/photopost/showphoto.php/photo/23151/cat/500/ppuser/4172
-'Cause, here's the thing. I don't know how much Mike made, as an architect in 1970 Southern California – but they had 6 kids, and although Carol didn't have a job, they still had the maid.

And that's a pretty sweet deal. Way better than my deal which involves deciding if the joke I'm working on about Jesus (that it's better that he died young, like James Dean, because what if he wound up old, bloated, fat, bald Jesus, maybe with a gambling problem "Come on sevens! The King of Kings needs a new pair of sandles!" And a golddigging young wife "I know she's only in it for the salvation and the cheap liquor, but I can't help myself, the heart wants what it wants and JC loves the young poon") is too blasphemous or just blasphemous enough. So, big ups to Mrs. Brady.


9. The rod-Heh, heh. He said rod. Heh. Heh.


The rod is 5 ½ yds. Also called a pole or a perch.


10. (tie) Diamond Jim and the Scruple
-Diamond Jim http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.old-picture.com/american-history-1900-1930s/pictures/Diamond-Jim-Brady.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.old-picture.com/american-history-1900-1930s/Diamond-Brady-Jim.htm&h=504&w=650&sz=44&hl=en&start=1&um=1&tbnid=H6IHBujBwqIzxM:&tbnh=106&tbnw=137&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522diamond%2Bjim%2Bbrady%2522%26gbv%3D2%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive was a railroad tycoon during the Gilded Age; he had a dozen gold plated bicycles manufactured for his girlfriend and himself. Her favorite bike had handlebars covered with mother of pearl and spokes garnished with rubies and sapphires. His own collection of jewelry was conservatively estimated to be worth two million dollars. Dude could also eat, he started the average day with a breakfast of eggs, pancakes, pork chops, cornbread, fried potatoes, hominy, muffins, and a beefsteak. He washed it all down with a gallon of orange juice. Occasionally he would entertain himself with a mid-morning snack of a few dozen clams or oysters. A typical lunch consisted of two lobsters, deviled crabs, clams, oysters and beef. He finished up with an array of pies. Not like slices of different pies, but several different pies. The usual evening meal began with an appetizer of two or three dozen oysters, six crabs, and a few servings of green turtle soup. The main course was two whole ducks, six or seven lobsters, a sirloin steak, two servings of terrapin and a variety of vegetables. He topped it off with a platter of pastries and often a two pound box of candy.

A scruple is an apothecaries weight equal to 20 grains.

Revelation!