The All-Fat Team

OK it's been a while but I have nowhere else to put this musing.

Today, I interviewed ESPN's Jayson Stark for a piece I'm working on. We were joking about how the Manny suspension story is kind of ruining his week and I said that if Pujols gets implicated, there will be almost no great, untainted natural hitters from this generation. I said that Griffey might be the last guy under the bar. Jayson said he's rooting for Ryan Howard to be the slugger everybody remembers.

Then it occured to me - baseball has come full circle. It went from fat guys hitting the ball forever to musclemen, now it's fat guys.

So here it is - the All-Time-All-Fat team. This is a list of the best baseball players who fall under the "fat" category. You don't get points just for being comically fat or having a fat "phase" a la "Fat Elvis" or "Fat Miggy Cabrera."

C: Ernie Lombardi

I've never looked at Pudge Rodriguez and thought "fat," in all honesty. Plus Lombardi scores big points for being known in baseball folklore as the slowest guy ever to play the game.

1B: Ryan Howard

Fat guy, hits the ball very far, very often. Off to a good enough career start to beat out Boog Powell, Cecil Fielder and Prince Fielder for this slot.

2B: Ronnie Belliard

Only fat guy I can think of at second.

SS: n/a

Fat guys don't play shortstop.

3B: Terry Pendleton

Third is kinda "thin" on fat guys too.

LF: Kevin Mitchell

Fat guy, hit the ball far.

CF: Hack Wilson

Kirby Puckett wasn't "fat" until he had health problems and you know it. Hack Wilson was 5' 6", 195 and allegedly had a neck the size of a telephone pole.

RF: Tony Gwynn

Not a slugger, but one of the greatest hitters of all time. I used to get cheap seats to Padres-Pirates games at Three Rivers Stadium in right field just so I could sit near Tony.

P: Babe Ruth

You save an outfield spot this way. In my world, the DH was never invented.

Manager: Tommy Lasorda

Duh.

Honorable mention: Boog Powell, Cecil Fielder, Prince Fielder, Kirby Puckett, Bartolo Colon, CC Sabathia, Fernando Valenzuela, Andres Galarraga, David Ortiz, LaMarr Hoyt

New PW article

I wrote this a while ago but it's been on the shelf at the PW. Fortunately, some current events made it timely again, so it got published.

Philadelphia Weekly: List Mania

Take me out to the crowd

Peep game: A new story I wrote about the life and death of the old North Philadelphia ballparks:

Philadelphia Weekly: Take Me Out To The Crowd

Look for it in print tomorrow.

There's Noone to Stop You

The Thermals - Ballad Of Big Nothing (Elliot Smith cover)

I'm going to spend tomorrow afternoon and evening drinking bloody mary's and eating rice and beans, watching a monstrous and uncontrollable weather system stomp all over the city of New Orleans with some of my friends who grew up there.

People from New Orleans have a sense of inevitability about hurricanes. About ruin in general, actually. The city's legendary party culture is different from Vegas's corporate hedonism. In New Orleans, you party because you need to maximize the pleasure when times are good to balance out the absolutely assured ass-kicking which is coming to you as the sad son of a bitch you are. Juvenile gets gold teeth, the city's oil barons build the Superdome and ex-pats watch yet another meteorological disaster befall their fair city while getting retarded drunk.

I spent a summer in the city back when it was an amusing, aging drunk of a city and, though the summer of 2003 (?) was among the worst I've ever had (RIP Money Mike), I spent enough nights drinking away the humid tedium at Butler's (also, RIP) and saw enough shows at The Maple Leaf to tear up when Randy Newman opened one of the myriad fundraisers for Katrina victims with "Louisiana, 1927" out of both nostalgia and grief. I was working at LSU medical center and I'm quite sure any progress I made in my research of protein motifs was destroyed when most of the power to downtown New Orleans went out and all the windows in the towering building I had worked in blew out during Katrina.

Katrina almost wasn't "the big one." It actually fell short of the worst predictions and things weren't apocalyptic until the levees broke and dumped up to twenty feet of water on almost 80% of the city (according to some e-mails I wrote at the time). The tragedy of Katrina was that it was avoidable. Not so sure about Gustav, although at least evacuation plans are going smoother this time around. I will let GW9K give the geological knowledge on the dangers of the bol Gustav.

Three years ago, I was dealing with the end of a very intense three-year relationship with a girl from New Orleans. I had been in Brooklyn for about a month and her on-again-off-again situation with a new man played a big role in getting me to leave St. Louis in the first place. As it would happen, the stability that said man provided to her while her family tore itself apart during the aftermath of Katrina led to them settling down. They recently got engaged.

(I'm working through another break-up right now, less complicated but still painful, and here comes another hurricane. This, of course, means I control the weather.)

I don't really have a point, I'm just thinking about it a lot right now. I hope everyone who has people living in harm's way knows their people are out of harm's way and I'm hoping for the best. With a refreshing beveredge.

History of the DNC

This is pretty fascinating

NYT: A History of the Democratic National Convention

Decline

Cities declined when their "bubble" burst- when they no longer offered the perception of limitless growth and investment opportunity relative to other options (and when white people ran away from non-whites instead of reaping the institutional racism they'd sewed for 400 years).

But what happens now that John Q. Public is seeing the uselessness of his suburban utopia as he finally realizes he lives in a resource-limited world?

What is the Future of Suburbia?

Clash

In case you wanted some insight into America's role in the situation in Georgia, peep Fred Kaplan's article in Slate this week. The details on what Europe understood about NATO and Russia, and what Bush et al did not in their quest to get a posse together to ride on Sadaam, are heartbreaking.

The article also includes a very good rebuttal to any kind of Hitler/Sudetenland argument you might hear from idiots who think it really would be a good idea to tussle with Russia ourselves: why isn't our government acting accordingly if we're really going to start WWIII?

If so—if this really is the start of a new war of civilizations—why aren't you devoting every waking hour to pressing for the revival of military conscription, for a war surtax to triple the military budget, and—here's a twist—for getting out of Iraq in order to send a few divisions right away to fight in the larger battle? If not, what exactly are you proposing?

Not that I'm at all in favor of that, but it would be some kind of small comfort to see American hawks putting their money where their mouth is, even if it meant higher taxes and cutting and running on Iraq.