I Wanna Chop Those Brass Rings Off Your Fat Fucking Fingers

I'm never sure what to say when this happens. I'm never quite sure how people who pride themselves on ignorance and a total lack of curiosity can be so comfortable sharing that point of view with the whole internet. That so many people agree with them makes me want to drink about 50 gin-and-Oxycontins.

This is a post about NC HB2. It's also a post about baseball and Magic: the Gathering. I want it to be a post about communication, but nobody has yet found the right words that lead to mutual understanding. If you think I'll be the one to crack that code, you're betting on the wrong horse. I'm also going to talk about sexual assault and domestic violence in bitterly sarcastic terms, because that's how I talk about anything contemptible. I do not intend to trivialize these matters, merely to spit some fire at those who take the wrong side in them.

When I tried to write about trans issues a couple years ago, my conclusion was this: the ability to live without ever having to consciously exercise the right to define one's own gender identity and/or sexuality is a privilege. Cisgenderism and heterosexuality are not things to be ashamed of, nor is anyone proposing they be treated as such. But this conversation is to LGBTQ rights as George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and Kim Kardashian are to discussions of wealth. Those individuals have accomplished nothing positive at all between them other than winning the parents lottery, but hell if they aren't all proud of themselves for being born rich and, to a degree, powerful. If you're content with your own genitals and sexually desire only people with different genitals, you were born on third. It's up to you whether you think you hit a triple. One thing's become clear, from Black Lives Matter to the rise of Trump to HB2. It's that empathy is dying, solipsism is alive and well, and if the latter hasn't conquered American society just yet, we're almost there. That's what leads to statements like "All lives matter!" or "Born with a penis, always a male." (I'm not going to explore female to male transsexuality in any detail here, because nobody's even pretending to be worried that trans men are all about playing grab-ass in public bathrooms.) It's easy to look down on blacks if you've never lived in crushing poverty, never had to be afraid of cops as a matter of practicality. It's easy to look down on trans people if you only assume they could have turned out just like you if they hadn't wanted and chose to be different. It's easy to look down on gays and lesbians if you only assume they're choosing a lifestyle just to offend you. Just because it's easy doesn't make it good. (Aside: the look on such a person's face when you ask them if they, too, could choose to be gay is priceless. I never get tired of that, and it's one thing I'll miss when all the bigots have died off or moved to the sovereign nation of Texassippianazona.)

A few weeks ago, at a Magic tournament, some guys were spewing trans hate within earshot of me. The exact words words I heard were "Trannies are just boring guys who think [being trans] makes them interesting." I don't know why they were talking about this, and I don't really care. I didn't say anything, because I'm a coward. I just went outside for a cigarette, saw red for a couple minutes, then kicked their bigoted fucking asses at Magic. I play at a store run by some great guys, but their tournies don't draw as well as they should. As much as I've heard "Call out people for being unwelcoming or offensive", as that's a big deal in Magic now, it's a matter of numbers for me. If you chase away intolerant and offensive people and then your store can't get enough people to run an 8-player tournament, I don't know what exactly you've helped. You just don't get to play Magic in a place you enjoy anymore. Besides, we're all guilty of crude sexual humor and foul language at that store, and I wasn't prepared to draw the line at transphobia, especially when I haven't had the necessary, long, difficult, and complicated conversations that would lead to understanding with anyone there yet. Another time, at another store, this dude wouldn't leave me alone because the backpack in which I keep my cards is a purple-and-black Hannah Montana backpack. He finally gave up, in confusion, when I graciously ceded to him that his backpack absolutely made him more of a man than mine did for me. I still don't understand that conversation at all, but whenever I go back to that store and he isn't there, I'm happy.

So HB2 reminds me a little of watching Bill O'Reilly or Michelle Malkin, and not just because of their identical positions. If you turn your brain off all the way and abandon critical thinking, they all seem to make a kind of sense. O'Reilly is the patronizing uncle who knows best because he's made a bit of money for himself, so you should be grateful that he's even bothering to bestow his wisdom upon you. Malkin is in a permanent state of outrage about how us liberals are constantly assaulting your God-given rights and freedoms, and if you ignore the lack of evidence to support anything she has ever said, hell yes that's worth being pissed off about! And HB2 just includes one, erm, problematic "definition": that a person's sex and gender is determined solely by their birth certificate. It goes on to tell the city of Charlotte that their own bathroom bill is null and void, since it disagrees with that definition. And let's get the obvious out of the way: for a vast majority of people, this definition of sex and gender works well enough, if not perfectly. But this bill isn't about those people. It's about telling trans folk that they aren't welcome in North Carolina unless they're willing to subject themselves to using the wrong bathroom.

The loudest voices are the ones saying that if we allow trans individuals to live as their authentic selves, the whole point of all the emotional and psychological torment, harassment, assault both verbal and physical, expensive and painful treatments and surgeries, and absence of social sympathy that they already have to endure has all led to this: getting into a public women's restroom so they can rape our wives and mothers and molest our daughters. I'm the furthest thing from an expert when it comes to what gender identity really means, or what makes us male or female, but this assumption of rape and violence strikes me as a pretty male thing. Because the writers and supporters of HB2 believe trans women are still men, they still have male brains, so of course they would be all about that sweet, sweet public bathroom rape. This belief fails even the most basic test of critical thinking, because anyone of any persuasion who committed such an act would be equally arrested. And nobody's managed to produce any data or statistics (I have yet to even see an anecdote) to support the notion that allowing trans women to use womens' restrooms puts anyone, anywhere, in danger. But that doesn't matter. It's all about my next point: fear vs. hope.

I'll admit to having been a myopic, self-centered young person. I don't think I cared about politics at all until the 2000 election, the first one I was allowed to vote in. But since then, I think I figured out what makes a person liberal or conservative. That's a really arrogant thing to say, and I only say it because I have yet to see contradictory evidence. If you're a conservative, I believe you are motivated at the most basic level by hate and/or fear. The questions are always about threats: who's coming to take my job/money/guns/bible away? Who needs a good bootstomp to the face to make sure they don't get what's mine? Since it clearly isn't my fault my life sucks, whose fault is it? It is fear that brought us back to the Middle East, probably for good. It is hate that burns down black churches and revives the War of Northern Aggression in the deep south. It is fear that causes Christian Dominionists and everyone who listens to them to use "religious liberty" as a euphemism for "legalized discrimination", and it is the widespread nature of this fear that grants human garbage like Tony Perkins a regular national platform. It is a combination of both hate and fear that keeps putting a disproportionate number of gays and trans people in the hospital or the morgue by no fault of their own. It is a combination of both hate and fear that has put an obvious misogynist and racist on track for the republican nomination in 2016, despite an utter lack of qualifications or, indeed, accomplishments of any kind. And it's fear and hate that made Pat McCrory governor of a state that I know for a fact has at least ten or twelve decent people in it. And fear and hate will work forever, because it's SO EASY to be pissed off and scared.

On the other side, I believe liberals (not Democrats, liberals. Our Democratic Party, with a few shining exceptions, is a centrist conservative entity.) are motivated primarily by hope. We envision a better world, and we ask what we can do to help create it. We almost never succeed, because it's a lot easier to succumb to the negative emotions than embrace the positive ones. It's exhausting and demoralizing to wake up every day and think that maybe this shit world will get a little less shitty today, only to go to bed knowing it really didn't. I believe we have an ace up our sleeve, though. Fear and hate prey on ignorance. Hope feeds off knowledge. If we can value truth more than tribalism, we can beat this. It'll take every last one of us, and it'll take longer than any of us will live, but I think we can win. All we have to do is call out bullshit every day for what it is, and remind those that spout it that they're free to say any damn thing they want. Just as we are free to point out the weakness of their arguments, because disagreement is not persecution, and responding to free speech with our own stifles nobody's free speech. If we do this every day, all the time, maybe we will enter an era when we'll get sick of winning, because we'll all be winning too much. We'll be like, stop with the winning already. Except we have to get the media on our side for this to really happen, so probably, we're all just fucked.

This brings me to the reason I wrote this post: calling bullshit. Curt Schilling was a truly great pitcher for the Phillies, Diamondbacks and Red Sox in the 90's and 00's. He was a joy to watch on the mound, and a solid on-air analyst for ESPN after he retired. Unfortunately, in recent years, he's shown himself to be that relative everyone has who throws FOX "News" talking points up on social media, except he's that for all of us- even those of us who proudly lack a Facebook or Twitter account. He was suspended from covering the MLB Playoffs last October when he compared extremist Muslims to Nazis on Twitter, and when he tweeted a HB2-supportive meme meant to provoke fear and disgust, ESPN finally showed him the door today. The uproar from the right was predictable and immediate: They're persecuting him! Read the constitution! First amendment! Yes, that renowned liberal organization ESPN:
-Who gives awards to domestic abusers like Floyd Mayweather
-Who was the first to ask when Ray Rice and Kobe Bryant would be allowed to play sportball again because maybe the bitch had it coming
-Who supported and magnified the influence of overgrown fratboy Bill Simmons for nearly 20 years

...has snuffed out Curt Schilling's dissenting, patriotic voice of reason. Except not at all. Schilling still has all the free speech in the world; he just no longer has ESPN as a platform to use it. It's conservatism's Other Jesus, the free market, that betrayed Curt Schilling. ESPN decided it was no longer profitable or good for their image to allow him on the air. As his blog (which I will not link to) attests, Schilling has not been silenced by either his firing or his cancer. He is free to recite gibberish of his own choosing, whenever and however he wants. But sometimes, if you're an asshole, people aren't going to want to hear you talk. At least until you wind up on the wingnut welfare circuit. If he hasn't already been the #OneLuckyGuy, it's in his future. So congrats, Curt. From now on, you'll be in the slideshow of tiny-minded assholes that flips through my brain whenever I listen to "Black Me Out". And since I've already covered two things I love- Magic and baseball- in this post, let's end it with some perfectly appropriate rock and roll. My unlimited love to all who love.

I'm Finding it Harder to be a Gentleman

I guess I've established to myself and the internet that I give at least one shit about the treatment of LGBTQ's. That's cool; it was bound to happen eventually. It just means I have to write about Michael Sam now, even though it feels like an obligation instead of an opportunity for self-improvement.

I had the misfortune of reading the comment thread on ESPN.com's story about Michael Sam's coming out. This was a mistake. The scariest thing is that you need a Facebook account to comment there, and there were many people who didn't see a problem with being vocally homophobic UNDER THEIR OWN NAME. This falls under the same "common sense" category as Christina Kahrl's column from the Dr. V. uproar, but some people just don't get it. And what I say won't convince them. But I still have some thoughts, gained through no authority other than trying to be a decent human being.

-Part of this is publicity-based. Michael Sam knows exactly what he's doing and name recognition is a part of that. My own opinion is that the positives of fame and trailblazing were probably very difficult for him to see, and to him, it was a choice between several bad options. He chose the immediate pain of being a minority of one over the gradual suffering of a closeted life. Given the same opportunity, I would probably make the same choice. Soon he'll be used to his status as a public figure, and there's a chance his appearances will change public perception of homosexuals. That would be a good thing. If his fame bothers you, then be one of the people who shrugs and says "Whatever. I'ma go play Battletoads." whenever someone comes out. If your response is "I don't care, but grrrr I'm still pissed he's getting publicity out of this", you're doing it wrong. Of course the first openly gay NFL player is going to be a big deal. People care. Let's all of us- you, me, Michael Sam, Skip Bayless, Glenn Beck, Jesus over there- rip this band-aid off already. I'm grateful it's happening now, so next time it happens we can all shrug and go play Battletoads.

-I wonder if the inherent homophobia in the NFL community is overstated. I know most of the players are black, and the black community is not as accepting of homosexuality as American society as a whole. Niners CB Chris Culliver made headlines before last year's Super Bowl by saying "Can't be with that sweet stuff, man... Can't be in the locker room, man, nah." But these guys are all gen-X or later, and the world they grew up in made it a point to accept people as they are. I hope the majority of NFL players would react more like baseball's Tom Glavine and Preston Wilson. When asked if they would ever play with a gay teammate, both answered "I probably already have". Veteran reliever Mike Timlin said he had done so knowingly, and it wasn't a problem. Maybe NFLers will transcend the narcissistic "Ewww, he's gonna be checkin' out my junk in the shower" attitude. Maybe not. We'll find out soon enough.

-This is something I'm amazed I have to say, but apparently I do: If your opinion is based in ignorance rather than understanding and you take pride in said ignorance, nobody owes your opinion any respect. You get no cookies for being protective of your lack of understanding. It is not valid as an appeal to emotion nor as a rational argument. Take it somewhere else, preferably off my goddamn internet. If you were worthy of my attention, you would sicken me. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and free speech even covers most instances of what would objectively be called "hate speech". However, it has its limits. You are not protected from the reactions of others when you say something particularly offensive or ignorant. People's impression of you is conditional on what you say. If you are vocally ignorant, being told as much should be par for the course and is not persecution.

-The following is considered middle ground in some circles, but it's as insidious as outright bigotry: "I don't have a problem with people being gay. I just think it's wrong." If you say something like that, you're a liar. You do have a problem with people being gay. Let's try it with a couple words changed and see how it sounds. "I don't have a problem with black people. I just think their existence is wrong." "I don't have a problem with women. I just think it's wrong to be a woman." Seriously, it reeks of "Homosexuality is a choice". Nobody chose their orientation any more than I chose to be born with a penis or Trayvon Martin chose to be born black. And if you say you remember the day you "chose" to be straight- as some luminaries of the ESPN thread did- you intentionally misunderstand the word "choose" and your argument is a false equivalency. I do believe people can have "awakenings", but that is not exactly a choice. It is living life one way, in the darkness of ignorance, because it's what you think you're supposed to do. Then one day you change and start living your life another way because you realize it feels fucking phenomenal and takes you to places your old life never could. It doesn't mean you chose to be the new way. It means you never fully knew or accepted yourself, and once you did, there was no turning back. I believe we can choose what we do, and we can choose how we express our feelings, but there's no controlling what we feel. The best we can do is act on our emotions in a way that helps, heals, and does no harm.

-This goes back to what I said about Dr. V. Being born with your appropriate physiology and a socially acceptable set of sexual preferences to grow into is a privilege, probably the easiest of all privileges to take for granted. I try to empathize with people who can't fathom homosexual feelings, but they make it very difficult by refusing to accept that some people don't have heterosexual feelings. Homosexuality and gender dysphoria don't come from childhood abuse or inappropriate exposure to sex as a child. They aren't diseases or defects or repercussions of trauma. They're things that just exist. I'm a believer in the genetics argument myself, and the science is pretty clear that nurture cannot undo what nature has done. But shit, if science swayed these people, this wouldn't be a discussion we'd need to have, because then Leviticus would just be a bad story instead of a central tenet of American Christianity. Besides, the focus on that one verse is really unique to American Evangelicalism (I think). There's all sorts of batshit rules and regulations in the Old Testament, but as is their wont, thumpers pick the one that doesn't affect them personally and enforce the crap out of it like Jihadists. Maybe it's just my status as an outsider of the church, but the whole thing seems completely out of step with stuff like "love thy neighbor" and all the other awesome stuff Jesus said. Maybe that's the point.

tl;dr: Mizzou DE projected to be drafted in the 3rd or 4th round.

I'm Too White to Have the Blues

I miss the 3 years I spent in a Seroquel-induced emotional flatline. Caring sucks. It really does. I mean, I can still drink my face off and while away the hours with cartoons and card games, but I'm not used to doing so while dealing with emotions and other such nonsense. I'm used to being laconic, impassive, occasionally happy-go-lucky. I was of the opinion that the worst had already happened so having hopes, fears, or feelings was pretty much a waste of energy. This too shall pass, all things are fleeting, etc. I was all set to enjoy being alive until the day I died, and I was largely indifferent as to when that day should come. But now I have a new imaginary friend: righteous indignation. It's like a demon that chews on the back of my head all day reminding me that for all the setbacks I've had, most people have it worse. I'm angry and I get to thinking it's for no good reason, but then I remember that there are thousands of good reasons.

Here's one of them. Please do click, read, and watch. And this is up to you and your own viewing preferences, but I would prefer it if you didn't watch the Olympics. I'll admit I'm also angry that they preempt Community and Saturday Night Live, but my lacking in entertainment options is pretty far down the outrage list from a nation that shares my dad's views on LGBTQs getting all the money from hosting an Olympics. My entertainment options are usually pretty close to the top of my priorities list, so I guess this is a big fucking deal to me. Since the big hand slapped me "White Male American", I know I tend to overestimate my own problems and it's easy to forget that my life is pretty damn good compared to people in some other places. Like, being L, G, or B in Russia is horrific. Being T is probably worse, because you know, that's something they can choose and they're all just choosing wrong (If you failed to recognize that as sarcasm, you just lost the Rehabbing the Hoodie home edition. Time to eat the stick).

Maybe I have some big primal-scream type post coming up on this subject. It might be a week, a month, or ten years from now. Something's brewing and I have no idea what it is. I've been feeling the need to write, to stand on my roof and rant at 3 AM, to start fights, ever since the Dr. V. story broke. I have been waiting eagerly- if I were the praying type, I would be praying- for someone to use a gay or effeminate slur in my presence so I could let it all out through violence (I'm not a big guy, but I'm crazy and that's the equivalent of an extra 20 pounds of muscle in a fight. Also, most people aren't prepared for the suckerpunch). But when I sit down to express it I have nothing to say. I'm just pissed. If you are too, good. Let's hang out sometime. And that's all I got for now. Time to go to sleep and have another unnecessarily long and painful stress dream*.


*Last night's was fun. I got to taste the world's best frozen custard, but since I didn't have the $1200 to pay for my serving, I had to work off my debt by helping to make it. The only ingredient was human suffering. That's a lot of suffering when you're working it off at minimum wage. Come to find out, nobody who worked in the factory got paid. Everyone was working off a debt.

You Know It's Obvious, But...

I put up last night's post in what was little more than a fit of rage, and it was less coherent than the subject deserved. I'm going to try and unpack my thoughts a little here. If you care, awesome. If not, my readership is unchanged.

For those who don't want to read the articles in the links, here's the short summation. Caleb Hannan wrote an article for Grantland.com about a putter- a golf club. Let's start with that. This story started with a golf club. It's also about the woman who invented it, a physicist by the name of Essay Anne Vanderbilt. While verifying her credentials as a physicist, he discovered that she was a fraud- no doctorate, no MBA, no education that would lend credence to her sales pitch that the putter was a scientific breakthrough. She was a struggling mechanic who, by all accounts, was impossible to work with. This part is good reporting. Not anything I would care about, but hey, it ruined a con artist's life and would give boring old dudes something to joke about on the golf course. But that wasn't what made this a big deal. Hannan chose to lump something else in with those fraudulent credentials: Essay Anne Vanderbilt was born a man. In pursuing this angle on the story, Vanderbilt's correspondence with Hannan goes from distant but helpful, to furious and threatening, to pleading with him not to out her, offering proof of her nonexistent degrees in exchange for a NDA on her past. Hannan refused. On October 18th of last year, Essay Anne Vanderbilt killed herself.

Christina Kahrl, a trans woman who writes about baseball (very well) for ESPN.com, was brought in to write a critique of the piece. Some of what she said should be obvious to anyone with the slightest bit of empathy. Much of the story was not information Hannan had any right to make public. The responsible thing to do would have been to push her about her fraudulent credentials while assuring her that her gender identity, as it was not pertinent to the story, would be off limits. Trans people kill themselves at a rate 26 times higher than that of the population as a whole. Some estimates have the trans suicide rate at 41%. Four. One. Violence against trans people remains an under-reported and tragic phenomenon. None of this was news to me, but it probably was for some. I really only learned one thing: the idea of a "deep stealth" transperson. That's someone who cuts oneself off from his or her previous life completely in order to start a new life as a new gender as Essay Anne Vanderbilt did. It was once second only to repression as the most recommended way of dealing with gender dysphoria. I can't imagine anything more horrifying.

Reacting to the blowback, Grantland Editor-In-Chief Bill Simmons wrote an open letter. This is where I went from sad to angry. Bill's like Jon Stewart, or the fine folks who make The Simpsons, or Green Day. He's been a part of my pop culture experience for half my life. I've read his columns since he was ESPN.com's Boston Sports Guy. I've read his books, "The Book of Basketball" and "Now I Can Die In Peace". I find him knowledgeable, persuasive, goofy, occasionally insufferable- all the things you want from a good columnist. To Bill's credit, he takes responsibility for running the story and admits several mistakes, but so much of what he says is completely culturally tone-deaf. It makes me think he doesn't really know the implications of taking that responsibility. Here are some of the things he said that made me want to breathe fire.

"On Wednesday morning, we posted a well-written feature by Caleb Hannan about an inventor named Essay Anne Vanderbilt, a.k.a. “Dr. V.” "

(When your subject kills herself, who cares how good the writing was?)

"Caleb only interacted with her a handful of times. He never, at any time, threatened to out her on Grantland. "

(Except that's what happened after she died. I don't see how he needed to put words to an obvious implied threat. Would he be asking her and her family repeated pointed questions about her gender identity if he had no intention of writing about it? Get real.)

"For us, this had become a story about a writer falling into, for lack of a better phrase, a reporting abyss. The writer originally asked a simple question — So what’s up with this putter? — that evolved into something else entirely."

(Um, yeah. The guy who writes about a golf club is the one who fell into an abyss. Not the transwoman whose clearly tenuous grip on reality was shattered by a piece about a golf club that turned into... whatever you want to call what it turned into.)

"Not only did we feel terrible about what happened to Dr. V, we could never really know why it happened. Nor was there any way to find out."

(Really, Bill? You don't know? I have a guess.)

So in the end, all I have is anger at a cultural monolith I used to mindlessly consume, and a new respect for Christina Kahrl. The word "courageous" is passed around the LGBTQ community like a blunt at a 311 concert. I have a better word for her: Tough. She is a tough person to speak for those who need it. There are still plenty of people who troll the internet making it clear they think gender dysphoria and homosexuality are perversions and sicknesses but also a choice somehow, and it takes more toughness than I think I'll ever have to stand in that world and say, "bring it on".

I need something good to come out of this. I need to know I'm a better person for having given this thought. So here's my conclusion: Self-definition is something hetero-normative people don't even think about. They are the way they are and that's the way they should be. For LGBTQs, self-definition is an essential part of life. It is the heart of their rights as humans and too often we treat it like it should be a privilege. Be gay, but don't do it in front of me. Be a lesbian, but don't get married. Be bi, but only if you're a girl, because that's hot. Be trans, but don't go out in public looking like that. If you don't know what you are, quit navelgazing and find a nice person of the opposite gender. Get to work making the next generation of entitled morons who don't learn to think in shades of grey.

 Grantland and I are broken up, but as I said in the previous post, Rany and Jonah can still hang out sometime. As for what it means for my blog, I have no clue. I want to tell you I plan on writing about these issues if and when they come up. I want to brag that I've never been afraid to ask questions about myself, the people I share this planet with, the tribal mentalities that turn people against each other to distract us from what's really going on. I want to believe I'm the kind of person who has something to say when it's obvious someone has been mistreated. And yet I've written thousands of words about American goddamn Idol and baseball. I've wasted so much time and I'm not getting it back.

We Can't Choose How We're Made

I'm going to hide what is possibly the most important thing I've ever written in between countless baseball posts with no readership. Well, second most important. It's a reading exercise. Read this, this and then this. It's a lot of reading; the first one is at least twice as long as it needs to be. But if you make it through and have no problem with the sequence of events detailed within, we can't be friends. I check Grantland pretty much every weekday, because their sports coverage is thought provoking and informative, and their pop culture coverage is so pretentious and asinine it makes me feel good about listening to twenty-year-old alternarock, watching the same old syndicated cartoons until I've memorized every episode of The Simpsons, American Dad, and King of the Hill, and playing my Playstation 2. But continuing to read them after this is going to be tough for me. None of what happened is OK. Admitting ignorance and vowing to improve is a great first step, but for me it's too little too late. If you don't get it and you know someone in the trans community, ask them why it's not OK. I think they'll say what I'm about to say right here: the idea of outing a trans person without their or their family's consent is beyond the goddamn pale and I can live without Steven Hyden and Bill Barnwell. Maybe I'll sneak a Jonah Keri every now and then, because fuck it, I love baseball and Jonah's the best. If you just don't care about this, that's alright. There's plenty of stuff I don't care about. But it means we can't be friends. Again, I wish I could be nicer about this. But I wish- no, I fucking beseech whatever gods exist, have existed, and will exist- that everyone could be smarter about this.

Walkin' slowly down the Hall of Fame

In the midst of the frenzy of relief pitcher signings and trades of average catchers, I wanted to take the opportunity to take some kind of unnoticed, unheard stand. If you know baseball at all, you know the BBWAA (Baseball Writers Association of America) has been derelict in their Hall of Fame election duties ever since the BALCO scandal broke. Their argument, repeated en masse by voting results, is "Nobody who played in the 90's is a Hall of Famer because steroids maybe!" I'd like to put aside the conceit of using baseball players as moral actors, because that isn't what they are, but we're not allowed to do that these days. Instead, I'll just ask for consistency. If it's OK that Hank Aaron used amphetamines, then it's OK that Mark McGwire used steroids. You can go on down the line with this- whether it was cocaine, amphetamines, steroids, or just being a terrible person, there is no 'clean' period in baseball history. You can tell me half this year's ballot doesn't deserve enshrinement because they maybe, probably, or definitely used performance-enhancing drugs. To that I say, welcome to baseball. Guys do bad stuff. Get over it. I believe great players are marked by great numbers, great consistency, and usually both. If they achieve it, they're Hall of Famers. Let our children and grandchildren decide if the transgressions of the 90's and 00's were really that much worse than the cocaine 80's, the amphetamine 60's, or the segregated first half of the 20th century. And the members of the BBWAA who no longer follow baseball but engage in blanket refusals to vote for anyone because they're too lazy to find the facts to match their moralizing and really just want the kids to get offa their lawn- they can fuck off and forfeit their ballot, in whichever order they choose. Till that day, here's my (Sadly limited to ten players) hypothetical Hall of Fame Ballot.

(Apologies to Curt Schilling and Mike Mussina, who would be easy ins if the ballot wasn't clogged. But if the ballot wasn't clogged, then there would be no BBWAA intransigence to write about and I wouldn't have to bother with this post.)

1. Greg Maddux. 4 straight Cy Youngs (92-95). 5 more seasons finishing in the top 5 of Cy voting. 8-time All Star. Best pitcher of the 90's, and I don't think there's really a discussion to be had here, given that Pedro wasn't Pedro until 1997 and The Big Unit took till the mid-90's to put it all together. Maddux represents a litmus test of sorts: he is so clearly one of the best of all time, there is no rationale that leads to not voting for him. I think Hall of Fame voters who pass on Mad Dog- even if the rest of their ballot is blank- should be shown the door and never welcomed back in. The Hall of Fame is for great ballplayers. If you consider yourself important enough to allow your problems with the era to prevent you from doing your job as a judge of greatness.... Well, I already said it.

2. Tom Glavine. He was never as dominant as his long-time Braves teammate, but his peak actually lasted quite a bit longer. Glavine's final truly great season was probably his 1998 Cy Young year, but he managed 4 All-Star appearances after that and his decline wasn't quite as sharp as Maddux's. And if you're into counting stats, hey, 300 wins. That Glavine is such a clear HOFer and still so clearly inferior to Maddux should remind us how important the Braves were to 90's baseball. There's always a team that's always in it, but Atlanta was that team for an ungodly length of time.

3. Frank Thomas. Dude had a .454 OBP as a rookie. His OBP didn't dip below .400 until 1998, the year where Jerry Reinsdorf decided to scrap the team and go with the Big Hurt, Ray Durham, and 7 rookies in the lineup. In 1994, he lapped the league in offensive production. He had seven effing years with an OPS over 1.000. I'm hopeful Thomas actually has a chance, because he was vocally anti-PED throughout his career and mopped the floor with the league anyway.

4. Craig Biggio. Played catcher and second base while turning in season after season of high average, high OPB, high doubles offense. Won 4 straight Gold Gloves at second base. 7-time All Star. An excellent base thief, with a career success rate of just under 80%. Durable. Led the league in runs, doubles, steals, and hit-by-pitch at various times. 2nd all time in hit-by-pitch. Crossed the magic 3,000 hit mark in his final season.

5. Barry Bonds. Your position on this player determines whether or not you and I can have a conversation about baseball. In a just world, he'd be a clear first-ballot Hall of Famer and we would get to relive the two five-year spans in which he was the most dominant offensive player on the planet. In the world where we live, he may never get in. Because OMG STEROIDS YOU GUYS. Look, if your position forces you to deem one of the three greatest hitters of all time unworthy of the Hall of Fame, your position is stupid and so are you. I wish I could be nicer about this. I really do. But more than that, I wish you could be smarter about this.

6. Roger Clemens. See above. I hate this guy, and I believe every nasty scandalous story about him. Doesn't matter. He's a clear Hall of Famer and among the best baseball players of all time. If you have a vote and you don't vote for Bonds or Clemens, you are saying that baseball from 1990-2008 has no credibility. And if you're saying that, well, first of all, congrats on wasting your life. Secondly, let's apply the same standards to baseball before 1990. I think the game falls short of your purity edict there too, but  writers of the day were comfortable with it. That says more about you than it does the players under consideration. And you're not interesting enough for that "Why I don't want anyone to be a Hall of Famer" column you've already written to make up for another summer without an induction ceremony.

7. Alan Trammell. The first of two 80's guys on my ballot, I give Trammell a vote because 1) he's running out of chances, and 2) his career would be much more appreciated if he were having it now. Shortstops who play the position acceptably and draw plenty of walks just aren't something we see all the time. He was overshadowed by Cal Ripken throughout his prime, but a better comparison is Barry Larkin, a contemporary who earned election by virtue of playing in the National League while Ripken and Trammell were in the AL. Trammell (and his keystone partner Lou Whitaker) had a hell of a lot more to do with Detroit's good 80's teams than Jack Morris did.

8. Tim Raines. As Trammell was overshadowed by Ripken, so too was Raines overshadowed by Rickey Henderson in the "greatest leadoff hitter of all time"-off. I'm hopeful that the trend of Raines' growing vote totals continues and he gets in, but he may have another year or two to wait. He shouldn't. His steal success rate of 84.7% is 13th all time... And nobody above him is even close to his number of steal attempts. His longevity and his consistency in doing leadoff hitter things for most of his career make "Rock" an obvious Hall of Famer from my point of view.

9. Jeff Bagwell. Had seasons of 34, 39, and 43 homers while playing half his games in the Astrodome. Had 4 seasons of 39 or more homers after the move to Enron Field. Stole 202 bases. Remarkably durable up until his career-ending shoulder injury. Never had an OBP under .358, and that was in his final, injury-ridden season. Career OBP of .408. Had the misfortune of playing between 1990-2008, so probably won't get in.

10. Mike Piazza. He got more than 50% of the vote last year, and he should get in eventually. I could run down the numbers, but anyone who watched baseball when Piazza was at his peak knows this guy's a Hall of Famer. We knew when he retired. Hell, we knew when he was halfway through his career, answering questions about his sexuality in front of the New York media. He's not a maybe HOFer, he's not borderline. He's an all-time great. Obscene power from the catcher position. His defense was regularly derided, but the numbers suggest he was at least passable behind the plate. The 4 players with careers most similar to Piazza? Bench. Berra. Carter. Fisk. I've got him in that same class, and- like every other player in this post- the hall ain't worth a damn without him.

Thoughts on the first week of baseball

Since you'd have to be pretty dumb to draw any conclusions from the games themselves, I'm gonna stick to things that will last all season: the uniforms.

Ok, whoever it was in the Orioles' front office that made this decision gets an A+. While the team itself might stink, those home and home-alternate caps with the white front panel are delightfully old-school and hearken back to a day when the team didn't suck. I caught a good bit of an Orioles game this past weekend, and I couldn't stop staring at the caps and beaming. Fan fucking tastic. Now they have one of the best parks AND some of the best uniforms in baseball. All that's missing is the dudes who play in them.

Speaking of old-school uniforms that made me inexplicably happy...

There's Jose Bautista sporting the new Blue Jays duds, doing away with the ultramodern uniforms of the past decade or so. I didn't hate the ones they had, but when your team wins two World Series with a classic and distinctive look, why mess with it? The maple leaf addition doesn't hurt anything, and now they look like a baseball team again. I think these might be my new favorite uni's in baseball. They reflect the franchise's identity, just like the Orioles' new ones, which is why I hope they stay awhile. Nice work Blue Jays people.

My old favorite uni's are no more, which will send me to eBay one day this summer to clean up on vintage Luis Castillo and Livan Hernandez gear. It'll go nicely with the T.O. Eagles jersey I bought for a song in 2005. Anyway, maybe I'm the only person on earth who thinks black and teal is a proper uniform combination, but I loved loved loved the old Marlins getups. What they replaced them with has been the subject of some derision, and while I wish they hadn't changed a thing, these really aren't as bad as they seemed at first glance:

They're just black and orange. The powder blue and yellow don't factor in as much as I thought they would at first, which would have turned them into some technicolor barfbag. It's something I can get used to, and I'll never stop rooting for the Marlins, because of what happened in 2003. Still, if they wanted to take part in 150 or so throwback uni nights a year, I would be cool with that.

As long as I'm talking Marlins, I want to put in my two cents on the Ozzie Guillen situation. As a White Sox fan who came to love baseball in the late '80's and early '90's, Ozzie-- along with Robin, the Big Hurt, Ray Durham, Bobby Thigpen, and Blackjack-- is among my all time favorite baseball people. When he would speak off the cuff to the media during his time as manager of The Good Guys, I would gaze adoringly at the screen and think that if one day I should ever become the manager of a baseball team, I would approach it the exact same way as Ozzie: brutally honest, but never all that seriously. He reflected a lot of my values as both a manager and as a human being: consider yourself fortunate that you play a child's game for millions of dollars, don't forget to have fun, and play your ass off. So, as a sports bigamist (terminology courtesy of Bill Simmons), if Ozzie had to leave the South Side, I was happy it was for my second team.

Now I want them to fire him.

I think in a lot of ways, sensitivity has gone too far. People who think, then type, ask "Could anyone possibly be offended?" instead of "Is anyone offended?" and that annoys me. It leads to ridiculous non-apologies ("I'm sorry if anyone was offended by...") which quite literally means "I don't regret what I did. I just regret the way you reacted to it." But in Ozzie's case, I have to side with the easily-offended, culturally-sensitive crowd. For those who don't know, Ozzie spoke of his love and respect for Fidel Castro recently, in an interview with Time magazine. Ozzie manages a baseball team in Miami, Florida, a city with the largest population of Cuban expatriates (OK, let's call them what they are-- refugees) of anywhere in the USA. These people do not like Fidel Castro very much. Ozzie knows all of this, since he's been a coach with the Marlins before, and I am led to believe he considers Miami home. So... Why would this come out of his mouth? To me, there are only three possibilities.

1) Thoughtlessness. Ozzie knows that people expect him to say outrageous things, and he forgot he no longer works in Chicago, a city that will basically let you get away with anything. He now works in Miami, a city with a large population of Cubans and Dominicans, among others, who might just hold him accountable.

2) Martyrdom. Ozzie knows that if the media focuses on him, they'll leave his players alone. This strategy worked to perfection in 2005. Seriously, name a player from the 2005 White Sox. If you're not a Sox fan, it's a toughie.

3) Egomania. Ozzie knows that the media focuses on inflammatory statements, and decided to provide one because he had just watched ESPN for an hour and nobody mentioned his name on-air.

I think it's a combination of 2 and 3. Ozzie's not an idiot; I mean, he managed a team to a World Series title when they were far from the best team in baseball. The man's brain works and I will not dispute that. But if he's going to keep ripping the Cubans and others who live in Miami, it might suck for a team that needs to draw people to their new stadium. That's why, if I'm anyone in the Marlins' front office, I push to fire Ozzie with cause. I mean, if saying "I love Fidel Castro" isn't cause for firing someone who works in Miami, then I don't live in a world of reason.