Must-Read Mondays

I had to do it, folks: a second post about baseball, and a link I must insist that you follow. Jeff Merron's all-fat baseball team is not to be missed. My personal favorite? Gates Brown (pictured above, hatless), who in 1968 was called to pinch hit while he was sneaking a few hot dogs in the clubhouse. The dogs went down his shirt; a head-first slide later he was covered in ketchup, mustard, and mashed franks.

Baseball could use a few players like Gates nowadays, if only to deflate the ubiquitous steroid suspicions. To think there was a time when extra power was thought to come not from mysterious creams and clear liquids, but from the creme donuts and beer that gave some players a few surplus pounds to put behind their swings.

Surely this is the pattern in Little League, where (as I'm sure we can all remember) the largest players are invariably the most potent hitters, and are able to deflect jibes about their weight with one swing of the bat. But remember also that such players can be hamstrung by the absence of outfield fences. One player on my Little League team routinely hit the ball further than 300 feet, sending the much smaller outfielders bounding across the hills toward Flatbush in pursuit; without a fence around the field, sadly, he seldom reached beyond second base under his own power.

Of course, the indiscretions associated with weighty players are not limited to those who manage to reach the Major Leagues, either. That player from my youthful days on the diamond was also a teammate in high school. When his weight kept him of out of the starting lineup, he once alleviated his boredom by offering to eat a ball of mud for the right price. Even the umpire anted up $20, but escaped quickly to his car when the deed was done and the large young man came to collect his fee.