Perfect Bedtime Story For Kayls

Having a deformed finger doesn't need to hold you back in life. I think that's the motto of a new children's book written by Alan Page, former Minnesota Vikings defensive lineman and leader of the Purple People Eaters, Alan and the Perfectly Pointy Impossibly Perpendicular Pinky.

In the story, Page, who really is a Minnesota State Supreme Court Justice, visits a school and one inquisitive child, asks what happened to his pinky. The Page in the story then goes on to tell the true story of a pinky that had been severely dislocated several times during a football career.

Rainy Summer Sunday

"The sun did not shine
it was too wet to play
So we sat in the house
All that cold, cold wet day."



Good thing I had Thing 1 and Thing 2 to entertain me.

Where Have You Gone JD Salinger?

Author JD Salinger died this week at age 91.
Salinger is most famous for writing "The Catcher in the Rye" a book I have always intended to read but never got around to reading.
The only other thing most people know about him is that he is a recluse basically disappearing in the mid-60s.
His reclusiveness was the subject of an episode of the great mid-90s sitcom "The Single Guy" starring Jonathan Silverman. To impress a girl Silverman said he knew JD Salinger. His doorman, ably played by Ernest Borgnine tried to impersonate Salinger (made possible because he hadn't been seen in public for years).

Salinger may have spent his time in exile writing. We will soon find out the contents of a safe at his New Hampshire home.
It's is believed it contains a stack of finished, unpublished books.
Why would anyone write something then go to great lengths to make sure no one saw it?
"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing," J.D. Salinger told The New York Times in 1974. "Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure."

That's sort of how I feel about this blog.

Ron Hodges is a Dick

In this day and age of the internet it seems there is nothing we don't know about our favorite athletes. And even the guys who aren't so good, we end up learning a lot about them too.

But what about those players from the past, anonymous guys mostly whose personalities are never revealed.

Two recent books I read shined a new light on former Mets catcher Ron Hodges.



In "The Torre Years" Joe Torre recounts his days as manager of the Mets. In 1978, Torre was the manager, Bob Gibson was pitching coach and Ron Hodges was backup catcher. One night Torre and Gibson were walking through the hotel lobby and they saw Hodges and another player at the hotel bar.
According to Torre's rules the hotel bar was off-limits to players. But instead of going over there himself and "catching" them, Torre sent Gibson to tell them to finish their drinks and leave. Without using these words Torre hints that Hodges told Gibson to go fuck himself and refused to leave the bar.
A backup catcher insulting one of the greatest pitchers of all-time.

Lest you think that was one isolated incident, there's this from "The Complete Game" by Ron Darling.
Before Darling's first major league game in uniform (he was not due to pitch, just sit on the bench), he got dressed in his brand new white Mets uniform and was so proud of himself that he made it to the big leagues.
Darling sat on the end of the bench to steer clear of the veterans who would actually be playing that night. Hodges walked the full length of the dugout, spit tobacco juice on Darling's leg and walked away.

Ron Hodges was a career .240 hitter. Imagine what an insufferable son of a bitch he would have been if he were actually a good player.

Update: Keith Hernandez recently told the following Ron Hoges story but prefaced it with "He isn't going to be happy I'm saying this." Hernandez said when he was with the Cardinals it was well-known that Hodges wasn't disguising his signs well enough and it was too easy to see which pitch he was calling. Hernandez said as soon as he got traded to the Mets, he told Hodges about his pitch tipping.

More Lascivious Details About the 86 Mets

If you didn't get enough in "The Bad Guys Won" you can get even more dirt about the best team in the history of baseball in a new book by Darryl Strawberry.

In "Straw: Finding My Way," due out in April, Darryl describes the 86 Mets:

"We were the boys of summer. The drunk, speed-freak, sneaking-a-smoke boys of summer...[An] infamous rolling frat party . . . drinking, drugs, fights, gambling, groupies."

Beer "was the foundation of our alcoholic lifestyle," he writes. "We hauled around more Bud than the Clydesdales. The beer was just to get the party started and maybe take the edge off the speed and coke."

The team's mantra on the road, he writes, was to "tear up your best bars and nightclubs and take your finest women...The only hard part for us was choosing which hottie to take back to your hotel room. Lots of times you...picked two or three."

Although he doesn't name names, Strawberry relates how team members picked out girls from the stands for quickies. He once watched a pitcher march a frisky fan to a private room for oral sex: "I was jealous. When I saw her heading back to her seat, I gave her a sign. She smiled, turned right back around, and met me in that same little room...I had to be quick and run back out on the field."

SCZA wants to know how its possible for a guy to have a quickie between innings. I think it's possible if he made the last out of the previous inning, he has about 2 minutes between innings, plus the whole time his team is up (maybe he asks the guys to take some pitches or step out), that should give him a total of 8 to 10 minutes which should be more than enough. Obviously a starting pitcher on his off day and a DH or even a bench player, are the best candidates to receive in game blow jobs, but I think a position player could make it work.

That's One Way to Get Out of Overdue Fees on Your Library Books

My new hero is Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger. Chase got a toy plane for Hannukah and I told him the pilot was a Sully Sullenberger action figure.
Sully called the Fresno State University Library (a place Melvin Ely never visited) to ask for a waiver on overdue charges for a book he borrowed.
Turns out the book is still in the cargo hold of the plane Sullenberger landed on the Hudson River.
The library told him not to worry about it, it will replace the book in his honor.
Oh, and the book is about ethics. Why did this guy need to read about ethics?