The Ted Williams death has taken a bizarre twist. It looks like his son is going to freeze his head in hopes of reviving him in the future. Sounds like Ted Williams will be guest-starring on Futurama!
Oh, and his estranged daughter is getting a lawyer to fight this.
It will be sad is this goofy shit ends up becoming how we remember him. “Remember Ted Williams?” “Yeah, great hitter. Didn’t they freeze his head after he died?”
Oh Mark, it’s much creepier than that.
From the above linked Salon story:
“On Saturday, Williams’ estranged daughter accused her half brother, John Henry Williams, of planning to cryogenically freeze their father’s body and preserve his DNA, perhaps to sell in the future.”
I’d like some Ted Williams DNA in my new baby please. Hold the mustard.
Two variations on a famous movie line I’ve heard in the past couple of days:
“There’s no tying in baseball!”
“There’s no cryogenics in baseball!”
Now Bud “Worst. Commissioner. Evar.” Selig says one team will fold in the next week or two and another might fold before the season is over.
I hope it happens. Good riddance to bad rubbish. MLB was entirely foolish and greedy to expand as much as they have in the last decade. They added four teams and now want to get rid of two older teams. They looked the other way while the Marlins won a championship and then sold their players off like so many auto parts from a chop shop. Finley tried to that with the A’s back in the '70’s and Bowie Kuhn stepped in and stopped it. Selig was too busy making sure his new stadium got built at (I presume) taxpayer expense.
They’re such good role models too! Now Barry Bonds admits that he uses creatine to bulk up. McGwire used andro. Sosa flies into a hissy fit when a columnist asks him to volunteer for a steroid test after Sosa said he’d be “first in line” for the test if the Player’s Association" approves it. Meanwhile my 17 year old son who’s been training all summer for fall football wonders if creatine isn’t something he should use to bulk up – why not? He can go from 225 to 245 and add muscle and maybe get some kind of a scholarship offer. It’s only a supplement for which no long-term usage studies have been done.
Fuck baseball and Star Wars. Unless Stan Musial comes out of retirement, I’m not interested.
I’d pay to see Stan the Man wield a light saber.
Interestingly, rumor has it that the two teams that might not make payroll on Monday are Tampa Bay (no surprise there) and the World Series Champion Arizona Diamondbacks.
What gets me is how woeful Tampa Bay is yet Selig wants to erase the Twins and all their history? Admit you made a fucking mistake in ever approving a franchise for Tampa and revoke it and leave the Twins alone.
The Expos? Yeah, they suck mightily at the attendance gates. You can’t make much of a case for preserving them.
Stan Musial – “baseball’s perfect knight.” I got his autograph as a kid at his restaurant. I took up a napkin to him and nervously asked him to sign it – I was probably 7 – and he said “We can do better than that!” and took me into the waiting area and grabbed a couple of photos of himself posing at the plate and signed them both for me. Nice guy.
‘Good riddance to bad rubbish. MLB was entirely foolish and greedy to expand as much as they have in the last decade.’
Amusingly, they keep talking about killing off the Twins, who are in perfectly fine finanical shape. This “contraction” isn’t about team profitability.
I was using the Bill James Runs Created per 27 outs method. A team of nine Ted Willams batting would produce 11 runs per game. A team of average contemporaries only 4. Standard sabermetric tool. And a lot easier to understand than his new win shares thing, which is still a little beyond me. You can review all this stuff in Stats Inc’s All Time Major League Handbook.
Go here http://www.baseball-reference.com/ for all things baseball stats… not that itm atters since baseballs ded, since they won’t even allow the players to finish an All Star game dem bastards. Has Kevin Brown earned his 100 million yet?!?
Also to add, the site ranks Ted Williams as the eighth all time greatest hitter. Ruth is 1st… then Hornsby, Mays, Musial, Cobb, Wagner, Aaron then Williams. If Williams never went to fight in the war… he could have possibly been up in the top 3…
Check out the site, its really good.
etc
What ranking are you using? If you look at career OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage), which is generally considered the best measure of a hitter, Williams is second only to the Bambino.
Baseball Reference has a Hall of Fame career batting standards test. They have some formula based on some numbers… and come up with the list. I dont completely agree with it, but its pretty accurate in terms of production. It takes into account totals as well as averages. So really, it doesnt mean * best hitter *, more like best career hitter.
If you look at the list, Williams has a lot of competition… some really good names… and Gehrig came in at 12… and I would have expected Gehrig in the top 10…
etc