Jason Giambi

In 2000, I got myself a Jason Giambi rookie. In 2001, I gave it away after he signed with the Yankees and got rid of his dirtbag image for pinstripes.
Somewhere in those years afterward, I never forgot that he was once the guy that Mark McGwire took under his wing and even begged St. Louis to sign (instead of Tino Martinez who the Yankees cast aside for the Cardinals despite his contributions to the magnificent run that all of their fans thought they had over the past 5 years). Sure, he was salivated over with Seattle in that year that the Mariners beat the Yankees in 1995, but it wasn't the same way that the Yankees lusted after Giambi. Like someone else's girlfriend that is hovered over when the imminent breakup is about to occur, but that doesn't work out when the window of opportunity is there (is everything a Seinfeld episode, or is it just me?)... Tino went to the Yankees, but he was quickly cast out when the opportunity came to get Giambi.
And so the Yankees did, but for the fact I gave his rookie card away (I wouldn't touch Yankee cards at that period of my life - especially ones that featured former "one of my favorite players"). I felt the same way with Randy Johnson and Kevin Brown. Randy was someone that I once adored the hell out of in only the way that a grown straight man can feel for a baseball player that he'll never know. Brown was someone whose talents I really liked. I didn't know much about his temper, but I'll tell you... I loved seeing him smash his hand in the dugout during a stretch run collapse.
Who knew that it was a sign of fierce competitor-ness / roid rage?
And when Giambi got struck by "parasites," I wasn't thinking about how he took Miguel Tejada to task in the 2001 playoffs for being a schlub. Though I never forgot that, I just felt that it was the universe paying him back for taking Yankee dollars and creating a demise of the Oakland team that was dominating August to make the playoffs year after year (Zito, Hudson, Mulder, Tejada).
He was 33, 43, and 38 for home runs in those last 3 Oakland years as he rose from the ashes of a dismantling that saw McGwire shipped to St. Louis. He was first in MVP in 2000 and second in 2001. He batted .315, .333, and .342 those last 3 years. He was 123, 137, and 120 for RBIs those years. He was also 105, 137, and 129 for walks in those campaigns! In the end, he was holding down the first sack and leading a team of dirt bags to the ALCS only to see them implode to the Yankees - we can blame the universe or we can blame his fat ass brother for that, but all the same... the A's were never to be again.
Giambi found a new hope and he found BALCO, and after 2 seasons without scruff, he wasn't the same man again. He did bounce back, but never to the level of his time in Oakland or his 2 41 home run seasons that began his New York tenure (and so began the Curse of Jason Giambi and Mike Mussina - the 2 players that the Yankees had to have at the end of their 3-year run, but couldn't win it all with).
He went back to Oakland in 2009, and it meant well at the beginning, but by the end of the year, he was playing in Denver, a town he still plays in. It's a bit role, and he sort of resembles the guy that he used to be - with a little more gray in the beard... the mustache thing is now over as he looks scruffy again, and for one evening, the old Jason was back killing Philadelphia substitute pitching (Kyle Kendrick) last night.
In the end, he had 3 homers and 7 RBIs.
Now that he's 40, he finally has a 3-homer game. He joins Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, and Reggie Jackson on that short list. For that, we wish him well and back in the lineup on a regular basis, but sadly, the end is coming... there will be no Cooperstown due to his non-specific apologies, but we will remember... that evening with Tejada's playoff goat self.
He was once the man.
Last night he was again.

Roger McDowell

On Seinfeld, he was the 2nd spitter. Sure, Hernandez was upset at Kramer razzing him, but it definitely wasn't a magic loogie!
In baseball, he was a career .500 pitcher, but he did post a 3.30 ERA for his career that ran from 1985-1996. That has to say something. He also had a fair bit of saves, and while they are baseball's most over-rated statistic EVER, he did have a purpose when he played.
As the Atlanta pitching coach, he was tasked with making the team resemble that of the late eighties and nineties. However, instead, he took a couple of hecklers to task in ways that were homophobic and threatening. They were so degrading that do-nothing commissioner Bud Selig did something - suspend McDowell for 2 weeks, give him sensitivity training, and agree to have him personally apologize to one fan and his family.
To this, we have 2 thoughts:
1) don't be an asshole.
2) don't be an asshole back.
I learned a long time ago that you can't win in a confrontational argument. If you're a professional, you have to act like one. Look at former President Bush and the fact that he had to deal with people wearing Kill Bush T-shirts. Sarah Palin and John McCain were brought together for sex pictures during their run for president (as was Obama and Hillary). When you're a public figure, you get this stuff... like it or not. You're manhood isn't in question when drunken yahoos are shouting insults at you. Play through and ignore them. It's part of the game.
Sadly, this isn't the first time that the Atlanta Braves have had to face the consequences on some redneck comments by one of their pitchers. Who can forget John Rocker, who screwed up so badly that even Twisted Sister got upset at him and refused to let him come out to their song anymore.
Now, don't get me wrong. I get the call for him to be fired for insensitivity unparalleled, and as we learned on Glee last night, once the toothpaste is out of the container, it doesn't go back in, but there's something else... the right to earn a living.
Is McDowell competent enough to pitch or be a pitching coach? Is firing him going to permanently keep him from getting hired again (and thus being a ward of the state)? Aren't we supposed to be punishing people so they learn from their mistakes?
Because if we can't allow them to learn from their mistakes, then why not just feed them to the sharks?
To be honest, I'm sure a lot of people would like to see him eaten by Jaws.

Joe Dimaggio

I once stated accurately that I prefer my baseball players dead. Sure, I love that movement that Tim Lincecum puts on his pitches. To go from a hanging arm to whipping a nasty pitch over the plate in a way that deceives the batter into a state of utter stupidity is a fantastic thing to watch. Now, I'm not a fan of the ponytail, and I'm definiteliy not a fan of his bong, but the man is one of the better players in the modern game.

Nevertheless, I prefer the mystique of the eras that I never truly got to see except on documentaries and the images that I see in my head while I daydream about what it must have been like back in the day. That said, I don't imagine life before baseball gloves and catcher's masks, but yeah... tobacco card era baseball and beyond (up until the players that began their careers in the late 70s / early 80s); those were the days.

A prime example of what they don't have any more in baseball is a Joe Dimaggio. We could ask where he's gone, but like Paul Simon (who Dimaggio initially wasn't impressed by due to an incorrect perception that "Mrs. Robinson" was an insult), we have no clue. In 1999, he shuffled off this mortal coil and left many fans sad and lost with only their memories to share. Fortunately, there's HBO's Where Have You Gone, Joe Dimaggio to help us remember the Yankee Clipper / #5 / Mr. Coffee as something more than a couple of pages in a best players ever baseball book.

I don't know if it's safe to say that he's that much better than what an Albert Pujols type player is, but there was something about him... a war era player that lost the best years of his career (43-45, 2 years after the 56-game hitting streak - 1 more would have got him some Heinz 57 money) to World War 2.

He lost Marilyn Monroe to the American people and a drug overdose (not to mention the Kennedys), but he kept a vigil to her for the rest of his life with the red rose he placed by her gravesite.

In 13 seasons, he batted .325 with 369 strikeouts TOTAL! In comparison, that's about 2 years of Mark Reynolds' career (not even). To top it off, he hit 361 home runs for his career.

He was so popular in New York, he could make Mickey Mantle feel like a schlub for daring to replace him.

When it came time to go, he didn't seem to know despite the fact that Casey Stengel was trying to make it easy on him. In the end, Life Magainze, Andy High, and Gene Woodling combined to show just how pedestrian that the "Greatest Living Player" had become. Like Lou Gehrig before him, a superstar being shown as being mortal knew that something was wrong. Where Lou Gehrig's finale came with being congratulated for doing the routine, Dimaggio was taken down to size for not being able to run, field, or hit in the way that he did when he electrified the 1941 spring and early summer.

For even with a bat stolen, he didn't complain. Sure, he wanted to bang heads to get it back, but he went right on hitting until it came back.

He tried his hand at TV, but he quit when he wasn't successful. As Ric Flair said, "to be the best, you have to beat the best," and to Joltin' Joe, if he couldn't be the best, he didn't want to play, so he did what he was good at - running restaurants, making appearances, signing bats, and adding his name to a children's hospital.

Sadly, the band who became a Les Brown record will never be seen at a Dinky Donuts again, but he will always be an example of what's right with baseball and the world.

Albert Belle

In honor of Donny Tobolski, it's time to announce all of the baseball people that qualify as "a fat ass who should stop eating fast food, and is a douche bag." See, it's my Constitutional right to let them know how much they suck, and if they disagree, I'll just get my mom to defend me because I don't deserve to have consequences like suspension marring my future because I'm just an id driven kid that can't be held accountable for what I do.
I'd probably start with Cap Anson since he was responsible for the gentleman's agreement. However, he's not a fat ass. He has 3,435 hit and over 2,000 RBIs, so he's an accomplished athlete, it's just that he has some serious racist issues with including all people. If Dale Carnegie sat down with him and told him how to win friends and influence people, he might be OK, but we'll never know since he's dead.
Now, there are a lot of people that dislike George Steinbrenner as well, but see, here's the things: 1) he made for good humor on Seinfeld as George Costanza's boss, and 2) he may have tried to get the Yankees to win at all costs (ask Dave Winfield and ask those who benefited from Yankee revenue sharing), but he did bring Roger Maris back to the game. To a lot of Boston Red Sox fans, he might be the Evil Empire, but he rescued Maris from Baseball Purgatory, so that's not a fat ass douche bag action.
Albert Belle really was a jerk, but he was a self-admitted "angry black man." Does this sound like an apology, a realization, or a call to be instated in Cooperstown? Steroids accusations, stalking his ex-girlfriend after placing a tracking device on her car and threatening her, chasing kids that were egging his house off his property in an SUV, corked bats, almost ending Fernando Vina with a hard slide, and just being an all purpose thug. In short, he was the talented version of the Devil Rays and Nationals' Elijah Dukes. With that said, are they and guys like Gary Sheffield really jerks or just a product of their environment? That said, if we're name calling, should we stick with fat ass douche bags or is there a more proper name to use? After all, it should be the responsibility of the person doing the name calling to at least accurately describe said person.
For Tolbolski, fat ass douche bag was simply a tag for someone who gave too much homework. Was that really accurate or fair? Just because his teacher could have a weight problem, is that reason enough to hone in on his obesity? Shouldn't we be focusing on people first language?
Sure, we hammer Ryan Howard and King Whiff Mark Reynolds for their frequent strikeouts, but that is addressing a problem with their job performance, something that is objective and something that they get paid a lot of money not to do. We may feel that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are soon going to be getting their prostates examined in the pokey, but was that their doing or ours? In some respects, we blame this as much on a reckless federal government that chooses to prosecute for former players for steroids instead of going after terrorists. And on the subject of terrorists, we may find a picture of Osama Bin Laden wearing a Yankee symbol on his turban as fun (thus equating that many unsavory characters like the Yankees), but let's be honest... it's a proven fact that people should run if they see a person in Yankees attire coming up to them in the dark, but don't believe me... believe the New York Times article!
Nevertheless, it's easy in Blog Land to get caught up in dishing hate on specific people by name. We have that privilege as bloggers, and we have a responsibility to make sure that we're objective and not ranting on real life things that can hurt our lives because we stopped being the professionals we are supposed to be in our real lives. In the end, that's what it's really about - even if athletes, entertainers, and politicians give us such fodder to attack them for (and New York Times v. Sullivan gives us the right), there is still a feeling that there are lines we should be able to protect ourselves from if people cross them. Just ask Tony Larussa. Whether it would have won in a court of law before Twitter made nice, one wonders, but alas... it's a brave new world of hatred and vile comments we can make.
In this, let's hope that we can always stay as professional as we need to.

Rickie "Wild Thing" Vaughn

Every night, my wife and I watch what she refers to as way too much TV. I'm home first, so if I'm downstairs, the first thing on is usually Seinfeld, which is still a classic show despite the fact that the earlier seasons featured some really AWFUL fashion. Not that I'm a fashion guy - I could care less. Give me a T-shirt and a pair of loose fitting pants, and life is good, but I get all of these memories of the early nineties watching that show, and I just think back to how bad the late eighties through the early nineties (until grunge hit big) really were - even if Jason Alexander and Jerry Seinfeld were one of the greatest duos in comedy ever. Personally, I found some of Michael Richards to be amusing, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus was a good fit, it's not like they ran the show the way that Jerry and Jason did. Call it the show of the time, and the TV stations do since it lives on in syndication forever and ever and ever.
This is a period that I often refer to as the dead era of American pop culture. For my last years of high school and the time afterward when I was in the Air Force in Europe, I missed a lot of popular shows like Quantum Leap and the Wonder Years. I've seen the latter, but never the former, and for some reason, the stations don't syndicate Fred Savage the way that they do other shows that have been on for WAY too long.
Somehow, that period of time still seems to leave a lot of things in our lives in 2011. Most of them aren't as good as the original Die Hard, which was truly a classic movie of our lives, or even the grand daddy baseball movie of them all (Bull Durham) and its twin (Field of Dreams), but at least we're not constantly bombarded with Steel Magnolias, Sister Act or Ghost. Sure, we get Roadhouse, but that's different since who doesn't want to watch Patrick Swayze kicking ass (dancing, not so much, but beating the crap out of thugs - oh, hell yeah).
From the completely opposite end of the spectrum, The Cosby Show is even better in reruns than it was when it first came out. That's the thing about great reruns... you can watch them over and over and over from the start and just flow with it. I've gone through periods of time in the last 15 years where I saw every episode of The Simpsons, Home Improvement, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Scrubs. Reruns seem to work better as comedic half hour shows. Most of these shows weren't hits FOR ME right away in prime time, or at least I wasn't watching them in prime time slots. That's the joy of reruns... you can get addicted to something and watch it over and over again every night of the week. Good shows survive and we get to see them and enjoy them for all times sake.
In the eighties, there was Different Strokes, Facts of Life, Silver Spoons, and classic fare like Gilligan's Island, What's Happening, Leave it to Beaver, and The Brady Bunch. They all served a purpose in making the time go by and connecting us to different times throughout history. Besides, who can forget Rerun asking, "Which Doobie do you be?" However, now it's a world different. Now, we're stuck with hours and hours a day of Two and a Half Men because television has been reduced to a world of crappy reality TV that doesn't play well in syndication. Things aren't going to get better, so we just get more crap like TMZ or multiple episodes of bad comedies (to include the last 12 years of the Simpsons, which can be funny, but mostly is just a special guest or a "Treehouse of Horror" episode). Thus, I get Two and a Half Men, and every time it comes on, I can't help but think the same thing...
I HATE CHARLIE SHEEN.
He's just a piece of crap. Let's be honest. Somewhere in all of the repeated life problems and porn star obsession, he makes the same mistake over and over, and with it, he just inspires serious amounts of loathing and hatred. It's gotten to the point where I can't even watch Major League because he's in it, and that's a shame because some of the other actors make the movie as enjoyable as it is.
For example, Dennis Haysbert is a great actor. Whether it's as Pedro Cerrano or as President Palmer or even the All State guy, he's just charismatic and entertaining. Even middle aged dead wood like Corbin Bernson work well. Tom Berenger plays a good lead role, which works well as he always plays solid in stuff like Betrayed and Born on the Fourth of July. I've never been a Rene Russo fan, but she's ok. Wesley Snipes may be a tax cheat, but he's not keeping me from watching that movie. Hell, if he gets annoying, I can imagine Ice-T saying that he wants to kick the tar out of him so badly that his "dick is getting hard." If you haven't seen that, you really need to re-watch that other classic early nineties movie New Jack City.
And throughout it all, there's Bob Uecker... how can you go wrong with Bob Uecker?
But all the same, there's Charlie Sheen, and I hate Charlie Sheen. I really do. I wish he would just vanish and take his stupid show with Duckie and vanish into the Bermuda Triangle, I really do.
And I haven't even started to get into how much they ruined the little kid from the Rookie, which may be the ultimate crime in all of that show's many transgressions against humanity.
Charlie Sheen... I hate you. Phillies fans should hate you. Your nickname became the name of Mitch Williams who imploded in 1993. Defense attorneys hate you.
Only prostitutes, high class drug dealers, and porn stars like you.
That's not good company.
Just take your sorry ass and leave.
Yeah... Charlie... I'm hating on you.