There's . . . Killebrew, and Gehringer, and Heilmann and Robinson.

November 15, 2010 5:48 PM

The Periodic Table of Baseball Hall-of-Famers.

Previous periodic tables on MetaFilter include Irrational Nonsense, Typefaces, Condiments That Periodically Go Bad, Awesoments, Printmaking, Visualization Methods, Haiku, Funk, Cupcakes and, of course, other Periodic Tables.

Link via Baseball Think Factory, which includes a very brave attempt to Tom Lehrer-ize this periodic table as well.

posted by Copronymus (10 comments total)

Heh, this is great, and too appropriate for a night when I should be studying for a Chem II exam instead of dicking around on MeFi.

The person that commented "I'd definitely shift Al Kaline into the alkalines. It's just the right thing to do." made me laugh so much.

Thanks. I needed this.
posted by Ufez Jones at 6:05 PM on November 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

I was going to take issue with the blank spots on the table (in the radium, rutherfordium, and dubnium spots plus three of the actinides, but it looks like he's still working on these, or has left them blank for future inductees. Extending the 'Radioactive' category would be a good idea if you're going to include such, erm, luminaries as Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds. Of course, if you want to make your own suggestions, Baseball Reference has a handy list of Hall of Fame inductees, along with sortable lists of the honorees' batting and pitching stats.
posted by hangashore at 7:29 PM on November 15, 2010

I thought I knew Baseball decently well, but I'm confused as to why Reggie Jackson is in the "Radioactive" column. Can anyone enlighten me?
posted by Navelgazer at 7:45 PM on November 15, 2010

I devoutly hope they'll never be Hall of Fame inductees - but if the steroid users did ever make this list, I hope they'll go into the slots for the artificially constructed transuranium elements.
posted by Chanther at 7:53 PM on November 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

I'm confused as to why Reggie Jackson is in the "Radioactive" column. Can anyone enlighten me?

Some quotes on the bio on Baseball reference can give you some idea of how Reggie thought of himself - though I bet the "radioactive" label comes from his regular feuds with Billy Martin (who was a New York Yankee manager).
posted by cnanderson at 8:33 PM on November 15, 2010

Navelgazer: "I thought I knew Baseball decently well, but I'm confused as to why Reggie Jackson is in the "Radioactive" column. Can anyone enlighten me?"

He was a highly unstable isotope: 11th in career home runs, 1st in career strikeouts.
posted by not_on_display at 10:19 PM on November 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

The Babe wasn't a slouch for strikeouts, either.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 3:29 AM on November 16, 2010

I'm glad he included Old Hoss Radbourn ("for purely subjective reasons"), one of my own favorites from the nineteenth century. You don't get many 60-game winners these days.
posted by languagehat at 7:55 AM on November 16, 2010

This is definitely better than most "periodic tables" on the Internet. A lot of them seem to believe that "periodic table" just means "arbitrary way of writing the elements in a grid" and forget that there are actually some patterns. (The ones that are linked to seem good at not doing this, though.)

Also, there's the Periodic Table Table (previously). That's not redundant, it's an actual table containing actual samples of the elements.
posted by madcaptenor at 8:35 AM on November 16, 2010

I'm glad he included Old Hoss Radbourn . . . one of my own favorites from the nineteenth century

He's quite the wit on Twitter as well.
posted by yerfatma at 5:54 AM on November 17, 2010