My Designated Hitter is a Fish
December 28, 2011 9:30 AM   Subscribe

William Faulkner's ballot for the 2012 Baseball Hall of Fame election.
posted by Copronymus (13 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm not exactly sure what to call the emotion the first paragraph evoked in me, but I'm absolutely positive I've never felt it for Edgar Martinez before.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 9:39 AM on December 28, 2011 [1 favorite]


Reading this over again, it's actually a fake ballot for the Bill James Hall of Fame and not a fake ballot for the real one, which explains why Andre Dawson, Jim Rice, and Kevin Brown are on it and Jeff Bagwell isn't, but I don't think it meaningfully affects the player-themed pastiches.
posted by Copronymus at 9:40 AM on December 28, 2011 [1 favorite]


This is amazing.
posted by ORthey at 9:48 AM on December 28, 2011


Bernie Williams? I have great affection for Bernie Williams but like a few Yankees of the 90s-2000s he was maybe not as impressive as the aggregate. Though his career was shorter I would be inclined to vote for Scott Bosius. And I would love to read a pean to Chuck Knoblauch, whose disintegration on the field was as poignant as watching the tumbling of a quartershorse.
posted by From Bklyn at 10:04 AM on December 28, 2011


The parallels between Reconstruction South and Knoblauch in the outfield would be fertile fodder for Faulkner.
posted by karmiolz at 10:13 AM on December 28, 2011 [3 favorites]


Well damn, the I dont! I dont! low-hanging fruit is represented in TFA.
posted by infinitewindow at 10:13 AM on December 28, 2011


I am going to go ahead and assume he supports Jack Morris for the Hall of Fame.
posted by zzazazz at 10:24 AM on December 28, 2011


Don Mattingly?

PUH-LEEEEEEEEZE.
posted by bukvich at 10:44 AM on December 28, 2011


I'm not sure how Faulkner-ian this is, but I really don't care. I adore it:

And how he loved to throw! How he would charge a ball and throw it, not for the chance to appear later on the television shows or to make an out, but because when he threw he was fully within his body and his body was directed to one task; one objective that transcended cause and became something eternal; a moment that even as it passed would somehow outlive his body and go forward to the years he would not see.

You know, a lot of the baseball descriptions here remind me less of Faulkner than it does Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding. I'd also like to think that there isn't enough bourbon to bribe Faulkner into writing commentary on a Hall of Fame ballot, but we all know that just isn't true at all. A couple bottles would do it.
posted by .kobayashi. at 10:56 AM on December 28, 2011


This doesn't read anything like Faulkner to me, but I like it.

If and when the conversation actually turns to the merits of this years nominee's, here's Peter Abraham of the Boston Globe discussing his votes.

And previously, where the conversation turned to this year's ballot while discussing Ron Santo's election by the Veterans Committee.
posted by SpiffyRob at 11:08 AM on December 28, 2011


His ballot, that birthright that had passed from hand to hand in a country the players of which he was, to each one, not only a fan, but a voter, by that very privilege by which his father had voted and by which he at that time believed his son would vote; only to spend the slip's promised charge, sacred in his youth and by his ancestor's, and nature's, and the nation's implied duty, not spoken but present in every cracked bat he traced, as he had so many, the trajectory of, with its bald statement of hidden knowledge in the arc it traced through any park's air; only to place that charge's burden in Shlabotnik, whose father he had known, whose son he would, but whose own fate was not to ground or fly but only to once again foul out as he always had before that day.
posted by longtime_lurker at 12:24 PM on December 28, 2011 [2 favorites]


Love love love love love it
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:06 PM on December 28, 2011


Fred McGriff. He was a Brave only from 1993 to 1997, but his name brings me back to a time when I cared about baseball, the Atlanta Braves specifically.
posted by grabbingsand at 7:41 AM on December 29, 2011


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