Archers of what?

Credit where due. It was a brilliant idea. The three of us, presented with the happy magic of a reunited Archers of Loaf would walk through the back catalogue, explicating the titans of our misspent youth as we went. This was our sweet spot, and when P emailed the suggestion I was in, no questions asked. The opportunity, all gift wrapped in gutter punk glory and the dulcet tones of Big E in full croak, to relive the past in anticipation of next month's back to back shows at The EARL. It was fantastic. It was a brilliant idea. Of course I flaked.

It seems most of my contributions these days bear introductions built around why my homework is late. This is no exception. The question at hand being “how could you flake on the Archers?” It's a meatwad, thigh-high fastball on the inner half, with little to no movement. It's the perfect pitch, dead red center of your wheelhouse. How on earth could you whiff on that? It's the freakin' Archers, for God's sake.

The best I can come up with – and I have considered this somewhat thoroughly – is timing. Or more precisely, timeline. Or more, more precisely, the disconnect between the actual timeline of Archers releases and the timeline of Archers-related memory mining from the base of my thick skull. The idea was to walk through the discography chronologically. Icky Mettle to vs Greatest of All Time to Vee Vee to Speed of Cattle, so on and so forth. That makes all sorts of sense, of course. The problem is it completely crashes my mental edifice of all things Archers. I think, for me to properly do this thing, I have to walk through the exercise on the personal timeline rather than the official arc of history. That is to say, I have to start in the middle. Specifically it all has to start with Vee Vee.

It's summer, 1995. P and I are wandering the seemingly endless bins of used and new merch at Eat More Records, up in Norcross, in a run-down strip mall off of Jimmy Carter Blvd, a few miles east of 85. Eat More is maybe the best used record/CD shop in the Atlanta metro, with rack after rack of the utterly unknowable snaking out through a bland space that might have once been a Dollar General. The Fat Man – that's all I ever knew him by, for the record – that owns and operates the place is a force of legend. A trip to Eat More, or one of the few other used record shops in the city, is to us what Mass must be to Catholics. We'll usually traipse out every couple of weeks or so and sift through the wares. Our own little ritualistic dance. Scan the bins. Flip the discs. Never sure what the hell we might find.

It's summer, 1995. I pretty sure I've heard the Archers a few times on Album 88. Memory is fickle even at the best of times, and this is the High Period of Categorical Insobriety, so take it for what it is. But I'm pretty sure I've heard the Archers a couple of times before. I may have seen them open for Weezer. Or maybe someone else did and I'm blurring stories told a hundred times into false memories of my own. Who knows? Does it matter? Isn't that how communities worth living in are made? It's summer, '95, and I'm pretty sure I've heard “Harnessed in Slums,” or maybe “Might,” on the radio once or twice. P and I are sifting through Eat More at our own paces, and somewhere in the Ar-As bin I stumble upon this.

I suspect it will take too long to explain, in this age of digital downloads, iTunes, lossless audio, etc, et al, how it makes such perfect sense to have the cover art be the kicker that makes the decision between “meh, not today” and “I need this.” Such are the pains of the aging hipster, I suppose. This is how I took Vee Vee home with me. $5.99 used, promo copy. Still has the “not for resale” imprint on the cover. This is how I heard Archers for the first time. Not chronologically. I'm pretty sure I'd heard singles on the radio. Might have seen them open for another show, even. But this is the first true listening. Because this is the first time we put the disc in the tray, put on the headphones, and lose the world to the sound.

So, that's the excuse. Archers, for me, don't start with the “Might” single released prior to Icky Mettle in '94. Archers, for me, starts with Vee Vee. Archers, for me, start with “Step Into the Light.”

How does one do this without becoming that guy? How does one do this without boring the audience by being the old man ranting about how much better it was when he was young? I honestly don't know. I honestly don't know how to convey to non-believers the hook. It's like trying to explain heroine to a straight-edger. How could you even begin to do that? There's that kick/snare, and the simple walking guitar, all starting at once. There's the weird, broken, post-punk doo-wop chorus - “ooooooooo, ooooo” - as the bass and second guitar slides in. Then there's that weird tweaking, half plucked, warped out, deconstructed lead line from Big E. There's the low slung, perfect tone of Little E's rhythm work. And it just...builds. Without building. It just walks into and out of the shadows. Until, two minutes and 40 seconds into, Bachmann side-saunters in, as tweaked, and half-plucked, and warped out and deconstructed as the his guitar work. Trampled. Destroyed. Beyond repair or salvation.

“Step into the light; I'm tired of being in the dark and all alone. Step into the light.” Repeat. And then Little E and the backing vocals. As if you can call that backup. Around the 3:06 mark. There are so few moments of recorded music of which I can truly say this, but I promise you, if you can ever come to understand this moment of this song – where Little E comes in screeching “STEP INTO THE LIIIIIIIIIIIIGHHHTTT” off mic in the background as the bigger Eric half croons through his lead dirge, you will understand the healing power of rock and roll.

And as far as it goes, constructively speaking, that's it. That's the song. And it's fucking brilliant. And it fades. And then you're hit in the teeth with the boot heel of “Harnessed in Slums.”

I'm going to assume that if you're reading an off-the-beaten-path indie rock webzine's writeup of the Archers of Loaf's back catalogue you have heard “Harnessed in Slums” once or twice. I will assume you can shout it out loud. That said, I'll leave you to it, noting only two things. First, there's Little E again, at the 45 second mark, again off mic. “I WANT WASTE! WE WANT WASTE!” Crescendoing. Building. Teetering uncontrollably towards the song's pitch perfect pivot. Which, for the record, in case you're interested, is a single plucked, out of tune guitar string at the 1:37 mark.

I promise.

Slide into “Nevermind the Enemy.” Note the strategic use of the “truck backing up reverse siren warning sound” in the guitar lick. Note that sampling was not a new endeavor for Eric Bachmann when he moved to his solo work with Crooked Fingers. “Nevermind your friends. We'll make a joke of them.” Trust me on this one, okay? And oh, for the love of God, don't miss the line about halfway through that pushes full throttle into track four and previews the album's entire thematic structure. “Let's tack their earlobes to the radio.” I swear.

And that brings us to track four. “The Greatest of All Time.” I could literally write six or seven pages about this one song. I won't, because that would bore most people to tears. In fact, I think I'll just try to sum up as quickly as possible. “The Greatest of All Time” is the best track Archers of Loaf ever recorded. “The Greatest of All Time” is one of the top five songs recorded in the 1990s. “The Greatest of All Time” is the early-90s slacker-culture's gestalt answer to Don McLean's “American Pie.” It can not be understood without reference, in some way, to Ben Folds' (ironic) breakthrough hit “Underground.” If you can listen to this song and not howl along with the chorus - “Toasting to their heroes; toasting to their heroes; a toast to the dead heroes” - you were not alive and conscious for the better parts of my youth.

I swear.

So yeah, maybe I'm already that guy. Maybe there's not out to this trap. I'm probably alright with that, now that I think about it. I could continue with the track list, but if you're listening along, you should have it at this point. Everything forward harkens back to this moment. “The underground, is overcrowded.” Underdogs of Nipoma. Right there. “Scraping over matches and a microbrew.” “Since you're better at me than this...” All right there in GOAT. “The underground, is overcrowded.” Don't say we didn't see the tsunami of “indie rock” of the 2000s coming. We did. It's all right there. “Fabricoh's the favorite sound around. Watch the wholesale slaughter of the whole damned town.” Let The Loser Melt. “Underachievers, attack at your leisure.” The Worst Is Yet To Come.

Don't say we didn't warn you.

"Radical"

This post was inspired by this conversation at BaseballThinkFactory.org, and this post from the always brilliant Don Malcolm of BigBadBaseball.

There's been a lot of talk recently about realignment in Major League Baseball. Much of that talk includes the term “radical” as a descriptor of proposed schemes. The so-called “radical” realignment scenarios usually involve a complete tear down of the existing American League/National League distinctions, to be replaced with a more holistic “Major League Baseball” aligned by geography. Much as the old American Football League was subsumed, becoming a conference in the NFL, the old AL/NL distinctions would become mere divisional semantics of the greater, realigned MLB concept.

There are a few very good reasons for realignment. Primarily, it is a problem of math. There are 30 major league teams. 14 play in the American League. 16 play in the National League. Each league is divided into three divisions. The NL Central has six teams (the other two divisions have five each.) The AL West has four teams (the other two divisions have five each.) The entire point of so-called “radical realignment is to move one of those NL teams to the American League in order to create six divisions (three per league) of five teams each. The problem with that theory is that in order to do that, you have to schedule and interleague game every day of the season, in order to make the math work for a 30 team league. And having interleague every day pretty much means you don't actually have two “leagues,” an AL and a NL. You have one league, with six divisions. This is what they call “radical.”

I hate the misuse of terms. I also hate small minded solutions that cower in the face of the actual problem. The problem isn't that MLB needs to move a team from the NL to the AL. The problem is that MLB has too few teams. The obvious solution isn't to create some sort of wonky 6x5 league with “interleague” play every day. The obvious solution is to add at least two teams.

At BTF, I suggested a team in Salt Lake City and another in Newark, NJ. Both would go into the AL, creating two leagues with 16 teams each. The basic layout of the leagues was thus:

AL EAST - BOS, NYY, BAL, NWK
AL CENT - CLE, DET, TOR, TBR
AL MIDW - CHW, KCR, TEX, MIN
AL WEST - SEA, SLC, OAK, LAA

NL EAST - NYM, PHI, WAS, PIT
NL SOUT - ATL, MIA, CIN, HOU
NL CENT - CHC, MIL, STL, COL
NL WEST - LAD, SFG, SDP, ARI

This alignment is the least radical possible. It literally solves the problem in the fewest steps, without switching franchises from their traditional leagues. Put a new team in Newark, playing in the AL East. Put a new team in Salt Lake, playing in the AL West. Play baseball. Simple. Easy. Not radical. The hardest part of this strategy would be to carve out a new franchise in existing New York Yankees territory, a problem I'd suggest be solved by eliminating the “luxury tax” system, wherein the Yankees, after crossing a certain threshold of payroll, have to pay other teams a “tax” from their coffers. A team in Newark cuts into the Yankees' gigantic market (as well as that of the Mets) so there's no reason to double penalize them for being, well, the Yankees.

This seems like a straight forward solution to me. But for some reason, the powers that be in MLB refuse to even consider expansion. I blame Bob Costas.

Regardless, after putting this together, I got to thinking about what a true “radical” plan might entail. Now, granted, as a former card-carrying radical of the radical school of radicality, I might have different ideas as to what plans could honestly use that moniker, but hey, it's my blog.

Going through the thought experiment, starting with a few grounding assumptions.

1. The proper direction is out, not in. MLB should be growing it's product, not shuffling pieces around the board with no real future-oriented strategy in mind.

2. The smallest market in baseball, currently, is the Milwaukee metro, with just under 1.7 mil people in its Combined Statistical Area. Rounding a bit, a million and a half is the smallest market size that would likely support a ML baseball team.

3. There are eleven (11!) markets in the United States larger than Milwaukee that lack a MLB team.

• Orlando
• Sacramento
• Charlotte
• Indianapolis
• Columbus, OH
• Las Vegas
• Austin
• Raleigh-Durham
• Salt Lake City
• Nashville
• Greensboro, NC

Eleven markets! Eleven new potential baseball teams! Think of the radical possibilities. But wait. Let's balance our crazy with some realism. We're not 20-somethings with an irrational hatred of corporate coffee shops any more. Orlando, while over 2 million strong, is very close to Tampa and the Rays. And the Rays are having a hard enough time drawing customers as it is. Orlando's off the list.

Columbus, OH is actually a bit larger than Cleveland these days, and growing rather than shrinking, but Cleveland already has the stadium and the team. Columbus is too close to the Indians, so they're off the list too.

Three of the markets are in North Carolina. While NC is booming, I don't think it's ready to go from zero to three franchises over night. We'll leave Charlotte on the list, but remove the Raleigh-Durham Triangle and Greensboro from consideration. Marking those off as well, we're left with only seven potential expansion sites.

• Sacramento
• Charlotte
• Indianapolis
• Las Vegas
• Austin
• Salt Lake City
• Nashville

You've got enough markets to bring in the two new American League teams, PLUS another division entirely. But you can't have a single, orphaned four- or five-team division off by itself. You need at least eight ne2 teams, in addition to the two new AL teams, to really expand. Luckily, we haven't even begun to exhaust the potential markets.

As I said earlier, the smallest market in MLB is Milwaukee, with just over 1.5 million people in it's Combined Statistical Area. The vast majority of MLB franchises operate within CSA markets of 1.5-6 million residents. BUT, there are a few notable exceptions. New York, as previously noted, has 22 million people, but only two teams. If we assume the City splits evenly (and there's no reason to gut punch Mets fans at this particular moment, so why not) that's 11 million per franchise. Clearly, the NYC metro can take another team. In fact, if we use the same math from above, wherein 1.5 mil people creates a metro-market to sustain an MLB franchise, NYC could support 14 franchises. FOURTEEN!

(Dear Yankees fans, if you want to know how it feels to be a Pirates or Royals fan watching your payroll eclipse theirs by factors of ten, think about having more than 14 competing teams in the metro area.)

Now, I'm a reasonable man. I don't think we should break the NYC metro up between 14 different teams. That's just silly. Assuming that some New Yorkers don't even like baseball at all, I'm fine with doubling the market size needed to support a single-franchise city for the multiple franchise model. You only need 1.5 mil or so to support a single team, but to support two teams you probably need 5 or 6 mil. Which is fine. Instead of 11 NYC teams, we'll only assign them with two expansion teams – one in Newark, NJ; another in Brooklyn. That's 5+ million citizens – or roughly the size of the entire Atlanta-Marietta-Sandy Springs metro area, per team. We now have an additional two franchises!

But there's no reason to single NYC out for the slice and dice. Los Angeles has just under 19 million people. Again, we'll be generous and just add a third franchise to the LA basin.

Chicago has 9-10 mil, but we've already added a new franchise to Indianapolis, which abuts South Chicago more or less, so we'll keep ChiTown as a two team city. But Boston has nearly 8 million people. No reason not to add a new NL team to Beantown.

At this point, we slide into the “just over 6 mil in population” cities. Dallas. Philly. Houston. Dallas, at near 7 mil and growing, could probably take a second team. We'll draw the line at Philly's 6.2 mil, unless we desperately need a final franchise to balance things out.

At this point we've added eleven new MLB teams.

• Sacramento
• Charlotte
• Indianapolis
• Las Vegas
• Austin
• Salt Lake City
• Nashville
• Brooklyn
• Newark
• Boston NL
• Dallas NL

Imagine that league for a moment. Every major city in the country has a major league baseball team. Every franchise has a roughly equal market from which to draw fans. Sure, the historically manifest brands will maintain their position of dominance – not every Yankee fan in Jersey is going to burn his Cap'n Jetes jersey the day the Newark Sopranos open shop. But the field is a lot more even. And being that there are a ton more teams, you can cut the regular season drastically, have distinct leagues without interleague play, AND have a playoff structure that includes like, twenty friggin' teams. What could a Selig not love about this plan?

But wait. We're not done. There are some rather notable markets outside of the US boundaries, currently unserved by MLB. Let's assume you need 2-3 million unAmerican fans to support America's past time.

• Mexico City, Mexico (22 m)
• Guadalajara, Mexico (4.5 m)
• Monterrey, Mexico (4 m)
• Puebla, Mexico (2.6 m)
• Juarez-El Paso, aka The Borderplex, Mexico/Texas (2.5 m)
• Montreal, Canada (3.8 m)
• Vancouver, Canada (2.3 m)
• San Juan, Puerto Rico (2.6 m)
• Havana, Cuba (2.1 m)

Okay, fine. Is it too radical to put a team in Castro's Cuba? Even considering the possibility of the “natural rivalry” between the Miami Marlins and the Havana Your-Family-Goes-To-Prison-If-We-Lose? Fine. Pussy. Call it another eight potential teams.

30 + 11 + 8 (with a second Philly team, and/or Havana in the wings) = 49. Forty-nine potential teams! Radical realignment.

AL EAST - BOS, NYY, BAL, NEWARK

AL CENT - CLE, DET, TBR, INDIANAPOLIS

AL TEXAS - TEX, HOU, AUSTIN, EL PASO

AL MIDW - CHW, KCR, MIN, NASHVILLE

AL WEST - SEA, OAK, LAA, VANCOUVER

NL EAST - NYM, PHI, WAS, BROOKLYN

NL SOUT - ATL, CIN, MIA, CHARLOTTE

NL CENT - CHC, MIL, STL, PIT

NL MTN – COL, SLC, VEGAS, ARI

NL WEST - LAD, SFG, SDP, SACRAMENTO/LA3

IL NORTH – TOR, MONTREAL, BOSTON-2, SAN JUAN

IL SOUTH – MEXICO CITY, GUADALAJARA, MONTERREY, DALLAS-2

There you go. A 48 team super league. 12 divisions of four teams each. And for you traditionalists out there, I've maintained both the Red Sox-Yankees and Cubs-Cards rivalries.

Win your division, go to the playoffs. Period. End of story. Scheduling to accommodate travel and balanced competition. No need for Mexico City to play the Yankees, so long as Mexico City and Monterrey play the same schedule. The MLB playoffs become a true World Series, a North American championship to put all other international competitions to shame. Hell, when it's all done and you have the champion challenge the Japanese and Korean leagues to play each other so that the winner would fly over and face off for global bragging rights.

Grow baseball. Level market access around the league. You know. Radicalism.

Math rock is hard

This story, like all stories worth telling, begins with Charlie Brown. Specifically it begins with "A Charlie Brown Christmas."

Last December the 'Sponge crowd and assorted hangers on tripped over to The EARL to partake in Atlanta's most hep-cat Christmas party - Jeffrey Butzer's annual performance of Vince Guaraldi's masterpiece, "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Hipsters and indie-rockers soaking up the modern jazz and totally dancing non-ironically to the Christmastide joy. With the Peanuts! It doesn't get much more cred-tastic than that, kids. Plus you get to do the Snoopy dance in public.

The 2010 show was opened by a local math-rock outfit called Sorry No Ferrari performing The Ventures' Christmas album (brilliantly titled "The Ventures' Christmas Album.") Going in I had heard neither the Ventures' Christmas album nor Sorry No Ferrari, so I was quite pleasantly surprised to completely lose myself in the surf-rock Yuletide. Yay, beaches! Yay, Christmas!

Between sets the lot of us were talking and socializing, as we are want to do. The subject of Sorry No Ferrari's latest album, 2010's "Ternary," came up. Christmas spirit. Excellent show just played. "Sure man, I'll review it! Send me the download link!" This is where it all goes wrong.

Now, all things considered, you wouldn't think it too hard to write up a CD, would you? I mean, give it an honest listen or three, open up a notepad and knock out a few paragraphs. Bang, bang, your done. It's April. Ain't no procrastination like a 'Sponge-man procrastination, my friend.

I was originally a little off-put by "Ternary." I came into the band blind, no experience or expectations other than the Christmas show. Did I expect a track list of holiday tunes in classic surf-rock style? Well, no. But I'm not sure I was really teed up properly for the mathy McMatherson mathematics of the math-rock either. Maybe that's why I never managed to spin it up properly and write the damned review. Yeah, that's it. Contrary expectations totally stole my homework.

Coming back to the disc a few months later, and knowing what to expect a little more going in, I'm far more grooved into the sound now. Sorry No Ferrari do straight up instrumental math-rock. (Have I mentioned the math yet?) Some other sites call them "heavy progressive," and I guess I can see that. They're certainly proggy, that's for sure. A lot of their riffs could be dropped into a Kings X or Rush song with little editing required. I'm not sure they qualify for what I would call "heavy" - I mean, I spent the darker days of last winter listening to GREYMACHINE, right? But still, I can see the descriptor as apt.

Now, being a music nerd from Atlanta and hearing a dueling-guitar, prime-numbers driven time signature instrumental math/prog band going full on at the craft, I can't help but compare SNF to local godfathers The Purkinje Shift. No, the youth doesn't match up quite yet. Who could? I'm not sure I'll ever see a drummer the likes of Scott Robbins again. But these guys are no slouches. They know their counting, and their time changes, and their intricate fret work. And the percussion adds in backbone - there's some double kicks in there, which is maybe where the "heavy prog" thing comes in - what it lacks for Robbins' percussive genius.

Listening to the disc is best done without reference to track breaks or track names. There's no real reason to try to note where "Ternary I" slides into "Ternary II," or where "Ternary III" melds into "Ashar" for that matter. The albums is a singular set, meant to be taken as a totality. There are no radio singles here. And that's good. It suits the genre.

Having finally come back to it, I'm pretty impressed with the disc and even more so with the band. "Ternary" is a solid five-sponge offering. Fans of the genre should love it, but it remains accessible and listenable to non-devotee ears. Sorry No Ferrari are an excellent set of musicians, and their ability to slide from their preferred style to spot-on renditions of surf-rock holiday standards speaks highly of their tastes and their ability. I shouldn't have put off listening so long.

The inevitable battle for second place

Let's be honest, right? The Braves are playing for second place and the Wild Card. When the Phils went out and signed Cliff Lee to join "H2O" smart money just went ahead and penciled them into the World Series. In ink. The rest of us should be happy that our teams are allowed to be beaten mercilessly by our new Philadelphian Overlords. Not since the Mets brought in Johan Santana to team with Pedro Martinez and Mike Pelfrey has such an unstoppable juggernaut been unleashed in the NL.

Oh, but our passions are deep, and it is spring. Perhaps we can at least dream to one day hope. In this spirit that I present part one of A Series of Datum with Commentary In Tabular Format.

	2010 WAR	Commentary
Roy Halladay	6.9	Roy Halladay is really damned good.
Tim Hudson	5.4	Tim Hudson is better than the rest of the Phillies' rotation.
Roy Oswalt	5.1	Oswalt posted two straight years of 3ish WARs and was on track to do that again, until he went insane after the trade to Philly. He won't be insane again in 2011. He's 3-4 WAR pitcher.
Cole Hamels	4.7	Hamels is really good and young enough to still improve. He's Philadelphia's second best starter.
Cliff Lee	4.3	Very good, yet still extremely overrated.
Tommy Hanson	2.5	It doesn't take a Braves partisan to suspect that Hanson is primed, after two years of 2.5ish WARs, to move into the league of Hamels and Lee. He's 24.
Derek Lowe	1.7	For fun, I call Derek Lowe “The White Man's Kenshin Kawakami.” Outside of Joe Blanton Lowe is the most likely to just go whammo and suck completely in 2011. He's 38.
Jair Jurrjens	0.0	Jurrjens had an injury plagued 2010. In 2009 he posted a 5+ WAR. There's no reason to think he can't do that again when healthy for 2011.
Joe Blanton	-0.7	Aging mediocrity.
Mike Minor	-0.7	Up and coming #3.

Halladay sets himself apart from the rest of the field. That's obvious. And the Phils are more likely to get good pitching from their #4 guy (Oswalt) than the Braves (Lowe.) But Mike Minor is just as likely to out-pitch Joe Blanton.

The doom, it is overstated.

Pettitte Crimes and Miss Demeanors

So yesterday we unveiled The Pettitte List to a rousing chorus of soused crickets. At the exact same moment Joe Posnanski was turning out some 7000 words on the best players of his lifetime, which you'd think would be enough, but was actually merely the intro bit for his thoughts on Gary Sheffield and the HOF. It's like synchronicity or something, wherein "synchronicity" means nothing remotely like what it's been used for in any real world language game to date.

Now Joe, as everyone knows, is the most beloved man in all of sports-writing. Some attribute this to his passion, encyclopedic knowledge of virtually every American game, intellectual honesty and mastery of the writer's craft. I personally attribute it to voodoo, but then again I tend to attribute pretty much everything to voodoo given the slightest option. Joe Posnanski, voodoo priest. Works for me.

Anywho, as these things go, The Pettitte List post generated like, twelve comments over at BTF, which is a new record for one of my bits not directly related to physical violence or Dan Szymborski's sub-basements. As such, we shall continue to ride this tiger. Because, dude, it's spring and I'm thinking about baseball again.

The Pettitte List: Gary Sheffield

1. Q: Does Andy Pettitte Gary Sheffield deserve to be inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame? A: No.

2. Q: Would anyone other than mindless Yankee fanboys, paid Yankee media shills or Andy Pettitte's Gary Sheffield's immediate family honestly believe... A: Wait! How close to me is Gary Sheffield standing? Because if he's within say, oh, sixty feet and six inches of my skull and he's waggling that bat around like he did and he's glaring at me the way he glared at pitchers, I want to change my vote.

2a. Q: You can't change your vote. You already answered the first question. A: But Gary Sheffield could hurt me if I say no. I once saw him almost nutsack a defender on a damned short hop line drive to left field. He was the terror of every third base coach that ever lived. Even the ones that died before he started Little League!

2b. Q: You've made your bed, now lie in it. A: He was Doc Gooden's cousin, too. Don Sutton told me so. Like, every single at bat for all of 2002-2003. Sometimes twice per at bat.

2c. Q: Does Sheffield's attitude or inclusion in the Mitchell Report alter the likelihood of you voting for Gary Sheffield for the HOF? A: No. The only thing that matters is how close he is to me physically and whether or not he is doing that bat waggle thing. Bat waggle at my head = "Yes." No bat waggle = "No."

3. Q: If Andy Pettitte Gary Sheffield gets elected to the MLB Hall of Fame, what would be the general reaction? A: I suspect the entire state of Milwaukee might disappear into a cataclysmic sink hole, which admittedly would be another reason to vote for the man.

Keltner Schmeltner, Pettitte Scones

Way back in pre-history, before the internet and talking super-computer proto-gods, Bill James published the 1985 Baseball Abstract. The Abstract was a running publication where internet dorks talked about statistics before the internet even existed. It was printed on mule-skin with ink condensed by stomping the fruit of thistleberries into a fine pulp. Notably, this had to be done while the thistleberries were still living and attached to the thistles, because it only makes ink if the berries scream for their lives as you stomp.

Anyway, in the '85 Abstract James published one of his more famous pieces - The Keltner List. The Keltner List was a simple, non-mathematical series of 15 questions fans could ask about any given player to determine whether or not he was worthy of enshrinement in MLB's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. It's still quite popular even today, 25 years after first publication, usually as a conversation starter for recently retired borderline players (Javy Lopez, Gary Sheffield, etc.) The list is also still useful for its original purpose from 1985, which was to ask in a somewhat obtuse way the question "Seriously, some nutters actually thought Ken Keltner was worthy of a HOF vote??"

Alas, 25 years is a long on passing time, and our current Twitter-driven dialogue is short on attention span. It seems the list might be in need of some updating. In the spirit of brevity, concision and open handed giving, I humbly suggest Keltner be replaced with my new list of fewer, less difficult questions. I call it The Pettitte List.

1. Q: Does Andy Pettitte deserve to be inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame? A: No.

Much simpler, no?

If required, The Pettitte List may be expanded into Facebook posts as follows.

2. Q: Would anyone other than mindless Yankee fanboys, paid Yankee media shills or Andy Pettitte's immediate family honestly believe Andy Pettitte deserves to be inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame? A: No, and his wife wouldn't vote for him either if it were a secret ballot.

3. Q: If Andy Pettitte gets elected to the MLB Hall of Fame, what would be the general reaction? A: Murray Chass.

Consider this an opportunity for education and advancement.

5 million BCE, drop out of the canopies. Better and more varied food sources. Discovery of wanderlust.

A million years later, bipedal motion. Extended hunting ranges. The ability to carry goods long distances. Grasping thumbs.

Two million years gone. Discovery of fire and the eating of meat. Brain size jumps from 700cc to 1300cc. The first stone tools, migration out of Africa and eventually, inexorably, internal combustion engines.

Monday, February 14, 2011 CE. Easy off of Howell Mill. Straight shot down the on-ramp through Northside. Kick to 4th before you even hit the interstate proper. 70-something and the throttle isn't halfway spun.

Grasping hands. Bipedal motion.

The waters part. Moses out of Egypt on I75. Whatever. Arrow straight slash across six lanes. All in for 6th before you hit the deceleration zone heading into the pivot.

60 degrees. No clouds. No humidity. Modern man and his machines. The fool has said in his heart there is no G*d. Oh, poor Guanilo, you sad sack medieval bastard. You had no idea.

Stomp back down to 4 for the turn. 200-odd degrees south to north. The pure, unadulterated laws of physics as holy texts. In on the high line. Flash the knee into the lean. Drag the toe. Boot on asphalt, the burdens of consciousness a distant dream. Read and react. Apex. Throttle. Kick. Throttle. Kick.

I am Jack's existential forgetting. I am Jack's unrepentant childish glee.

Just shy 6 million years of evolution, this little Japanese machine you've named after a fictional mercenary's favorite weapon and the chaos of weather systems too complex to conceive combine in this moment of pure Buddha-under-the-tree mindful emptiness. The fool has said in his heart. Poor, sad Guanilo. If only for a fleeting moment, the world is right and true.