Baseball's Biggest Butt

Base (that's me, for infrequent readers) conducts an informal survey each season to find the player with the buiggest butt. Itt' really an homage to the late Kirby Puckett, who I belive is the gold standard. Any nominee will always be compared to Kirby. It was actually my wife that asked the question first. We were attending a Twins game (vs. Boston) in the mid 90's with a group of friends. A short serious discussion took place and we all decided that Tony Gwynn held that distinction at that time, although Rick Garces was also mentioned as a contender.

Over the past few seasons the distinction seems to fall amongst pitchers (Carlos Zambrano?). Perhaps it's just because we see them most of any position players on television, and in a wide variety of poses/movement.

Your vote, via comment, should not be confused with the Biggest Butthead in Baseball. That's a separate category where opinion contenders are Mark McGuire, Alex Rodriguez, and Ron Washington (actually Biggest Bonehead). Please join me in assembling these alternative statistics. I'll send the results to Bud Selig.

Winter Games

The purist in me does not like a lot of the new sports in the Winter Olympic Games. These include the aerobatics, and snowboarding (and possibly mogul skiing). Maybe it's just my age. I've lived long enough to see the entire Winter Olympic history, although admittedly not payed attention to every incidence.

It's not that I'm adverse to change. These sports are judged along the same lines as figure skating. Clearly they involve a lot of dedication and athleticism to develop skill and mastery. It makes for good television too. My ambiguity about these sports is perhaps a lack of history. They were developed within the age of wild technological innovation. Boarding grew out of surfing, a sport I liked while growing up partly in San Diego.

I started skiing when I was 10 years old in Alaska. Kept at it throgh my teens by way of a fortuitous move to Bavaria at 15, and became a competetive downhill and giant slalom racer. By 18, I was a fearless, but somewhat reckless speedster. A crash injury during a practice run for a race in Garmisch-Partenkirchen pretty much ended my dream of making my way to the world stage. Jean Claude Kily broke a leg that same year, but went on to gold in the Olympics a few years later.

Alas, I digress from a defense of purity preservation. So much surrounding these new sports seems driven by personality, as if they developed out of the reality TV trend. My theory is is that an ocean surfer decided to take the fin(s) off a sufboard an ski down a slope, much like some Norweigian that accidentaly discovered he could fly by leaning foreward while skiing too fast over a clif by leaning forward.

I might be wrong. I might be right.

Throwing Stones

There are a couple sports involving stones (and rocks) that attract my interest. Hill bowling (which I invented), and the 500 year old stone-pushing sport of curling.

Curling seems a very genteel sport for the players, not so much for observers. I like gliding sports. You can read about rules, equipment and scoring here. Some have described it as chess on ice. Early versions used flat bottomed river rocks. I like games without the need for expensive equipment. It was designated an official Winter Olympics event in 1998. Demonstration games in the 1920's were retroactively awarded medals by the "Committee" retroactively. Players are expected to call their own fouls; a superb expectation, elevating the sport beyond the need for close refereeing.

Hill Bowling was an accidental sport invented in the summer of 1979, while walking with a friend in a Baja California Sur canyon. We were resting above a dry river bed, talking importantly about art, while casually tossing rocks down the canyon. One toss hit a junked car with pretty interesting acoustics. We both graduated to larger rocks and began rolling them down the hill, musing that perhaps this was evolving into a game of sorts. Naturally, we developed a scoring scheme: one point for metal, 3 points for the much rarer breaking glass. We never kept score, nor played again. Should you ever find yourself above a rogue dump with a supply of rocks and stones, think of David and Ken, and the game only played once 30 years ago.