Class of 2001

Reggie White
3B
Wears a Milwaukee hat.

Reggie White was some kind of "football" player who had a whole bunch of "sacks". That was, at one time, what made him famous.

I recently watched the Errol Morris documentary Mr. Death, about a man (Fred Leuchter) who essentially stumbles into the Holocaust denial movement because he is unable (or unwilling) to accept the limitations of his own knowledge, and becomes a pariah because of it. The parallels to Reggie White (and other naifs of the evangelical persuasion, especially in the world of athletics) should be obvious, but in case they aren't let me spell them out - the vast majority of people know Reggie White mostly as that big fat guy who said that Asian people were good at turning televisions into watches and Mexicans were good at squeezing a lot of people into a house, and nasty things about gay people like this lovely gem:

"Homosexuality is a decision, it's not a race. People from all different ethnic backgrounds live in this lifestyle. But people from all different ethnic backgrounds also are liars and cheaters and malicious and back-stabbing."

So Reggie became a pariah, and now there's nothing anyone can do about it because he's dead, and that's too bad because maybe Reggie, like Leuchter, was just too goddamn stupid to realize what he'd done, but maybe unlike Leuchter he might one day have sought atonement for the hubris that caused him to believe he had all the answers.

Class of 2000

Sanath Jayasuriya
2B
Wears a Cincinnati hat.

Sanath Jayasuriya is a Sri Lankan cricket batsman, perhaps the most accomplished in that country's illustrious cricketing history. That's what wikipedia tells me anyway, and who am I to argue? He's also a pretty ugly dude, which wikipedia "forgot" to mention, so maybe it is as untrustworthy as people say.

I think I'm starting to get the hang of this cricket thing. The "bowler" (he's like a pitcher in baseball) chucks the ball towards the batter. His job (the bowler's) is to dislodge the wicket stump that the batter is protecting and not, contrary to popular belief, to throw the ball hard enough to send it back in time from which it will be impossible to hit it. The batter protects the wicket by hitting the ball, but since he has one of those flat wooden cricket bats (descended from American fraternity paddles) he can hit the ball in a lot of directions - forwards (like in baseball) or sideways, backwards and, well, that's about it. But that's still a lot. He then runs between the two wickets and he gets runs based on how many laps he completes. Or something like that. Meanwhile fielders go retrieve the ball and, I don't know, peg it at the runner's head to try to get him out. The game has a hell of a lot of run-scoring and matches only end based on some complicated formula that only people from the Indian subcontinent can understand which, quite frankly, is probably the only reason they love the game so damn much in the first place. It's not so unlike baseball, and even pays tribute to its American cousin with a history of ugly racism.


Squatch
SP
Wears a New York(AL) hat.

Who's the Typhoid Mary of "NBA mascots have to entertain the crowd by performing trampoline dunks between quarters"? I think I read somewhere that it was the Suns Gorilla, but I don't know if that's right. Anyway, Squatch is the Seattle (no longer Super) Sonics mascot, and he looks like Teen Wolf (a movie, incidentally, which I have never seen and which is on my lifetime boycott list for relatively petty and childish reasons).

Squatch in action:


Doesn't it seem kind of sucky that Squatch gets all the glory while the people not dressed in costumes do all the heavy lifting? Plus they have to wear tacky yellow shirts, not awesome chick-magnet costumes.

On his own this time, squatch throwing down in what looks like a high school gym, earning some money on the side as well as scouting prospects for the future (or, I guess, current) Mrs. Squatch: