Class of 2005

Bernie Brewer
3B
Wears a Cleveland hat.

Normally, I'm pretty ambivalent about mascots that involve a dude dressing in a foam rubber imitation of a person. And by ambivalent, I think they're fucking retarded. I mean, isn't this way cooler and less creepy than, say, this? This goes for Halloween costumes too - when you buy a Halloween mask you've basically said to the world, I refuse to put any thought into this costume at all. But I'll give Bernie Brewer a pass because he used to go down his little slide into a mug of beer, and anything that encourages children between the ages of 4 and 11 to consume alcohol is alright in my book.


Fear, Itself
OF
Wears a Kansas City hat.

Franklin Roosevelt once said that the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself. And I guess that's mostly true, unless it turns out that there's a maniac with a knife camped out in your closet, waiting for you to go to sleep so he can eat your eyeballs. In that case, you're probably justified in feeling that there are more immediate problems in your life than fear.


Max, King of the Wild Things
Catcher
Wears a St. Louis hat.

Maurice Sendak's scholarly dissertation on inducing hallucinations in children by temporarily starving them was picked up on by the mainstream media and ultimately made the rounds as the partially dumbed down novel version, "Where the Wild Things Are". Sendak's follow-up, "The Wild Things Experiment with LSD and Peyote", was less successful.


Senator Benjamin Wade
SP
Wears a Detroit hat.

How big of an asshole was Benjamin Wade? When Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868, he was acquitted by one vote. Now, Johnson was a total asshole. But Wade was an even bigger asshole, and it is said that, were anyone but Senator Wade to take Johnson's place as President (since he was President pro tempore of the Senate, Wade was the first in the line of succession at the time, since Johnson didn't have a VP), Johnson would very probably have been chucked from office. The Senate, ultimately, decided to stick with Johnson's everyday assholery rather than deal with the gargantuan, monumental assholery of Senator Wade. Just look at his picture. You can tell, immediately, that this is an asshole. And he always looks like that in pictures. Like an asshole.

Class of 2004

Ivan Nickolaevich Bezdomny
LF
Wears a New York (NL) hat.

Ivan Nickolaevich Ponyryov (who uses the pseudonym Bezdomny, which means "homeless", as a writer of poetry) is a peripheral character in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita. A full English translation can be accessed here. Bezdomny appearances bookend the novel, which revolves around the appearance of the devil in Moscow (as a dapper, refined gentleman, and isn't he always these days). The book was written between 1928 and 1940 - Bulgakov died in 1940, having mostly finished his novel, but it didn't actually see the light of day until 1966, when it was serialized, in an edited version, in Moscow magazine. The edits may have softened the blow but it was still a subversive, anti-establishment work, and it quickly became a contemporary classic, passed around and discussed by the Russian intelligentsia. It supposedly holds a particular high place in the psyche of the Russian people - it has been adapted a handful of times into other media, but there are stories (like with Don Quixote) of a curse on them, including one version that was filmed in 1994 and, like the original novel, was buried, this time for copyright reasons, although DVD versions have since appeared.

This is a pretty comprehensive site about the novel, if anyone is interested.

(Mikhail Bulgakov)