Class of 2036

Det. Thomas "Herc" Hauk
SS
Wears a Detroit hat.

One of the places in "The Wire" where verisimilitude isn't the order of the day is the accents. Since none of the main characters speak with a Baltimore accent, when a character does have one (like Dennis Mello, played by the real Jay Landsman, or the junior high principal, or on the black side of the ledger, Snoop Pearson) it's somewhat distracting. But anyone who's ever been around Bawlmer or the Eastern Shore knows that everyone there talks like that. Herc's accent stands out as obviously originating from New York, so much so that the show had to point out that the character comes from the Bronx.


HK416
3B/UT
Wears a New York (AL) hat.

It's a fucking assault rifle. This will hopefully be the last cock substitute I have to put in the Hall of Fame.

Dick Butkus
SP
Wears a Milwaukee hat.

When all is said and done, perhaps the definitive legacy of the turmoil that engulfed this country in the 60's and 70's is the hair. Shit, no one is going to remember what Woodstock was all about or the Vietnam War or any of that crap, but they'll have the pictures and they'll see the hair. Butkus is a perfect example of how this trend affected everyone, because a guy like him never would have let that sort of trend affect him in any other era.

Here's Illini Butkus. Close-cropped, no facial hair. The model of the early-60's football player.

Early Bears Butkus. The hair has gotten longer, and he's added sideburns. Everything is still pretty neat and put-together though. (This picture has a pretty significant Shrute resemblance to my eye.)

This is later Bears Butkus. He's added the iconic moustache. The hair is a bit more unruly, and the sideburns seem a bit bushier. This is the height of the Butkus Revolution.

80's or 90's Butkus. The Reagan Revolution sent Butkus into his natural state. The moustache remains, but the hair has reverted to the flattop of his youth. This is the state Butkus would calcify into. Youthful rebellion has ended.

Late-peroid Butkus. The hair's grayer and thinner, but he will never go back to the radical-chic look that he once sported. The dream of the 60's has officially died. Whatever comes next will have to do so without Butkus.

Class of 2030

Magic Johnson
SP
Wears a Chicago (AL) hat
Enshrined here for proving to people like Happy that people like Aaron aren't the only ones.


Rocky Horror Show
2b
Wears a Milwaukee hat

Craigles:
It's a pretty stupid story, but it's what I always think of whenever someone mentions Rocky Horror:

I’ve actually seen the Rocky Horror Show performed live. Not on Broadway or anything, it was a decidedly more amateur affair, but it wasn’t bad. I mean, the story is censored stupid, and it’s way over the top, but some of the songs are kind of catchy, and if you strip away all that audience participation crap that gives it such a bad name, it’s not such a bad little show.

Why did I go? Well, that has a pretty simple answer – someone said the magic word. I had a roommate who knew some people who knew some people who were in the show, theater types, and they were putting it on Halloween night (naturally). Well censored , I wasn’t going to go to that. They wanted my roommate to sit in the back and tape the performance, and I damn sure wasn’t going to sit in the back and have to do a goddamned job for a show that I already hated before I’d ever seen it. But, you know, someone said the magic word, and I went, and sat behind that camera, and taped the whole stupid thing. Sober, even. And what’s the magic word, you might ask? Well, nudity, of course. I was told that one of the actresses was going to get her top off at one point (the Susan Sarandon character, I think). It only ended up being for a few seconds, but that’s good enough for me. And hey, I kind of enjoyed the rest of the show too, like I said. Yes, I am that immature. The end.

Dan:
I think of my good friend Harry Waksberg, and of the darkness of middle school, whenever this movie is mentioned. I've seen the movie in his basement a few times, and also in midnight-theaters. It's good that someone turned it into a stageable thing, for the sake of people like this:



The Founder, Abner Doubleday
C
Wears a combined Cleveland and St. Louis hat, with a small Chicago AL feather

Will be forever remembered for creating this great game, sucking at it, and then for cheating death. For a small few of us, this game has never gotten any better than The Doubles.


Marvin Martian
SS
Wears a Boston hat

Forever marks the triumph of all, and indeed, of the OGL itself. It has taken all these years for us, at last, to succumb to our own Hilarity. A great thing has been accomplished here, this day. And Lou, unconscious somewhere, mutters and sputters, and is comforted.

Love.

Class of 2012

Ray Guy
RP
Wears a Milwaukee hat

Did you know:

- that Ray Guy attended the University of Southern Mississippi, and was its most famous alumni until Lou "don't shoot until you see the whites" Beesley and some guy named Favor or Furtive or some bullshit?
- that Ray Guy's foot is on loan to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, still incased in the shoe in which it was frozen and then hacked off at the request of Hall curators?
- that Ray Guy backwards is Yugyar, which sounds like a character in some Piers Anthony crapathon?
- that you're not supposed to wear white after Labor Day?
- that Ray Guy would be a good name for those guys in the black helmets who push the buttons and pull the levers to activate the Death Star's laser?- why do they need those big black helmets if they're just sitting at a console pushing some buttons anyway?
- shouldn't firing that laser require some sort of failsafe, like needing to have two top-level commanders turn keys at the same time or something?
- I mean, we do that on submarines, and those can't blow up planets. As it stands, one of those black helmeted guys could just blow up a planet that, say, an ex-girlfriend that cheated on him with a TIE pilot lived on.
- And considering how lax security on the Death Star is, it seems entirely possible that a small band of rebels could sneak into the superlaser control room, turn it on, aim it at, like, a mirror that's positioned some distance away in space and voila, no fuss, no muss, Death Star blows itself up with its own superweapon. The irony alone would probably destroy the Empire.

So, in conclusion, Ray Guy: awesome punter.

Class of 2008

Lance Alworth
1B
Wears a Milwaukee hat.

Lance Alworth overcame the handicap of being born white to become a pretty good wide receiver, for a white guy. He actually played running back at Arkansas, which will someday be a fact that people view with a mix of shock and amusement, sort of like looking at one of those horrible racist figurines that people who are by no means racist at all collect and display on their knick-knack shelves for all of their white friends to get a kick out of. Anyway, Lance Alworth got to wear everyone's favorite duds for the San Diego Chargers for 9 years, and then unfortunately for him got traded to the Dallas Cowboys (unfortunate since that trade doomed him to eternal torment in the fires of Hell for all eternity) and then some voters felt sorry for him for being so white so they put him in the real Hall of Fame, the football one, but it doesn't matter because everyone gets into that one eventually. So to summarize, Lance Alworth played football and was white, not necessarily in that order, and if he was a shade of paint he'd be eggshell the end.

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.