The Tree of Ténéré was a solitary acacia tree that stood in the middle of the Sahara.  Located in northeast Niger, it was a landmark for caravans passing through the area, and was once the most isolated tree on Earth as it was the only one for over 200 km.  It was thought to be the last survivor from a time when the area was less arid.  In 1939 a well was dug near the tree, and it was discovered that it had roots that went all the way down to the local water table, more than 100 feet down.

Now some of you are probably thinking “That tree sounds pretty badass.  What’s this doing on this site about stupid shit?”  Well, you’ll notice I’ve been talking about the tree in the past tense.  That’s because it’s gone now, dead since the early 70s.  But the real bit of stupidity is how it died.

Simply put, the most remote tree on the planet was knocked over by a truck in 1973.  A drunk Libyan truck driver somehow managed to find the only obstacle near the road for hundreds of kilometers and crash into it.  The truly amazing thing about it is that this wasn’t even the first time the tree had been hit by a truck.  It had happened before, sometime in the 1950s, and the tree had been severely damaged but managed to survive.  This time, however, a drunk asshole accomplished what nature never could, and killed the tree.

Seriously, look at this.  That’s the tree as it looked in the 60s.  Notice how there is nothing else around it, from horizon to horizon.  Exactly how drunk do you have to be to run into that?  Hell, if you were just driving through the desert randomly, with a blindfold on, you’d be extremely unlikely to hit it!  You almost have to try to run into that.  And yet it happened twice.

I almost think those drivers deserve medals or something.  I mean, they ought to get some kind of recognition for being the worst drivers on the planet, right?

Between 1961 and 1973 the United States carried out a series of nuclear tests designed to explore possible peaceful uses for all these damn nukes we had sitting around.  Since we inexplicably were not yet dropping them on the Ruskies’ heads, the military-industrial complex looked for other excuses to blow shit to smithereens.  Operation (or more commonly, Project) Plowshare consisted of nearly thirty test shots at locations around the country (mainly the Nevada Test Site, but tests were also conducted in New Mexico and Colorado) chiefly for the purpose of seeing how much dirt you could fling out of a hole with a big-ass atom bomb.

As it turns out, quite a bit!  The Sedan shot, conducted on July 6, 1962, was the test of a 104 kiloton thermonuclear device.  They dug a hole in the desert more than 600 feet deep and stuck the bomb in there, then set that shit off to see what would happen.  The result was the largest man-made crater in the US, about 1200 feet across and 300 feet deep.  However, another, less awesome result was a huge radioactive cloud which spread fallout in a narrow band across several neighbouring states.  Sedan was either the worst or second worst (depending on how you measure it) test at the Nevada Test Site in terms of radionuclide dispersal.  Of course, to be completely fair, the highest measured exposure levels from the fallout was about 0.35 millisieverts, which is close to the dose everybody receives naturally from the environment each year, and is an order of magnitude less than the dose a woman receives from having a mammogram (which is about 3 millisievert.)  But, you know, fallout is FALLOUT, and that’s bad.

Sedan was a would-be test on a small scale of the type of excavation explosions that would be needed for Operation Chariot.  In 1958, Edward Teller, the “father of the H-bomb,” decided Alaska needed a new harbor.  And he was going to make them one using huge nukes!  The harbor would be dug using 5 multi-megaton devices, set off in a precise configuration so that the end result would be a nice deep-water harbor.  It was supposed to look something like this:

Please nuke us up a harbor!

Pretty awesome, huh?  Anyhow, as you might have guessed, this plan was never realized, partly because of the always-present fear of fallout, but mainly because nobody could figure out what to do with the harbor once it was created anyhow.  There wasn’t really any need for one in that area, and the old “build it and they will come” philosophy wasn’t gaining much traction.

One of the less crazy of the Plowshare tests had to do with setting off nukes in deep underground natural gas fields, so as to stimulate the flow of gas from “tight” formations.  As it turns out, this actually works, and increased natural gas flow resulted from several test shots in Colorado.  However, a major drawback put the kibosh to the whole plan–the gas that was extracted from the fields after the nuclear detonations was too radioactive for safe use.

Over the course of 12 years, the US spent close to $800 million on Project Plowshare tests, with little to show for it except a big hole in the desert.  Thus ended the great “blowin’ up shit for peace!” experiment.

Sometimes I think the Nazis would have been funny if they hadn’t been a bunch of totalitarian murdering racist scumbag fucks.  Colonel Klink was pretty hilarious, and I hear Hitler did a great Charlie Chaplin impression.  But of course, they were a bunch of totalitarian murdering racist scumbag fucks, so it’s hard to do much but be pissed at them.

But when I read something like this, I just can’t help but laugh.  It seems a dude in Finland owned a dog that would raise his paw high in the air in an imitation Nazi salute at the command “Hitler.”  This so enraged the Nazis, they tried to have the man’s life ruined.  Large parts of the German government spent months digging up dirt on the guy and even planning to destroy his business.  Finnish officials questioned him, and when he denied that he called the dog Hitler and denied doing anything that could be construed as insulting the Reich, they eagerly reported back to the Germans that he was a damn liar.

The German government debated whether or not to bring the guy up on charges of “insulting Hitler,” but when they couldn’t find any witnesses willing to testify, I guess they figured it wasn’t worth the bother of manufacturing evidence (although this didn’t stop them when they wanted to invade Poland.)  So they looked into just destroying his entire life instead.  The German company that was the main supplier to the guy’s wholesale business offered to end their business relationship with him, effectively killing his business.  It’s unclear why the government decided against this, but I’m guessing a rare moment of clarity isn’t the answer.  More likely, they just got distracted by that whole invasion of Russia thing.

In the end, the guy, his wife, and the dog got the last laugh, as all three of them outlived the “Thousand Year Reich.”

Christopher Fennell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, has spent awhile trying to figure out why the Pike County Railroad Company chose to divert a rail line around the town of New Philadelphia, IL.  In 1857, the PCRC commissioned a survey  for a proposed new line between Naples, IL. and Hannibal, MO.  The surveyors proposed a sensible “straight line” approach that would have taken the rail line through the town of New Philadelphia.

The PCRC balked, and asked the surveyors to modify the route to take it north around the town.   Fennell looked at several reasons why this might be done.  He ruled out all the obvious answers:  terrain, cost, and bribery.  Rough terrain was not the reason for the proposed “bypass”.  It turned out, in fact, that the bypass actually took the railroad over higher, rougher terrain than the straight path through the town.  The section was so challenging, in fact, that the company ended up stationing a “helper locomotive” near the bypass to aid in pulling the train past the high point of the track.  Cost was not a factor either.  In fact, again he found that the cost of the “bypass” was actually higher than that of the proposed straight-through route.  Finally, Fennell  looked for evidence that rich donors asked for the bypass for one reason or another.  He found this was not the case, either.  In fact, again he found evidence that the PCRC had resisted pressure from county officials to divert the rail line in other areas, sticking to the straight-ahead path their surveyors originally mapped out.

In the end, the explanation for the odd bend in the track that seemed to fit the bill was good old fashioned racism.  New Philadelphia was a town founded by former slave Frank McWorter in 1836.  It was situatated on a busy wagon trail and soon attracted merchants and skilled tradesmen, who took up residence in the town of mostly black ex-slaves.  Blacks and whites lived side-by-side in New Philadelphia for decades before the Civil War.  Illinois was nominally a “free” state since its admission to the Union in 1818, but it was a hotbed of pro-slavery sentiment for years, and several attempts were made to ammend the state Constitution to legalize the practice.  Having an example of harmonious co-existence of the races on equal footing was not something that appealed to the pro-slavery crowd.

Such crowd would appear to include the owners of the PCRC.  Hannibal was a thriving slave-market town, and much of central and southern Illinois favored the introduction of slavery into the state.  Having a railway depot bring even more prosperity to New Philadelphia would be against the ideological interests of the PCRC, it would seem, as there doesn’t seem to be any other reason to spend extra money, extra time, extra effort, and extra materials to bypass the town.

Unfortunately, their plan appears to have worked.  The railway, complete with unecessary expensive bypass, was completed in 1870.  Many of the goods previously transported along the wagon trail through New Philadelphia were soon being transported around the town on the new rail line.  By the 1890s the town was essentially gone.

Way to go, assholes.

Of all the crimes that can land you a lifetime ban from baseball, throwing games is probably the most heinous.  Nobody likes  a cheater, but generally people cheat in order to win more games.  Intentionally throwing a game is like taking a huge steaming dump on the heads of your opponents, all the fans watching, and anybody who likes and respects actual athletic competition.

In 1919, eight members of the Chicago White Sox took a giant shit on everybody’s collective heads when they conspired to throw the World Series.  Worst of all, they were so obvious about it, rumors were circulating about the fix being in after the very first game.  Furthermore, they were such inept cheaters, most of them failed to even get paid what they were promised for doing the job.

It all starts with notorious skinflint Charles Comiskey, owner of the White Sox.  In an era where star players were earning handsome salaries upwards of $20,000 a year, the stars of Comiskey’s White Sox, who won 100 games and the World Series in 1917, earned more like $6,000.  And because of the reserve clause, none of the players could do anything about it except ask for a raise.  Comiskey denied them raises, and by 1919, they were ready to revolt.

The 1919 White Sox won 88 games and the AL pennant, and were heavily favored to beat the NL champion Cincinnati Reds in the World Series.  That was when first baseman Arnold “Chick” Gandil got together with some shady friends of his and hatched a plan.  Joseph “Sport” Sullivan, a local gambler and one of Gandil’s friends, put together a consortium of underworld thugs to bankroll their plan.  They would pay $100,000, to be split amongst the participating players, if the White Sox would agree to lose the World Series.  The gamblers would bet heavily on the Reds to win, and with the long odds against them, would stand to make a tidy profit.

Gandil approached pitcher Eddie Cicotte first.  Cicotte had a special grudge against Comiskey.  Cicotte had a clause in his contract promising him a $10,000 bonus if he won 30 games in 1917.  He had won 28 by the middle of September, then was promptly benched for the final two weeks of the season.  A similar thing happened again in 1919, and Cicotte was convinced Comiskey himself had ordered his benching in order to avoid paying him his bonus.  Feeling cheated and hating Comiskey more than hate itself, Cicotte readily agreed to the fix.

Between the two of them, Gandil and Cicotte rounded up five more guys, all with handy colorful nicknames:  Oscar “Happy” Felsch, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, Charles “Swede” Risberg, Claude “Lefty” Williams, and George “Buck” Weaver.  Weaver was approached about the fix, and attended the initial meetings about it, but decided not to be a part of it.  Another player who was not initially asked to be in on the fix (probably because he lacked a fancy nickname) named Fred McMullin overheard the conspirators talking about the fix and demanded to be cut in on the deal.

In all, eight members of the team, including two starting pitchers, either agreed to or knew about the fix.  Between them they would split the $100,000 promised by Sport Sullivan, which would amount to a hefty raise for everybody involved.  The World Series that year was a best-of-9 format, so the Sox would have to conspire to lose five games in order to make good on the fix.

When the time came to get their payoffs before the first game, only $10,000 showed up.  All of it went to Cicotte, as he had demanded $10,000 up front before joining the plot, or he wouldn’t throw the games he started.  Cicotte dutifully beaned the first batter he faced, signaling to the gamblers that the fix was in, and comically lost all semblance of control and was out of the game by the fourth inning.

Before game 2, the players again tried to collect their money, and were flatly told they wouldn’t get paid just yet.  Some of the gamblers were pissed about the obviousness of Cicotte’s performance, and wanted Lefty Williams to do a better job of it.  He did just that, allowing only four hits, but oddly becoming wild in the fourth inning and walking three batters to set up three Cincinnati runs, and the Reds went on to win the game 4-2.

The players received another $10,000 before game 3, and were told to win the game to “play with the odds”, which had been falling rapidly because of all the heavy bets on Cincinnati from the gamblers and their pals, and the fact that the Sox had lost the opening two games.  It’s unclear whether all the members of the plot knew they were supposed to win or not, but win they did, behind the masterful pitching performance of non-fixer Dickie Kerr.

The fix was back on for game 4, but again the money was not forthcoming.  The players demanded an additional $20,000 to go ahead with the fix, and despite claiming all the money was tied up with bookies, Sport Sullivan managed to come up with the goods.  Cicotte pitched well this time, but made two horrible errors in the field, and the Sox lost again, falling to a 3-1 series deficit.

Lefty went back out to the mound for game 5, without any additional money from the gamblers.  He once again pulled his “pitch well except for one comically bad inning” trick, and the Sox fell to a 4-1 deficit.

Non-cheater Dickie Kerr was up for game 6, and since they still had not received any more money, the conspirators apparently decided to play this one straight up, and Chicago won.

Cicotte also decided to get a win in game 7, and shut down the Reds, holding them to just one run.  The Sox pulled to within one game of evening the series, as it now stood 4 games to 3 in favor of Cincinnati.

The gamblers suddenly got nervous.  Oddly, they had seemed to be under the impression that the players would go through with the fix despite not being paid.  Now that the Sox were within one game of tying up the Series and forcing a 9th and deciding game (which would likely be pitched by non-cheater Kerr), they started to think otherwise.  Rather than pay the players any more money, however, they fell back on that old thug trick of threatening people.

Before game 8, Lefty was told in no uncertain terms that he was going to lose the game.  He was to go in the tank right away and let the Reds blow it open in the first inning, or else he and his wife would be “in trouble.”  Lefty got the message, and grooved a whole bunch of nothing fastballs to open the game.  The Reds jumped to a 4-0 lead and cruised to a 10-5 victory.  The gamblers coughed up an additional $40,000 for the players troubles, but that was all they would get.  Of the $100,000 promised, they got about $80,000, with several of the guys getting stiffed on their cuts–Jackson and McMullin only received about $5,000 each.  The really stupid thing is that all of them would have made as much or more in bonuses and the winner’s share of the World Series purse if they’d just played straight up and won.

Rumors of a fix had been flying since Cicotte’s outing in game 1.  But it wasn’t until the end of 1920 that a grand jury looked into the matter.  They subpoenaed several members of the team, and Cicotte and Jackson immediately spilled the beans.  All eight were hauled up on charges of conspiracy to commit fraud and injuring the businesses of Comiskey and the American League.  Before the trial, Cicotte’s and Jackson’s confessions mysteriously disappeared, and despite heavy evidence against them, all eight were eventually acquitted of the charges.

However, new Commissioner of Baseball Kenesaw Mountain Landis lowered the boom on them the day after the trial ended, and decided that even though the court had found them not guilty, he was banning them from the game for life.  Even though George Weaver did not participate in the fix and did not take payment from the gamblers, he was included in the ban with the other seven on account of he clearly knew about what was going on and didn’t tell anybody.

In later years, Joe Jackson would profess his innocence.    Today, you can still find plenty of people who think Joe Jackson didn’t do a thing wrong, despite the fact that he confessed to the whole thing, took at least $5,000 from the gamblers, and even if he didn’t play any less than his best, clearly knew that others were in the tank.  They paint him as some illiterate hayseed baseball savant, too stupid to know what was going on but somehow smart enough to take $5,000 and not ask any questions.  After the Series, Jackson did try to talk to Comiskey about the fix, but Comiskey ignored him.  And anyhow, that’s kind of a case of too little, too late in my book.  The deed was done by then.

“Lifetime” bans from baseball are often nothing of the sort, but the bans for the eight members of the 1919 White Sox have stuck.  None of them are likely to ever be lifted, despite all the whining from Joe Jackson supporters.  And the boneheaded idiots deserve no better.

In 1976, Canadian stuntman Kenny Carter decided he was going to jump the St Lawrence Seaway in a Lincoln Continental.  The jump would cover a distance of more than a mile, so he wasn’t going to use just any old Lincoln Continental.  He was gonna soup that bitch up with some sweet fins and some mofo rockets.

The jump proved more complicated than anticipated, as jumping a mile across a river apparently isn’t something you can do just on the spur of the moment.  Several backers of the jump came and went, until finally in 1979 Kenny was ready.  Or at least, he thought he was.  Mechanical failures caused him to abort an attempt at the jump just five seconds before takeoff.

The film crew who was then funding the jump decided Kenny was just a big chicken, and called him to a “meeting” in Ottawa just to get him out of the way while they brought in another stuntman, American Kenny Powers.  Because as everybody knows, if a Canadian isn’t dumb enough to risk his life on something stupid, the only answer is to call in an American!

Well, if you watched the video above, you know what happened.  Or, hey, if you just thought about it for a few seconds, you probably figured out what happened.  The car rocketed off the huge ramp, and… freaking disintegrated in mid-air.  The chutes deployed early, and American Kenny plunged into the river, far short of the other bank.  Kenny Powers lived, thankfully, although he broke 8 vertebrae.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don’t attempt a stunt even Evel Knievel thinks is a bad idea.

It’s been a little while since I’ve made fun of the French, so I figured I was due.

Fought on October 25, 1415, near the three quarter mark of the 116 year long Hundred Years War, The Battle of Agincourt featured an army of French nobles getting their asses kicked by a much smaller English army that consisted mainly of peasants.

It is debatable just how badly the English were outnumbered in the battle.  Some estimates range as high as 30 to 1, or as low as 4-3.  The accepted consensus puts the numbers  around 6,000 men for the English and between 20,000 and 30,000 for the French, putting the French advantage between 3 and 5 to 1.

The battle was fought on a narrow strip of land between two heavily wooded areas.  The English King Henry V was attempting to move his army to Calais after a long but successful siege of the French port of Harfleur.  The French had hounded the English all the way, and finally forced the English into a stand-up fight.  The English army was starving and sick, the French fresh and convinced of their impending victory.

As was the way of things back in the day, the two armies lined up at opposite ends of a field and had at it.  The English assumed a defensive posture with their formidable longbowmen on the flanks behind defensive stakes, and men-at-arms in the middle.  The field was muddy from recent rains.

The French had the English trapped, and refused to open the battle as they were waiting for more troops.  The English knew they could not wait, and so they actually dug up their stakes and moved forward to within bowshot of the French.  Amazingly, the French still did not attack–had the French cavalry hit the English while they were in the process of digging back in, it is likely the battle would have turned out rather differently.

After digging back in, the English opened the battle with a volley of arrows.  Finally, the French decided they couldn’t wait any longer, and the cavalry charged.  However, some of the French cavalry had apparently gotten bored and wandered away while waiting for the fighting to start, because the charge was not as large as it should have been.  The French Knights were not able to outflank the longbowmen, nor get through their defensive stakes.  The cavalry retreated in disarray, with riderless horses running amok through the advancing French lines.

The cavalry charge did little more than to churn up the ground over which the French men-at-arms would now have to walk to reach the English, all while taking volley after volley from the English archers.  They were exhausted when they reached the English lines, and because the confines of the narrow field made it impossible for them to bring their superior numbers fully to bear, the English were able to force a retreat after three hours of hard fighting.

The French had the advantage of superior numbers, of overall health and condition of the men, and they had numerous cavalry that the English lacked.  However, at the end of the day, they were decisively beaten.

Is anybody surprised?

Back in the days before the N Bomb, we had N Rays.  Well, actually, no we didn’t.  Because they didn’t exist.  And that, actually, is the subject of today’s story.

(That’s what we in the business call a “money intro”.)

René Blondlot was a professor of physics at the University of Nancy in France.  And yeah, they really do have a University of Nancy in France.  Apparently it’s named after the town of Nancy, not that awful comic strip.  While working with the recently discovered X Rays in 1903, Blondlot discovered a new form of radiation, which he called N Rays.  It turned out that this form of radiation was pretty ubiquitous, as Blondlot claimed to be able to detect it being emitted by almost everything, with the odd exceptions of green wood and certain metals.

Blondlot’s discovery was replicated at labs all across France.  Unfortunately, it seemed like this mysterious radiation was somehow confined to France, as very few scientists in England, Germany, or the United States could replicate the N Ray experiments.

Finally, the prestigious journal Nature asked American physicist Robert Wood to visit Blondlot and find out what was up.  While viewing a demonstration of the N Ray experiment in a darkened room, Wood removed a critical piece of Blondlot’s apparatus.  Oddly, Blondlot’s team still reported seeing the N Rays.  While trying to surreptitiously replace the piece he had removed, Wood was observed by one of Blondlot’s assistants.  However, he misread the situation and assumed Wood was in fact in the act of removing the piece he had already removed and replaced.  In further trials, with what should have been a fully functional apparatus, Blondlot’s team insisted they could no longer detect the N Rays!

Wood reported to Nature that the N Ray phenomenon was pure delusion.  Blondlot had been tricked by purely subjective phenomenon (a subjective “brightening” of photographs taken in the supposed presence of N Rays) and the other French scientists who had confirmed his results had seen the same thing because they were subconsciously biased in favor of a fellow Frenchman.  The non-French scientists hadn’t seen the effect because it wasn’t goddamn there.  And also, screw the French anyhow.

The story is told today as a cautionary tale about the dangers of experimenter bias in science.  But I tell it here because it’s funny.  And also, screw the French anyhow.

The longest battle in the history of humanity took place between February and December of 1916 near the French city of Verdun.  It’s only fitting that Word War I, possibly the dumbest war in the history of forever, has as its centerpiece one of the dumbest battles ever fought.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking “You’re just going to make fun of the French some more, aren’t you?”  And, well, you’re right.  I know, it’s cheap and easy to make fun of French military blunders.  But the best part about the Battle of Verdun is that the French were arguably being less dumb than the Germans who were attacking them.  Any time you have a situation where someone fucks up harder than the French while fighting a battle, you know you’ve got an all-time blunder on your hands.

Here’s the situation.  World War I started in late summer 1914, and by early fall the western front had stagnated.  The two sides (Britain and France on one side, Germany and Austria-Hungary  on the other) settled down into a network of trenches and didn’t move much for the next four years.  Throughout 1915 both sides attempted to achieve the elusive breakthrough that would end the stagnation and bring victory for their side.  Alas, all this achieved was minuscule movements of the trench lines and lots and lots and lots of casualties.

In 1916, the Germans decided to try a different tactic.  They reasoned that a breakthrough was no longer possible in the current situation, and instead they would pick a spot on the French lines that the French Army could not afford to abandon, and attack it endlessly, forcing the French to bring more and more men into the fray.  They sought to “bleed them white”, to inflict such great casualties on the French that they would either lose the will to fight or would be unable to defend other parts of the line effectively.

They picked the fortifications in and around the city of Verdun.  Verdun had played a major role in several previous French wars; it had withstood an assault by Attila the Hun in the fifth century, and had been built up after the Franco-Prussian war specifically to bolster French defenses against future German aggression.  The German plan was to attack, and bait the French into an all-out defense of the city and forts.

Well, it worked… sort of.  The Germans attacked, and the French took the bait and committed to hold the city at any cost.  It became not just a matter of military importance, but of French national pride.  Before the battle was finally over,  70% of the French army had been through “the wringer of Verdun”.  However, this might have been to France’s ultimate advantage–the French army had a policy of rotating troops out of the battle every 2-3 weeks, which is why such a high percentage of the army eventually saw action at Verdun.  By comparison, only 25% of the German army saw action at Verdun, so the French troops were comparatively fresh at any given time.

The Germans spilled a lot of French blood at Verdun, but at a price that was far too high.  The French casualties from the battle (approximately 371,000 killed, missing, or wounded) were only slightly higher than the German casualties (337,000).  By the time all was said and done, the entire thing was a wash–the Germans made small advances, but were eventually turned back by French counter attacks.  The Germans had managed to do nothing other than reduce the number of available fighting men on both sides by approximately the same amount, and also to blast the shit out of small portion of the French countryside.

The French, in turn, took their successful (if highly costly) defense of Verdun as a sign that fixed fortifications were a good idea, now and forever, and this led to the creation of the Maginot Line after the war.  And we all know how well that worked for them.  Also, the demoralizing effect of the war, and the Battle of Verdun in particular, is often credited with contributing to the French collapse at the start of World War II–they just didn’t have the heart to go through it all again.

So there you have it.  The Germans failed to either take Verdun or kill enough Frenchmen to change the course of the war, and they lost nearly as many men as they killed.  The French in turn held a line that probably didn’t need to be held, at such a huge cost that the effects were still being felt decades later.

Dumbest battle ever?  It’s in the running, for sure.

Ty Cobb was an asshole.  There’s really no getting around it.  Whenever anybody starts going off about how we can’t let Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame because he gambled on baseball, or how Shoeless Joe Jackson shouldn’t ever be allowed in because he might have thrown some games, or how Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, and Mark McGwire will never get in because they (stick with me here) corked a bat and probably took steroids, probably took steroids and was an asshole, and probably took steroids (and had an awful case of backne either way), just remind them that Ty Fucking Cobb is in the Hall of Fame.

Stats wise, there’s no doubt Ty deserves to be in the Hall.  The all-time hit king before Rose played for seven thousand years and beat his record (and his career .366 average is still the best ever), Cobb was also a demon on the basepaths, stealing somewhere north of 800 bases in his career, which is good for fourth on the all time list–and 2-3-4 on the list are bunched up fairly close together.  Lou Brock in second has 938, Billy Hamilton in third has 912, and Ty in fourth has 892.  Of course, Rickey Henderson swiped 1406 because he was a mother fucking base stealing MACHINE sent from the future to steal our bases.

But we’re here to talk about Ty Cobb.  And part of the reason he was so good at stealing bases wasn’t just because he was fast (although he was).  It was because he’d spike the shit out of you if you got in his way.

Here he is kicking some poor catcher in the dick:

Seriously, look at that.  He gave that guy a flying kick right in the goddamn dick.  And why?  Probably because he had the unmitigated gall to try to tag Ty out at home.  Or maybe JUST BECAUSE.  For all I know, Ty just walked, and decided to jump-kick the catcher’s ball sack before heading to first, just on goddamn principle.

Cobb fought everybody.  He once challenged an umpire to fight him under the grandstand after the game.  The hell of it is, the umpire accepted, and Cobb knocked him down and choked the shit out of him until some spectators intervened.  He fought with fans–he once climbed into the stands and beat the shit out of a handicapped man who called his momma names.

He was a well known racist.  He once slapped a black elevator operator for being “uppity”.  When a black security guard intervened, Cobb stabbed him.  It being the early 1900s, this was apparently acceptable, and the issue was never taken to court.

He was hated by so many people, one time a manager basically threw a couple games just to prevent Cobb from winning a batting title.  St Louis Browns manager Jack O’Connor ordered his third baseman to play back on the outfield grass every time Nap Lajoie came up to bat in the final two games of the season.  Nap was behind Ty by just a few percentage points in the batting title race, and old Jack hated Ty so much, he tried to rig it so Nap would win.  Nap went 8 for 8 in the double header, with six bunt singles, but MLB cottoned on to what Jack was up to and ended up awarding the title to Ty anyway.

So, in conclusion, Ty Cobb was a huge cock.  He was a shithead, a racist asshole, and a loudmouth punk with an inferiority complex that caused him to lash out at everybody.  But holy shit could the man play baseball.

So the next time someone tries to tell you Barry Bonds shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame because maybe he took roids, show them that picture of Ty kicking that poor dude in the dick.  If that’s “playing the game the right way”, I’m not sure what Barry (probably) did was so wrong.