It’s time to add a new favorite player into our elite group of baseball players. To get into this veritable Hall of Fame, the criterion is very cut-and-dried – personality matters. Forget talent and style. Those things matter, but they’re way down the list. To make my list of top baseball players, nothing is more important than entertainment value. That’s why players like Aaron Rowand and Jamie Moyer are better than Roger Clemens or Alex Rodriguez.
Besides, who wants a ballplayer that recites lines scripted right out of Bull Durham?
There’s another guy to add to the list, but not for anything he said to the press or did on the field. Actually, it’s how he interacted with a fan during the middle of a game that got this star superstar status.
That player? Vernon Wells.
Here’s what happened:
Apparently the Blue Jays’ Wells had been heckled mercilessly by a couple of guys in the cheap seats (actually, there are no cheap seats anymore, but until there is a more apt term we’ll stick with the popular nomenclature) in Cleveland. As the game wore on, the yapping from the fans grew louder and louder as more fans piled on.
Finally, after taking the abuse for six innings, Wells wrote a message on a baseball a tossed it to the ringleader. The message read:
Dear Mr. Dork,
Here is your ball! Can you please tell me what gas station you work at, so when you are pumping my gas, I can yell at you!!! Now sit down, shut up and enjoy the game.
- Your favorite centerfielder
Vernon, you had us at “Mr. Dork.”
On another note, Wells and the Blue Jays come to the Bank next weekend. Perhaps the Jays should pack an extra bushel of balls to write out messages for the hometown fans?
More: Indians fan wants last laugh
More: Interview with the ringleader heckler
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No one asked, and I’m not particularly interested in football during baseball season or the months between January and December, but it seems as if the Eagles have quarterback controversy over who will be the starter three years from now.
Things like that always remind me of a quote from Tug McGraw, who upon calmly and coolly slipping out of a jam against The Big Red Machine’s murder’s row of Joe Morgan, George Foster, Tony Perez and Johnny Bench with his typical aplomb, Tug was asked how he kept his composure: “Well,” he said. “Ten million years from now, when the sun burns out and the Earth is just a frozen snowball hurtling through space, nobody's going to care whether or not I got this guy out.”
Just like we won't care that the Eagles drafted Kevin Kolb in the second round when Donovan McNabb, still 30, was coming back from yet another injury.