Baseball is a Man Maker

[Willets Point]

Albert Spalding on The Psychology of Baseball.

[Willets Point]

Ok, no one cared for this post.

So I'm making this an "all-purpose random baseball history that doesn't fit anywhere else" thread.

Here's the Periodic Table of Hall of Famers:

[HahnSolo]

Very nice. Two questions:

1. The asterisks...what are they for?

2. Is there something that made Jim Palmer "highly temperamental"? He always struck me as pretty bland.

[Ceetar]

HahnSolo wrote: Very nice. Two questions: 1. The asterisks...what are they for? 2. Is there something that made Jim Palmer "highly temperamental"? He always struck me as pretty bland.

The asterisks have to do with those crazy unstable sometimes manmade weird metal elements in the middle like einsteinium.

[Willets Point]

HahnSolo wrote: Very nice. Two questions: 1. The asterisks...what are they for? 2. Is there something that made Jim Palmer "highly temperamental"? He always struck me as pretty bland.

1. The two rows at the bottom starting with Tris Speaker and Lou Boudreau should be plugged into the empty boxes with the asterisks in them, but are split out to prevent the entire table being too wide.

2. Palmer looks like he's at the stable end of table to me but I may be reading it wrong.

[metsmarathon]

i like that, and saw it earlier, but i feel like the groupings and positions don't really make all that much sense, nor is there much synergy with the real ptoe.

the nobles are in the right place, but shouldn't the really volatile guys be over by the alkali group?

and the short timers should all be in the bottom row, possibly preceded by the relievers. there's a gap in the wrong place. the ptoe doesn't fill from right to left, but from left to right. leaving the blanks where rutherfordium and dubnium belong in the transition metals, and americium, curium, and berkelium in the actinides runs counter to the source material. jeez, there's no radium either? but at least ununoctium is represented in fine form by tom seaver.

i also don't know why you'd go through the trouble of the exercise and not put al kaline in the alkaline earth metals, and cal ripken right there at good ol' atomic number 26. presuming, of course, that you leave gehrig over in the noble gases.

great. now i'm all tempted to reconfigure this thing and do it right. thanks. thanks a lot.

[Guest Edgy DC]

You go. Do it.

[metsmarathon]

this would, of course, get in the way of my attempts at ranking the 2010 mets...

[Willets Point]

metsmarathon wrote: i also don't know why you'd go through the trouble of the exercise and not put al kaline in the alkaline earth metals, and cal ripken right there at good ol' atomic number 26. presuming, of course, that you leave gehrig over in the noble gases.

Damn, you know your chemistry.

The table comes from this link and the creator has been notified about the Al Kaline/alkaline gaffe.

[Guest Edgy DC]

metsmarathon wrote: this would, of course, get in the way of my attempts at ranking the 2010 mets...

You could do an alternative version with the top 118 Mets.

[MFS62]

You forgot a color for the "Yeah, he got 3,000 hits and got into the Hall, but he probably wouldn't have if that fucking DH rule hadn't prolonged his career with some of his best offensive years" as in Paul Molitor.
And, I would have thought Bill Mazeroski would have been in there with the "Primarily defense" color. But I couldn't find him at all.
Was that an editorial decision, an oversight, or did I just miss him?
Other than that, well done.

Later

[ashie62]

Rickey Henderson could cross into the "highly tempermental"