On May 20, 2006, in the second inning of an interleague game between the rival teams from Chicago, Cubs catcher Michael Barrett became the immediate envy and beloved proxy of folks throughout baseball when his right fist assumed a linear trajectory and crashed forthwith into the left cheek of A.J. Pierzynski. Among baseball’s most disliked players—a man, indeed, about whom White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen once observed, “If you play against him, you hate him. If you play with him, you hate him a little less” – the White Sox catcher had just barreled into Barrett at home plate and punctuated his run-scoring achievement by slapping the plate with a haughty palm, a pair of actions that underscored Pierzynski’s reputation and served as a personal invitation to Barrett’s fist:

Both men emerged with ejections, but only one emerged—rather, remained—as the game’s most hated figure: Anthony John Pierzynski. It didn’t matter that Barrett had been the aggressor, a man with a too-hot temper and a too-quick jab. It only mattered that Pierzynski had been Pierzynski, a hyper-competitive annoyance whose reputation would find confirmation in several player polls—the most recent in 2012—ranking him at the very top of the very bottom: the best at being loathsome, awful and supremely punchable.

Pierzynski’s peers would even vote him The Player You’d Most Like To See Beaned.

Do fans of the game agree?

As a sport and an industry, baseball has produced no shortage of consensus heroes, players whose talents and personalities have cemented their standing in the pantheon of the American Pastime, yet the game has also delivered an assortment of punks, scalawags and plain old villainous men who, like Pierzynski, we absolutely love to hate. History, no doubt, is full of figures whose prodigious talents as players are weighed against their singular awfulness as people, a calculus that all fans must undertake when evaluating candidates for their private halls of fame. In the late 19th century, future Hall of Famer Cap Anson refused to play against dark-skinned players. A generation later, Ty Cobb made it a practice to spike opponents on the field and to attack minorities—and in one instance, a handicapped fan—off it. Recent seasons, too, have generated a variety of execrable men. Does anyone truly miss John Rocker and Milton Bradley in any capacity beyond their skill on the diamond?

Now as then, bad men are easy to dislike.

And yet for all that awfulness, bad men don’t always rank as our least favorite baseball players. Sure, we might recognize Ugueth Urbina as a less-than-savory character who attempted to injure and possibly murder four men with a machete and some gasoline, but does the former reliever actually rank No. 1 on any fan’s roster of least favorite players?

The answer might well be yes, but the larger question remains: What does make for a least favorite player? Is it someone like Pierzynski, the odds-on favorite in the annual Most Hated pageant but a man who, so far as we know, has never threatened anyone with a machete and a gallon of unleaded? Is it a man like Rocker, a reasonably gifted pitcher who in the span of one infamous utterance managed to disparage just about everyone except white English-speaking heterosexuals who travel in any conveyance other than the 7 Train? Is it Bradley, a supremely talented hitter who alienated fans and teammates by indulging an explosive temper several times too often (and who is now serving a sentence for domestic violence)? Is it the guy who underperformed for your team? – or the guy who over-performed for theirs? Is it the slap-hitter who offended sabermetric sensibilities by BABIP-ing his way to an All-Star berth? Is it the dude whose face and lips you loathe?

In efforts to explore the matter and to settle on an answer constructed of any number of answers, I put the question to nine baseball writers and also to myself: In short, who is your least favorite (or most hated) baseball player, historically and/or currently, and why? As a reader might expect, the answer depends entirely on the person.

…

Patrick Dubuque: “Growing up in Seattle in the eighties, it was hard to hate ballplayers. You need very specific conditions to craft hate: time, pressure, proximity. I had none of those. The team had no bitter scars, no rivals; the franchise was so thoroughly downtrodden that to despise any particular opponent would be to hate the whole of the American League. A snowman might as well try to curse the sun.

“We tried our best to curse, though. The natural alternative, the only alternative, was to turn on our own. It wasn’t easy. The team’s prominent names were a study in haplessness, a string of gentle oafs and embarrassed disappointments. Our heroes were a little too much like us. That is, until Rey Quinones came along.

“Quinones arrived under the cloak of intrigue: he had power, speed, and defense. He could throw a baseball from home plate into the center field bleachers, according to the team trainer. Ted Williams, somehow, likened him to ‘Frank Robinson at shortstop.’ He could do anything. And he did do pretty much anything: follow a diving play with a throwing error on a two-hop grounder, or doubling into the gap and then getting picked off second. Famously, he was unavailable to pinch hit in one ballgame because he was back in the clubhouse, stuck on world 8-4 of Super Mario Bros. The team got rid of him soon after.

A Hardball Times Update by Rachael McDaniel Goodbye for now.

“His baseball cards always wore the same bemused, impish smile, and as kids, we tore up each one we saw, a rebellion against the man who owed us so much. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve found hate harder to summon. Baseball is, in its milliseconds, less a conflict between one man and another, and more of one between each man and the ball itself, making it do what they want it to do. I understand now that the villain of my youth couldn’t be the villain I imagined him to be, because what I hated him for, his mental errors, were in no way immoral. He was a man without control. If anything he’s just a pathetic figure, a man who had to fight himself as much as his opponents.

“Now I just hope he beat Super Mario that day, before his bosses and the media and his own guilt fell upon him.”

…

Hey, I know the feeling. Growing up in Dallas, I also found it hard to hate ballplayers, not only because hatred is hard to summon as a happy youngster but also because I wanted to join those guys someday, to become a part of that fairytale fraternity of men for whom baseball cards were places to put their own names and faces. Hatred strayed still farther from reach because the hometown Rangers, like the Mariners, had no generational roots in deep emotion, no sour antagonism or soaring schadenfreude of the sort that seemed coded into ancestral bloodlines in places like Boston and New York, places that appeared as magical baseball kingdoms on my family’s fuzzy Magnavox.

Who could I possibly hate? No slap-hitting shortstop, on the strength of an ultra-rare home run, had ever bumped my team from the playoffs, because the Rangers had never even sniffed the pie on the postseason sill. My alternative, like Dubuque’s, was to direct whatever bile I could muster onto one of the Rangers’ own soldiers, an act that felt as occasionally treasonous as it did occasionally great. Jeff Kunkel, like Rey Quinones, came ushered on a stock of superlatives: He had speed, range, power and an arm so strong that, according to scouts, he could become an all-star pitcher as easily as he could an all-world shortstop. As the third pick in the 1984 draft, the all-American son of a major league umpire seemed destined to lead the Rangers at last to the Promised Land, and many fans, including this one, hitched their hopes to his 6-foot-2, 180-lb. frame.

Slowly at first, and then more rapidly, as if pulled ineluctably toward baseball’s version of a cognitive black hole, those hopes fell victim to an annual succession of batting averages that might have been impressive only if Kunkel had indeed become a pitcher. By his age-28 season, when he put together an almost impossibly bad .170/.221/.280 triple slash line, Kunkel had come to personify the collective trajectory of my poor Rangers, a team whose temporary highs would yield inevitably to long-endured lows and whose pie-in-the-sky dreams would tumble downward into slammed-shut windows.

Kunkel was my own private fall guy, the man who shouldered the brunt of the blame I unfairly manufactured. Today I find it hard to sustain any animus toward a player whose failures, like those of any overrated prospect, should hardly include the wreckage of someone else’s dreams, but still I smile at the memory of a sports-page account: A group of children were visiting the Rangers’ locker room, and upon seeing Kunkel reading fan mail, one kid said to the reporter, “Kunkel has a fan club?”

…

Dayn Perry: “I grew up a Cardinals fan and was honor-bound to hate the Mets of the mid- to late-1980s. And hate them I did. With some players, it was a mixed loathing. I couldn’t do anything but feign hatred for the most wonderful Keith Hernandez, and Gary Carter was impossible to dislike, as was Mookie Wilson. But to smoking hell with the sinister remainder. Ron Darling and his Yale education. Ray Knight was not worthy to look upon Eric Davis’s handsome face, let alone punch it. Wally Backman was an objectively unlikable red-ass. Tim Teufel had a fake name. Roger McDowell was painfully unfunny. Worst of all was Lenny Dykstra.

“It’s an objective truth that his face and lips are stupid. I also loathed him for his f**k-all ‘Nails’ poster, which would confront me while I was otherwise flipping through the rack at Spencer’s in search of Heather Thomas.

“Just look at him—at once pouty and cocksure. Put your shirt on, you toned and well-compensated professional athlete who has lots of sex, probably.

“Dykstra was the archetypal ‘player you hate on other teams but love on your own,’ but he was not mine. I cared not for his coiled aggression, and I cared not for, once more, his face and lips. They were stupid, you see. All of this was a tribal and provincial act of hatred on my part, and I’ve managed to put aside such childish inclinations. With regard to Dykstra, though, time has vindicated my contempt. Yea, verily: Lenny Dykstra is an a**hole filled with malaise.”

…

Hey, I know the feeling—sort of, and very much so. As a Rangers fan, I was not honor-bound to hate anyone (with the possibly indefensible exception of poor Jeff Kunkel). Unlike fans on the east and west coasts, Rangers fans dwelled on a calm emotional island, unburdened by geographic rivalries or fractious proximities to other fan bases. (The nearest big league city, Houston, played host to a team in the other league, so for all we cared, it might as well have been a major port city on the dark side of the moon.) Add to that the franchise’s woeful string of pennant-free seasons and, well… you had a fan base freed of the fear and loathing that poisoned the followers of other teams, those who launched double-A batteries and caustic taunts at players in rival uniforms.

No team would move closer to Arlington, of course, but in the mid- to late-’90s one team did relocate to that darkest part of the human soul, where hatred has its mooring: the New York Yankees. The Rangers had finally gotten good, even great, but in their first-ever playoff appearance (1996) and in the two appearances that followed (1998 and ’99), they ran smack into the pinstriped juggernaut that won the World Series in each of those years.

Turns out, it really is easy to hate greatness, especially when it plays New York, New York ad nauseam and hoists a trophy every fall. And so to hell and back and to hell once more with those entire triumphant rosters: Bernie Williams and his magical jazz hands. Tino Martinez and his stupid handsome face. Scott Brosius and his lunch pail. Chuck Knoblauch was a consensus dillweed. Ricky Ledee was not worthy to look upon Derek Jeter’s coattails, let alone ride them, but oh! Derek Jeter was already Derek Jeter!—soooooo Derek Jeter, with that pumping fist and confident smirk and absolute unrelenting Jeter-ness. Kill me. And Clemens, Cone, Pettitte—resurrect me just to kill me again.

Worst of all, though, was Paul O’Neill. It is a scientifically substantiated fact that Paul O’Neill had the most punchable face this side of A.J. Pierzynski. He never saw a strike call that he didn’t consider the second-worst offense (after only the invasion of Poland) ever perpetrated upon humankind, and the sour twist of his punchable mug never failed to register his disgust with the unworthy umpire. Petulant, childish and punkish, the dude once got so frustrated with the anti-Paulie turn of events that he kicked—kicked!—a ball from right field to the infield. (As testament to the connectivity of punkishness, it was Dykstra who hit the ball.) The thing of it was—and this is what made you really hate the guy—it worked! For just a moment, Paulie had channeled Pelé into his stupid wiry body and the ball had landed safely in a teammate’s glove! Ugh.

Yep, things always seemed to work out for Paulie—get traded to the Yanks and win four more friggin’ rings, anyone?—but in the end it might have been better for us all that fortune settled so frequently upon his curly-haired head. Otherwise, he might have pouted his way to back in time to become the scrappy point guard on the 1957-69 Celtics. Ugh.

The years, however, have softened my contempt. I kind of like the guy on Yankees broadcasts. Yea, verily: Paul O’Neill is a commentator now emptied of my loathing.

…

Frank Jackson: “Actually, I didn’t have to ponder the question very long: Alex Rodriguez is the answer.

“You will recall that when he came to the Rangers, he signed the fattest contract in baseball. That, however, did not bother me in the least. What was he supposed to do? Turn it down? He was a productive player for the Rangers, though it didn’t make any difference in the win-loss columns. But that was more the fault of the pitching staff.

“No, my animus was purely personal.

“The Rangers have something called Autograph Wednesday. Before every Wednesday home game, a couple of players would sign in the concourse for a half hour. The tricky thing about it was you didn’t know who it would be till you got there. Typically, I would show up when the gates opened so I could see who it was. Usually, it wasn’t necessary to immediately stand in line, and frequently you had time enough to stop at both autograph stations.

“One fine Wednesday, I entered the ballpark when the gates opened and saw the name Alex Rodriguez on the autograph sign. Well, I knew this meant getting in line immediately, even though the autograph session wasn’t scheduled to start for an hour or so. I wasn’t first in line, but I wasn’t in a bad position. I had no doubt that given a half-hour session, I would come away with an autograph.

“But when the session was supposed to start, there was no Alex Rodriguez. He showed up 10 minutes (fashionably?) late. I wasn’t happy about having to wait in line 10 minutes longer, but at least I was close enough to the front of the line that I never doubted I would get an autograph in the remaining 20 minutes of the autograph session.

“He started signing and the line inched forward, and just as I was about to step up to the table, he left early! Almost an hour and a half standing in line with nothing to show for it. I could have been watching batting practice or seeking out other autographs or drinking beer or just basking in the sun, but no, I was waiting in line for Prince Alex. Technically, he wasn’t a no-show, but his face time didn’t do me any good. I remember there were vendors selling 8-1/2″ x 11″ color pictures of Alex to the people waiting in line. Refunds, anyone? That’ll be the day!

“I’m not terribly vociferous at ballgames, but once the game started, I was on Rodriguez every time he came to bat. I don’t remember who won the game, but I do remember that he went 0-for-4 (Randy Winn made an outstanding catch at the left field wall to rob him of at least a double). That was all that mattered.

“I know I’m not alone in my dislike for Alex Rodriguez, but in my case it’s strictly personal. Before that fateful Wednesday afternoon in Arlington, I bore him no ill will at all.”

…

As it stands, this is not a feeling with which I’m intimately familiar. Aside from the time I got Rod Carew’s autograph (and, better, his tacit endorsement of my bold attempt to do so), I’ve never sought, let alone stood in line for, anyone’s signature. It’s not that I don’t see value in the process and its outcome. It’s just that in such situations, I’d rather be drinking beer or basking in the sun, customary alternatives that Jackson rightly cites.

That said, you can’t frame a hangover or sell a sunburn on eBay.

In any event, the anecdote does point to a larger issue: players’ responsibility to fans. With strict regard to his utility in the marketplace, a player’s lone responsibility to the fan is to show up and do the job, to perform all the functions that crewcut-wearing coaches preach: be on time, work hard, perform to the best of your ability—in short, every hackneyed sentiment you might see on an inspirational poster in a cubicle-filled office.

Of course, the more hackneyed the sentiment, the greater its truth, probably.

In a larger sense, the player should always remember that the fan is funding his bankroll, even if the fan can’t really afford it and the player has enough scratch for five human lifetimes. Small courtesies can go long way and aren’t hard to perform. Acknowledge fans. Sign autographs for the agreed-upon duration. And though you, as a baseball player, might quibble with your status as a role model, at least understand that kids are around.

Here’s what I recall: an unrelenting blitzkrieg of F-bombs.

It happened years ago. I was behind the batting cage while the A’s took batting practice when suddenly, as if guided by the ghost of the saltiest sailor in maritime history, Rickey Henderson launched a hear-it-to-believe-it salvo of utterances that, had they been broadcast on network TV, would have boasted more bleeeeeeps than discernable words.

I’m no monk, damn it, but jeez-o-pete, Rickey, pipe the hell down!

Granted, a well-placed expletive can punch up a monologue pretty nicely, but when F-bombs, or some variation thereof, serve as the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and bizarre adjectival/pronounal hybrids, it’s probably best to back the frick off.

Consarnit, Rickey, look around! Kids are listening!

Then again, a smile and cheerful spirit accompanied every F-bomb. He was nothing if not a happy guy, generous with his gestures and having a laugh with guys from both teams. Fans pay money, sure, but they also pay attention, and happiness is always better than surliness. For reference, see: Kingman, Dave; Bonds, Barry—nobody’s favorite.

…

Alex Skillin: “As for my least favorite player, I’d say I have two, both of them Yankees, but one who I disliked more in the past, and another who I barely remember baseball without.

“The first is Aaron Boone, and not just because he hit that walk-off home run in Game 7 of the ALCS (have I given away my Red Sox fandom yet?), but more so because he had the audacity to tear his ACL while playing pick-up basketball later that offseason. He had already crushed my hopes of seeing the Red Sox play in the World Series and then he tore his ACL, which, all too neatly, opened up a spot at third base for the Yankees to add A-Rod. This of course came after a month-long saga that saw Boston fail to trade for A-Rod, and the way everything worked out for the Yankees (the way everything always worked out for the Yankees) just crushed my optimism. I couldn’t believe Boone had ended our season on the field and then, somehow, given the Yankees a perfect opportunity to add the best player in baseball to what was already a loaded roster. Of course, things ended up working out for the Red Sox, but that’s beside the point. Boone was exemplary of how the Yankees always seemed to prevail, always seemed to get that extra bit of luck, no matter the circumstances.

“My other least favorite player is Derek Jeter, who has tortured me throughout my years as a fan. I don’t mind him as a person (he seems generally likable), nor do I believe he was overrated—he’s one of the best shortstops ever. But it was uncanny how he always, always came through for the Yankees. Bloop hits, inside-out doubles down the right-field line, line drives over the shortstop’s head. He was so reliable in dashing my hopes and leading the Yankees to victory. He never gave me the opportunity not to dislike him. From my perspective, Jeter was just so dependably unlikable.”

…

These are feelings that I have known. As mentioned, my Rangers allegiance has left me wholly unburdened by the generational fandom—the ancestral antipathy—that inflames the Big Apple-Beantown rivaly. To wit: The distance between New York and Boston is roughly the same as that between Dallas and Texarkana, and trust me, nobody is driving I-20 with plans to proclaim any civic or athletic primacy. In the other direction, no Abilene mom is training her toddler to spell “I hate Dallas and especially Dallas/Fort Worth-based professional sports franchises” with his Alpha-Bits.

An absence of rooted hostility, however, is no barrier to developing hatred, especially when it comes to teams for which every bounce seems providential, every break a collusion of fortune’s agents. As for Aaron Boone, he is hardly the first Yankee to get wallypipped; the Yankees invented wallypipping, a creation of high yield. But more recently, other teams seem to have used injuries as springboards for unheralded but top-notch understudies; the recent Athletics are one such team, and the pitcher tandem of Jarrod Parker and A.J. Griffin are the exemplars of this maddening Oaklandesque phenomenon.

Going into 2014, the young right-handed starters seemed primed to lead yet another stout A’s staff, but during the offseason Tommy John announced his name inside their elbows. No rational fan ever wishes harm on opposing players, but Rangers fans processed this development with no small measure of optimism. The A’s are toast! Hmmmmm. Hardly. If memory serves, a pair of Boy Scouts and, later, a couple of nuns, bus drivers and/or cosmetics clerks stepped in to throw a zillion consecutive innings of one-hit shutout ball.

Grrrr. How do the A’s always manage such miracles from the ashes of major injury? A.J. and Jarrod, you’re on my list. It’s not your fault, but who said blame-casting is rational?

Now, as for a generally likable fellow who nonetheless became Private Enemy No. 1, I direct your attention to former Yankees center fielder Bernie Williams. In the third inning of Game 1 of the 1999 American League Division Series, against the Rangers, Williams ranged across the outfield to turn a would-be Juan Gonzalez double into another elegant out, then proceeded to hit a three-run homer, a two-run double and a run-scoring single in the Yankees’ 8-0 victory en route to their three-game sweep. For Williams, this sort of single-handed destruction was nothing new. Three years earlier, he had hit .467 and stroked three bombs in the Yankees’ ALDS dismissal of Texas.

How is it possible to loathe such a talented and soft-spoken man, a guy who titled one of his jazz-guitar compositions Lullaby for Beatriz in honor of his daughter and who works to restore music education in disadvantaged schools? Three dingers in four games, that’s how. It’s probably ironic that his latest album is titled Moving Forward, because I just can’t.

…

Jeff Sullivan: “If I’m going to be completely honest, I don’t really hate anymore. It’s an ugly, unnecessary emotion, and I don’t like to let those feelings in. I don’t hate baseball teams, and I generally don’t hate baseball players. But I used to hate—I used to be younger—and there is one player who still manages to provoke me, one player who still makes me sneer at the mere mention of his name. I really just can’t stand Francisco Rodriguez.

“Oh, it began just because I didn’t like the Angels. I hated the Angels, I hated how the Angels always seemed to beat the Mariners, and I hated how so many Angels victories concluded with Rodriguez’s celebratory antics. The whole point of the dance was to get under the opponent’s skin, or at least that’s a factor, and while I know I’ve got a double standard since I don’t mind Fernando Rodney’s arrow-shot, Rodriguez was over the top. I don’t know if he still is; I make a point of not watching him. Thankfully, his career should be ending soon.

“It began as petty hatred. Ordinary sports hatred. Rodriguez was a rival. But then there were the other incidents. Abuse, domestic and otherwise. I don’t know Francisco Rodriguez, but I feel pretty confident about my evaluation of him as being a s***head. Though Rodriguez presumably isn’t baseball’s only s***head, I was already looking for reasons not to like him more, and you can’t kick the shit out of people and expect other people to like you. Not unless you do it professionally. Rodriguez seems like an ass, even as an adult, and though everyone’s entitled to additional chances, Rodriguez doesn’t have the right to be liked or respected.

“I guess what it comes down to is, of all the players in baseball, I think I’d least like to hang out with Francisco Rodriguez in my day-to-day life. Based on what I think his personality is like, we’d have nothing in common, and we’d drive one another up the wall. When I’m around a person I don’t care for, I try to spend less time with the person. When Rodriguez is around a person he doesn’t care for, he might just start throwing punches. No thank you. I would key Francisco Rodriguez’s car when he isn’t looking. Or actually, I wouldn’t, because that might result in someone going to the hospital. I wouldn’t want that on my conscience.”

…

If I, too, can be completely honest, this is a range of feelings I know well—very well. Allow me to address those feelings in reverse order by first creating a players’ parking lot full of cars, no doubt high-end and probably equipped with vanity plates, whose doors I’d like to secretly key. (In this exercise—call it a destructive-thought experiment—I ignore Sullivan’s closing caveat. EMT service need not concern itself with my imagination.)

Row 1 (current players)

Ryan Braun: liar, fraud. So narcissistic he makes Kanye West look like Jane Addams.

Delmon Young: bigot. Should be forced to celebrate Yom Kippur with Ryan Braun.

Josh Lueke, rapist: Prison might be a good fit.

Grant Balfour: hothead. “Lighten up, Francis.”

Mike Moustakas: punk. Should be forced to attend the Missouri School of Journalism.

Brian Wilson: showboat. “Dude, we get it. You’re different.”

Jonathan Papelbon: loudmouth/boldcrotch. “Jonathan, use your indoor groin.”

Heath Bell: self-promoter. “Nice slide, guy. What, was Wilson getting too much love?”

John Lackey: bad teammate. “Eating chicken, drinking beer, playing video games and, worse, cursing at teammates is no way to go through games, son.”

Row 2 (recent, or somewhat recent, retirees)

Vicente Padilla: headhunter, bad teammate. “If you’re going to throw at batters’ domes just because you hold a grudge, do us all a favor and move to the DH-free National League.”

Luke Scott: birther. Should have his birth certificate revoked, somehow.

Curt Schilling: blowhard/crybaby/failed entrepreneur. “If you’re going to indulge a massive ego and persecution complex simultaneously, please have the decency to admit that you might not have time to run a company in any way other than into the ground.”

Albert Belle: curmudgeon. So much talent, so little joy, so few Hall of Fame votes.

John Rocker: bigot. Should be forced to ride the 7 Train Monday through Friday.

Carl Everett: abuser, bigot. Should ride a dinosaur to a meeting of the Pride Foundation.

Chuck Knoblauch: abuser. Should be sentenced to five rounds with Ronda Rousey.

Brett Myers: abuser. Should be sentenced to Milton Bradley.

Milton Bradley: abuser. Should be sentenced to Brett Myers.

Row 3 (long-gone players, each driving a Model T, presumably)

Hal Chase: very bad teammate. “Hey, Hal, what are the odds that you’ll team up with gamblers and agree to ‘throw’ games and then be stupid enough to leave a paper trail?”

John McGraw: cheater, hyper-competitive thug. “You’re lucky that instant replay didn’t exist in your day, Mr. McGraw. Otherwise, that lone, distracted umpire surely would have seen you tripping and blocking baserunners while they rounded the bases, and Fin De Siecle ESPN would have consistently featured you in its Not Top 10 nickelodeons.”

Rogers Hornsby: sourpuss. “Mr. Hornsby, how can anyone so good at baseball be so bad at life? A .424 average should have had you singing Joy to the World, man, but instead you were sullen and mean. How do we know that teammates despised you? After the Cubs advanced to the 1932 World Series following your August departure from the team, the players voted not to allocate any World Series money to you, their former player/manager.”

Cap Anson: racist. “Mr. Anson, may you spend eternity trying, and failing, to find a position—any position, other than on your knees—with the Everlasting Negro Leagues.”

Ty Cobb: racist, jerk, racist jerk. “Mr. Cobb, may you spend eternity being slapped, kicked, spiked and stabbed—no, let’s call off the stabbings; we’ll show you the mercy that you consistently denied others—by dark-skinned, handicapped elevator operators.”

Carl Mays: terrible teammate, headhunter: “It’s sad that nobody—not fans, not writers, not teammates, certainly not opponents—liked you, Mr. Mays. We feel bad for you; it must have been unpleasant. Still, you probably should have refrained from throwing chin music such that you ultimately and perhaps inevitably killed a guy. Your lone saving grace is that in a game in 1915, you threw at Ty Cobb in each of his first few at-bats, brushed him back in the next at-bat, called him a ‘yellow dog,’ engaged him in fisticuffs and then, with order restored, promptly hit him on the wrist with the next pitch.”

Here and now, honesty is summoned once more: Imaginary vandalism never felt so good!

All those car alarms—hah! And me? Not so much as a scratch.

More seriously, what it comes down to is that among current players—current, because otherwise I’d have to throw down with Cobb—the player I’d least like to hang out with is Ryan Braun. Sure, Pictionary might be fun; a drink at the pub might be entertaining. Braun is smart and engaging, but therein lies the rub. Intelligence, eloquence and charisma are traits shared by history’s greatest con artists. With friends like that, who needs salesmen?

Continuing in reverse order now, we come to a temporary stopping point: It’s true that ordinary sports hatred might be the most puerile among the emotions, a sentiment unsupported by any measure of mature judgment, but is it possible, in the end, that ordinary sports hatred is the best alternative among the balance of directed hostilities? Would not the sports world, as it remains a part of the larger world, rate as a slightly jollier place if the sole reasons for loathing were predicated strictly on on-field acts?