Lou Gehrig's Mom Can Suck It

Ha ha very funny, Lou Gehrig's mom. Making me believe that the German word for "taking pleasure in the misfortune of others" is "Fahrvergnügen" is fucking hilarious. Is that really how you want to play this? Because I'll get you back. I don't know how or where, but you'll get what's coming to you. In spades, hearts, AND clubs.

Readers, you'll be happy to know that this saga is over. The correct word for the attitude people are having toward Johnny Damon for his boneheaded move of turning down the Yankees contract offer and then settling for a lesser offer from Detroit is "Schadenfreude." Apparently, I could've Googled it all along. My bad. Sorry to put you all through this.

Meanwhile, Cobb is having a lot of Schadenfreude toward me right now, and it is unacceptable. Time to remind him that he's a douche who no one likes.

Moe Berg is dead to me

So I just found out that Moe Berg was fucking with me when he told me that the German word for "taking pleasure in the misfortune of others" was "ich-bin-ein-berliner." He made me look like a fool to all my loyal readers, and I've completely cut him off. He claims he doesn't care, but I know that one day he's going to moan about not being invited to one of my parties and I'm just going to get all "ich-bin-ein-berliner" on his ass.

The worst part of this whole disaster is that Cobb got involved. In fact, he's the one who tracked me down and told me that I had the word wrong. First of all, having Cobb tell me I got something wrong is like Sarah Palin giving you advice on what to name your kids. You just don't want to hear it.

Even worse, Cobb had one of his maniacal grins when he told me. He just loved it! What a douche.

I wish there was a way to independently figure out the right word for this idea, but I don't know how to do it. The best I could do was ask Lou, who has some German in him, and he asked his mom. I totally trust Lou and his mom on this, so when you're reading the post below, please substitute the following German whenever you read "ich-bin-ein-berliner":

Fahrvergnügen

Oh Johnny Damon!

I've been keeping my feelings to myself on the whole Johnny Damon thing, but now that he's signed with Detroit for $8 million, I can finally say what I'm thinking.

Somebody once told me that there's a word in German for when you take pleasure in the misfortune of others. I had thought it was something like "shodden-froddy", but I asked Moe Berg about it, and Moe told me I was right that there is a word for it but I didn't have the word right. He told me and I had him write it down: "ich-bin-ein-berliner." I said, are you sure? And he insists that's the word. If anyone would know, it would be him.*

*You know what they said about Moe: "He knows 8 languages and can't hit in any of them." I don't really know what that means. You don't hit in languages. But people think it's funny, I guess.

So anyway, I sense that out there in the blogosphere there's a lot of ich-bin-ein-berliner toward Johnny Damon. Apparently he turned down a 2-year deal from the Yankees for $14 million, thinking he deserved 3 years for $24 million. The Yanks dumped him and signed Randy Winn instead, and the best Johnny could get is one year from Detroit.

Johnny clearly made a mistake. Some people say he should fire his agent, but c'mon, it was Johnny's decision. He's gonna have to live with it. He probably will never play in another World Series again, let alone win one. That's his punishment for dissing the Yankees.

I don't personally feel any ich-bin-ein-berliner toward Johnny, and I don't think you should either. Just be glad the Yankees are still on track to win another Series, and leave the ich-bin-ein-berliner crap for the people who really deserve it.

Time to recharge and refresh

Hey, loyal readers: I wanted to let you know that I'm going to take about a week off from blogging to recharge my batteries and get ready for the new baseball season. I'll be back the week of Feb. 22. Have a good Valentine's Day and all that crap.

Me and Ted's Head

The Internet has been buzzing about my recent face-to-face with Ted Williams's head. I think I'm ready to talk about it now.

As you know, it came during my big 115th birthday bash last Saturday. That party was a doozy, let me tell you. It's taken me a few days to process everything that happened and everyone who was there. I mean, Curt Cobayne sang me happy birthday, and I have no idea who that dude is! In fact, I could barely understand that he was even saying happy birthday because it sounded like he had marbles in his mouth. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington played a gig, too. They got a kick watching that Cobayne guy doing all his antics. I mean, when he finished singing Happy Birthday, he did a goddam stage dive!

All the usual suspects were there, like Claire and Lou and some other Yankee teammates. Mickey Mantle was there, but Roger Maris knows not to show his face. He knows why. We also had some of my buddies from back in the day.

I was gonna say the highlight of the evening was chatting with Ted's head, but I'm not gonna lie -- it was spooky. For me the highlight was actually eating my cake. I had a double-decker triple chocolate doozy. Everybody else had some bullshit carrot cake that Claire ordered.

But what you really wanna know about is Ted's head. As you know, when he died, his idiot son announced that Ted had wanted his head to be cryogenically frozen so that some day it could be brought back to life. His daughter cried bullshit and fought it tooth and nail until finally a judge agreed with the boy. So now Ted's head exists forever out here all on its own. Here's a good story that explains it all.

So there I am at my party, yukking it up with Jack Dempsey and Babe Didrikson, trying to figure out how I could get Babe alone because who wouldn't want to do it with somebody with the same name as you, when this severed head floats up over to us. We all jumped up about 6 inches each when it said, "Hey Babe. You been avoiding me?"

Babe and Jack got the hell out of there and it was just me and Ted's head.

"Yeah, I have," I said. "You wanna know why? Because you're a fucking severed head!"

Ted thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. "Nobody ever had the guts to tell me that to my face," he said, laughing. Then he immediately segwayed into a big diatribe about how he hated the music, the food, the cake, and the guests.

I said, Why'd you come at all, you douche. He said, "Because the one thing I wanted most out of life was that when I walked down the street, people would say 'There goes the greatest party-planner who ever lived.'"

I laughed but Ted looked serious. Then all of a sudden, some young guy with a napkin came up and wiped Ted's mouth.

"Babe, meet my son John Henry. He did this to me, so now he owes me big time. He gets me shit and cleans me up."

I shook John Henry's hand. Yikes, what a wussy handshake.

"Time for us to go, John Henry," Ted said. And with that, he was gone.

I went back to the party, thinking one thing: Happy fucking birthday to me.

Was there a game yesterday?

"Was there a game yesterday?" Don't you hate it when people try to be funny by asking that question after the Super Bowl? As if you think they might be so clueless that they don't know there's a game, apparently so they can laugh at you if it turns out you believe them. Sorry, not funny or clever at all.

In my case, of course I knew there was a game. In fact, I even invited Red Grange "The Galloping Ghost" over to my house to watch it. But I was so hungover from the night before that I didn't even wake up until Grange knocked at my door a few minutes before kickoff.

I'm like, Who the hell is that? And he's like, Babe, it's me Red. What the fuck are you doing here? I'm here to watch the game. What game?

And as soon as I said those words, I knew I had become one of those jokey assholes who thinks it's funny to claim he doesn't know there's a game... only I was speaking the truth!

So anyway, I did watch the Super Bowl with Red Grange, and I gotta tell you, that guy knows nothing about modern football. He kept talking about "the forward pass" as if there is any other kind, and he was complaining that nobody plays two ways anymore, as if that's a recent development. And he was trying to say how Reggie Bush and Joey Adday stole his moves, as if they have any idea who he was or ever saw him on film. Man, that Red Grange sure is full of himself.

Anyhoo, I'm sure you are all totally eager to find out about my 115th birthday party bash, and my conversation with Ted Williams's head. You're going to have to wait a little while. I'm still processing it.

Meantime, check out this new Google ad:

My birthday

Getting a lot of emails about my birthday, which, as I'm sure you're aware, is Saturday. It's the big 115, if you're scoring at home--I know I will!

Anyhoo, we're gonna have a BIG party and it's gonna rock. All the usual suspects are gonna be there: Claire, Lou, Koenig, Lazzeri, Col. Ruppert, Huggins, all those guys. I'm putting together all the final details and don't have time to blog, but here's a preview of my party recap: Ted Williams's head. Yes he/it is invited and it's gonna be interesting. Stay tuned.

Setting the record straight

In light of the recent news that some English soccer player was caught screwing his teammate's wifeand that 12 years ago an American soccer player was booted off the national team for doing the same thing (different wife), I wanted to set the record straight on an Internet rumor that's been floating around for about 80 years:

It was NOT written into my contract with the Yankees that I had the right of first night with all the Yankee wives. Any, um, extracurricular activities that might or might not have happened were purely consensuous.

The #1 question people ask me

You know what question people are always asking me? "Babe, how do you think you would hit if you played baseball today?"

My answer is always, "About .300 with 30 homers."

And they always say, "That's all?"

And I always say, "Yes, but you have to remember: I'm dead."

It always gets a big laugh, and I never give credit to the asshole who first made that joke.

But in all seriousness, the real question is, how would I do if I was in my baseball-playing prime in the year 2010?

The answer is simple: I would kick some serious ass.

Let me explain what I mean by "I would kick some serious ass."

- "I": Me, Babe Ruth, the greatest baseball player of all time.

- "would": This is like another version of the word "will", except for something that didn't happen and probably never will actually happen. It's called the conditional subjunctive pluperfect tense, or some shit like that.

- "kick": I don't mean this literally. It's more of an expression. See "ass" below.

- "some": Notice I say "some" and not "all." That means I don't actually think I would hit 1.000 or slam a home run every time up. I would make a few outs now and then. I'm humble enough to admit it.

- "serious": Normally, "serious" means, um, you know, serious, like not joking. But in this case, I mean something like "a shitload of".

- "ass": OK, this goes with the word "kick" above. By "kick ass" I generally mean dominate, strike fear into the hearts of opposing pitchers and managers. (But if someone tried to throw at my head, I would charge the mound, grab the chickenshit pitcher by the waist, and actually and truly kick him in the ass.)

I'll leave it to the stathead geeks try to figure out what my batting average would be and how many home runs I would hit. Some dork at SABR probably has tried already. You can believe that if you want, but take it from me: A shitload of asses would be forever sore if I was playing baseball as a young man today.