It's only a matter of time.  Any day, Barry Bonds will hit home run number 715 and pass Babe Ruth for second place on the career home run list.  We can debate the means he used to get there, but there's no disputing the truth contained in those numbers.

In a very real sense, though, no one will ever surpass the Babe.  He was the nation's biggest star, playing on the world's grandest stage, at a time when we wanted our heroes larger-than-life and painted without shades of gray.  His accomplishments may fade, but The Myth will never die. 

Just like Marilyn Monroe.

Looking at pictures now, it's a little hard to see what all the fuss was about.  She's clearly an attractive woman, but at least during her "natural" phase, it's more girl-next-door than salacious-sex-siren. 

But the staying power of the 50s blonde bombshell is a perfect counter-point to today's disposable celebrity culture.  Britney Spears / Lindsay Lohan / Paris Hilton / Anna Benson / Jessica Simpson and many interchangeable others all at one time have been this century's the hot girl of the moment.  As a society of Us Weekly readers, we have an unquenchable desire for the next new thing.  Once we find it, we want more, more, more ... right up to the point where we no longer find that thing interesting and we move on to the next girlofthemoment. 

Mrs. AK-47 is a great example.  Before her recent declaration of unselfishness, she was a nobody.  Being one of Russia's top models is a bit like being one of England's best chefs.  There ain't a whole lot of competition.  But then she pulled a reverse Benson and managed to start the clock on her 15 minutes, which should be running out just about ... now.

So yeah, there are a great many super-hot athlete wives running around.  The question is: will we remember any of them in 10 years, let alone 40? 

I don't think so. 

So my nomination for hottest athlete's wife has to be the former Norma Jean. 

There's a difference between "looks good on an airbrushed magazine cover" and "sexy."  And no one embodied the latter more than Marilyn Monroe.

She achieved her cinematic sex-symbol peak in 1959's "Some Like It Hot," the only film made before the 1970s to land on a recent top 20 list of sexiest movies*, despite the obvious handicap of containing no actual nudity.  The high point is a scene Roger Ebert once described as "a striptease in which nudity would have been superfluous," an almost impossible concept for us modern folks to get our heads around.  

Today's insta-porn culture is all stimulus-response - hot chick poses in Maxim, guys go crazy.  No need to engage anything above the medulla oblongata.  On the other hand, Marilyn lived in a time when men (and women) understood that sexual attraction was more than a matter of how little clothing one could wear. 

And just like we can never go back to the era of Babe Ruth (nor, in fact, would we want to), we can also never return to the time of Marilyn.  And that is both a shame (for there will never be another Marilyn Monroe) and a treasure (for there will never be another Marilyn Monroe). 

So you can have your Mmes. Seikaly, Stojakovic and Woods.  I'll stick with a true American original, Mrs. Joe DiMaggio. 

(As for why I should move on to the second round, I shouldn't.  I'm not actually in the contest.  But I thought it was a fun topic and felt like writing something.)

*No link, Google it yourself if you're not one of the many, many underage folks who seem to be running rampant around here.

Hi all.  Me again.  Mr. "Pathetic Sore Loser Whiner Boy."  (And those are only the ones I can remember off the top of my head.)

Just wanted to give a little credit where it's due.  I emailed Ty Hildenbrandt (tyhildenbrandt@gmail.com) earlier this morning after the contest results came down and we all had a chance to enjoy the reaction.  Although I couldn't convince him to join the mud-slinging game ("c'mon, Ty, jump in, we're all doing it -- don't you wanna be one of the cool kids"), he did respond to my email in a very gracious, honest and reasonable way. 

That was cool. 

Especially since the judges basically stuck him out there like a pinata (can't find the tilda thingie right now), handed us all broomsticks, and said, "Hit me, sissy-boy (or girl)."

So while I think there are legitimate concerns with the way this whole thing went down, I did want to give at least some credit for how the aftermath is being handled.  In particular, I wanted to pass along one bit of what he said.  He looked into the Ross thing, and confirmed that he did indeed uncheck the box for competing in the contest.  I take him at his word.

Ross, I feel for ya, but it sounds like an honest mistake.

Good luck to all the finalists.  (Including you, my laconic new best friend)

I will never forget the image of jockey Edgar Prado desperately trying to rein in Barbaro as his horse refused to stop chasing the Preakness field despite a badly broken leg.

Barbaro's leg is actually broken in two places*.  The first fracture occurred when he stumbled a few hundred yards into the race.  The second happened afterwards, when he refused to quit running despite the protestations of his rider.  According to Dr. Larry Bramlage, the veterinarian on-hand at the track, the injuries are life-threatening.

Dr. Bramlage explained that the biggest concern right now is blood flow to the damaged limbs.  Horses have only two small arteries that push blood down that far and an injury like this can easily cause significant damage to both.

It's no coincidence that modern warfare reached it's most brutal apex right as the cavalry was reaching the end of its useful life as a military branch.  Only a sadist could witness these beautiful, loyal animals dying by the dozens in a hail of bullets and not find him himself sickened in the process.** 

Barbaro was sent to the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center for treatment.  If he has a chance anywhere, this will be the place. 

Barbaro's racing days are over, but he's earned his time in the meadow.  Let us dearly hope he receives it.

 -----------------------------------------------------------

*In a pre-surgical evaluation, a third fracture was found.  The surgeon who is to perform the operation said of the injury, "It's about as bad as it could be."  Here's a good post that has much more information about the unfortunate side of horse racing.

**The reader might believe this paragraph existed without the context needed for it to make sense.  The reader would be right.  At the time of the composition of this piece, the context seemed entirely self-evident.  In hindsight, this is further evidence that the detachment needed for good writing deserts me when the subject matter is this affecting. 

The Dallas Mavericks spotlighted the stupid nature of the NBA's playoff seeding system by being slotted fourth, behind three division winners, despite having the second-best record in the Western Conference.  Now the West's two best teams are facing off in the second round of the post-season, a situation which isn't fair to either the teams or their fans.

Thankfully, the league recognized the flaw in this structure.  Earlier this week, NBA Commissioner David Stern announced a new seeding plan that would at least rank the three division winners and top "wild card" entrant in the correct order.

The problem is it shouldn't have come to this.  Everyone understood the potential problems with the system when the NBA realigned its divisions before the 2004-2005 season.  But the league did nothing about it until someone got hosed.  At least now everyone learned a lesson and things should work out better in the future. 

Which brings us to baseball.

The National League currently has 16 teams, while the American League only has 14.  The reason the teams aren't divided evenly is that having an odd number of teams in each league would require at least one inter-league game every single day of the season.  Major League Baseball isn't ready to take that step.

The problem is that with three divisions in each league, you're stuck with a situation where one division has six teams (NL Central) and one has only four (AL West).  All else being equal, the A's, Rangers, Athletics and Mariners have about a 25 percent chance of making the post-season each year, before you factor in the wild card.  The Cardinals, Reds, Astros, Brewers, Cubs and Pirates are under 17 percent (actually, the Pirates are under one percent, but that's a different story).

This is bad enough.  But check the current (5/19) MLB standings.  Notice anything?  Right now, there are four teams in the NL central that have better records than any teams in the AL West.  In fact, there are nine National League teams that would be leading the AL West right now, and three teams that would be only a half game back.

Now it's not likely that all of these teams will keep up this pace.  But one of these years, we are almost guaranteed a situation where an NL Central team is shut out of the playoffs with a record that would be good enough to win that rump AL Division.  There will be much chattering by sportswriters and television talking heads.  Fans in a place like Cincinnati are going to feel like they were robbed of the chance to see their team in the post-season.  Major League Baseball will look dumb and will respond by issuing a statement along the lines of: "We never anticipated something like this happening, but we still believe it is fair to reward division winners." 

That will make everyone feel better.

So what's the solution?  Kick the Brewers back into the American League.  I can never remember that they're in the NL anyway and I always end up forgetting to draft Ben Sheets for my NL-only fantasy team.  Then go ahead and have an inter-league game every day of the year.  The novelty has worn off by now, and if we're going to have inter-league play, I think it would be kind of fun to be able to focus on one series at a time. 

Of course, Commissioner Selig would never agree to move his old team back across league lines, so we'll have to wait until he moves on or some other NL owner steps up to the plate. 

Hmmm... Barry Bonds could certainly prolong his career by moving to DH...

My brother and I got into a discussion a few months ago about Brett Favre.  We differed on whether or not it was time for him to finally just hang it up, but we both agreed that there was nothing cooler in sports than being a starting quarterback in a Super Bowl.  If we could have chosen any career track in sports, that would have been it.  We understood why it was so hard for him to walk away.

But that got me thinking.  What if you weren't a Hall of Fame quarterback?  What if you were just a no-name guy struggling to hang onto the dream? 

If you were really, really good at a sport, but also kind of sucked, what would be the best career choice then?

It seemed like a simple question, but the more I got into, the more I realized there was a dizzying array of factors at play here.  Right away, the elements I identified as being important were:

1. Money

2. Dues-Paying (what would life be like on your way to becoming a below-average pro)

3. Groupies (self-explanatory)

4. Post-Career Opportunities

5. And, what I'll call the "Grandkid" Factor, meaning 50 years from now, how cool will Grandpa seem when people explain what he used to do

The sports careers I considered were baseball, football, basketball, hockey, golf, and generic Olympic athlete.  I'm tossing out the non-revenue sports, because there's no possible way you can convince me that being a professional bowler or bass fisherman is on par with playing in the National Football League.  NASCAR is too difficult to compare, and from my outsider's perspective, it seems like you need to be like third-generation to even get into that racket.

Also, no tennis, because it's basically the same experience as golf, but you have to work a lot harder, your body breaks down quicker and there's a good chance you had to endure a crazy dad to get there.  And how many times can you have fun getting smoked in straight sets by Roger Federer.

I tracked each factor on a five point scale and added up the results to figure out which sport was best for underachievers.  My exceedingly scientific results are as follows. 

 
#1 - Money
This is a key consideration, so let's deal with it right up front.  Scrubs don't have much in the way of endorsement potential, so we're pretty much looking at base salary here.  I'll take each league's minimum salary as our guide.

#2 - Dues-Paying
Life's great once you reach your destination, but how's the journey? 

 #3 - Groupie Factor
Now things get interesting. 

#4 - Post-Career Opportunities
So once you've bounced around for awhile and decide to hang it up, what next? 

#5 - Grandkid Factor
So how awesome will your grandkids think you are when they hear what you did back in the old days?