Hideous Ballplayer Week Returns, Soon

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It’s a time-honored tradition on this blog during the slow winter months before we have real baseball to write about. We pick some players who have been long forgotten in the thousands that have passed through time, and we devote a post just to them.

Diamond Hoggers’ fourth-annual Hideous Ballplayer Week will begin next week. You can e-mail us your nominations (diamondhoggers_at_gmail_dot_com) or tweet us (@diamondhoggers) if you have a guy who really stuck in your crawl over the course of time, or had a weird routine, or did something that in any shape or form was hideous. This won’t be any fun if you don’t submit someone and we have to do all the work ourselves.

These guys deserve recognition too. For every Mike Trout, there are a dozen Rowland Office’s. For every Miguel Cabrera, there are a zillion Oscar Azocar’s. For every Bryce Harper that dazzles you, there’s a Todd Benzinger that will torture you. They’re all part of the fraternity of baseball and we will bask in the glory of their awful-ness and the awful things they did to us.

So come one, come all – ante up your bad ballplayers and baseball observations.

And by the way, that’s the late Hideki Irabu pictured above. The ‘fat toad’ (someone else’s words, not ours) who posted a career 5.15 ERA and collected over $15 million back in the days that $15 million was decent baseball money.