Flak Magazine: A New Kind of Red Sox Nation, 08.15.03

Give me the carcass of Ernie Banks/ I wanna keep it in a 50-gallon tank/ I'll write you a check and leave it blank/ Give me the carcass of Ernie Banks

(...guitar interlude...)

Give me the carcass of Ernie Banks/ I don't care how bad it stanks/ Ain't no joke, ain't no prank/ Give me the carcass of Ernie Banks

As all deathless pop anthems do, the song resonates as eloquently today as it did in nineteen-eighty-something when it debuted. It's about preservation, economy, the valuation of memory in America, the paralysis of nostalgia. And right now it teaches us how to approach the strange case of Theodore Williams, dead headless hitter on ice.

Or, um... maybe it doesn't. But those rhymes are sweet, aren't they? If you never wrote another thing after that "Banks/stanks" couplet, you'd still die a genius.

The official position of Flak's sports section with regard to the freezing, possible damage to, extraction of genetic material from, and threatened thawing of Ted Williams is this: We really don't care. He's dead and, to the best of anyone's knowledge, he had no predilection for ancient Egyptian theology and, therefore, he probably wouldn't give a damn what happens to his carcass. Freeze it, cook it, mount it, smoke it, whatever. Mash it into powder and rub it on Trot Nixon's bat for luck. Ted's dead. He won't litigate.

But the vat full of Ted's remains is at the center of a controversy that threatens the credibility of sports in America. Dead Ted is the cold intersection of science, morality, human sexuality and baseball. Teddy Ballgame — hero of two wars, .406 hitter, American icon — is Jango Fett, a progenitor, a clone father, the unwitting patriarch of endless iterations of left-handed slugging half-people.

Why else would the former Red Sox great's genetic material go missing if not for the distant purposes of such major-league general managers as Brian Cashman or Theo Epstein? One of those conniving mofos is nursing mitotic Teds in a petri dish like baby Sea-Monkeys, and Major League Baseball had better address the implications of clones at play before they reshape the national game. There are unanswerable questions emerging, complexities that require clearheaded Seligian analysis.

Would a cloned Williams be draftable or would he be a free agent? Maybe he'd be grandfathered into the Reserve Clause, consigned to the Red Sox forever. Would he continue to accrue stats for Dead Ted, or would all subsequent Teds be considered numerically, if not nominally, unique? And what if he sucked? What would the sabermetricians do if he just flat-out sucked? What would be the backlash from the fantasy baseball crowd if first-round fantasy draft pick Ted couldn't poke a ball out of Coors Field with a 415-foot stick, if everyone in the league, from Chone Figgins to A-Rod, was simply better?

No, baseball probably shouldn't risk either the insult to its mystical past or the potential for a homogenous, Ted-ridden future. Baseball needs more rules, something to resolve the clone problem before it steps into the batter's box.

And yet part of us hopes that Commissioner Bud Selig addresses this problem as he has so many others: Do nothing. Let it arrive. Then deny it. We'd like to have a look at Ted's fabled swing; we'd like the overlap of eras on "Sunday Night Baseball." If we've got the nucleotides and someone somewhere has the technology, let's brew up a batch of fresh Teds and field a team.

We don't care how bad it stanks.

E-mail Andy Behrens at abehrens53 at hotmail dot com.