If you've ever wondered what the atomic weight of Babe Ruth was, a genius blogger is working to find out. Larry Granillo of Wezen-Ball — hands down my favorite baseball website — has created a guide for baseball Hall of Famers based on the Periodic Table of Elements.
THE Periodic Table. From sixth-grade science class. The chart that tried to tell us that "K" somehow should stand for "potassium." Yes, the thing with electrons.
Who thinks of this stuff? Larry does:
With 118 elements known on the current chart, and 109 players elected to the Hall of Fame by either the BBWAA or via special election (no Veteran's Committee here!), it seemed like a fun exercise to try and arrange the Hall of Famers into a periodic table structure. Well, maybe "fun" is a bit relative.
Not at all. It should be considered fun across the board, though if Larry had somehow tried to tie calculus to the Hall of Fame, I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much. But this? He's blinding me with science!
And that's just the half of it! (Because it's only half of the table.)
So, are you doing the Neutron Dance yet? Deeper explanations come with the chart, of course:
The game's most noble players make up the right-most column, with the most radioactive players making up the left-most column. The radioactive players go from most benign to most dangerous from top-to-bottom.
Every effort was made to keep the top-tier Hall of Famers in the first three rows of the chart, or as close to it as possible.
I'll bet the Sultan of Swat passed a lot of noble gasses.
The second-to-right-most column on the periodic table of elements is the second-most reactive group of elements. On the Periodic Table of Hall of Famers, this comes out as the highly temperamental Hall of Famers, those who were known for being jerks on the field but who aren't looked at as bad guys today.
Ty Cobb once beat a man senseless with a beaker graduated cylinder, I heard.
The 500-Home Run Club is represented together on the chart, as well as the group of 300-Game Winners. The 3,000-Hit Club is also grouped together, down below.
Just awesome. Hopefully, this is a work in progress, something that is tweaked and updated with each new class. Let the debate begin about exactly what it was A-Rod was growing in those Petri dishes.
Wouldn't it be great if a giant version of a finished chart, complete with data, hung in the real Hall of Fame someday? Even if it never reaches Cooperstown, it's a neat way to track its membership. Larry needs to make T-shirts, at least.
My two cents for the real Periodic Table: Let's change K from potassium to Nolan Ryan.
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