The frozen head of late baseball legend Ted Williams was abused, according to an excerpt from an upcoming book. The book, Frozen, chronicles the remains of the late Red Sox slugger in the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryogenic facility in Arizona. The book’s author, former Alcor executive Larry Johnson, describes how Williams’ body was mistreated and abused.

The book, out Tuesday from Vanguard Press, tells how Williams’ corpse became “Alcorian A-1949″ at the facility, where bodies are kept suspended in liquid nitrogen in case future generations learn how to revive them.

Johnson writes that in July 2002, shortly after the Red Sox slugger died at age 83, technicians with no medical certification gleefully photographed and used crude equipment to decapitate the majors’ last .400 hitter.

Williams’ severed head was then frozen, and even used for batting practice by a technician trying to dislodge it from a tuna fish can.

More nightmare fuel after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Those of you looking for another great football read or just walking around with twenty bucks to blow owe it to yourselves to check out The Football Fan’s Manifesto, the dickslappingest book ever written that doesn’t involve Jesus, zombies, or the American Revolution. Yeah, even better than that one guy’s book. Tell us about the book, Michael Tunison:

I finished editing this thing months ago and have had to spend the meantime sitting around praying specific jokes and references would hold up long enough not to be outdated by the time the book even hit stores. For example, there’s one part where I mock Cleveland for its 45-year title drought. Only so the Cavs could made me sweat it out for three whole rounds of the playoffs before failing miserably! Tension, I tells ya. via.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but the paperback cover feels fantasic against my baby soft skin. No, it’s a funny book from a funny guy, whose work you can still find on this site. And on Kissing Suzy Kolber. And on The Sporting Blog starting next week. But the book is better, and therefore, worth spending money on. Unlike your tramp girlfriend, who’s a tramp. Huh, that’s somewhat redundant, isn’t it?

God’s Quarterback (sorry, Kitna) just co-wrote a new book with his wife called First Things First: The Rules of Being a Warner, and it sounds like Rule No. 1 is the same as it is in every family: Father Gets Hosed. From NBC New York (via Tunison):

As the book unfolds, it becomes clear the the QB struggles at home: Warner had to offer one of his sons a quarter for every completed pass so that he’d agree to a game of catch in the backyard. He can’t even get them to agree to come to watch him play in the Super Bowl. Two skipped the game in February, and there was a good bit of tooth pulling involved to get the other five to show up for the game. What’s watching your dad play in a Super Bowl next to a Nintendo DS?

What a great family.

“Hey Dad, how was work?”
“We won the Super Bowl on a last-second play against Tennessee! It’s the greatest day I ever could have hoped for!”
“That’s nice. Can I have the car this weekend?”

Kids these days.

What follows is somewhere between a literary review and a book discussion.  Sorry about the headline being a complete lie.  But let’s be realistic: people aren’t going to click a headline with the word “book” in it.

It was almost two years ago that the collection of basketball philosophers at FreeDarko introduced the Competitive Style Guide, a series of sketches on graph paper that illustrated perfectly what the website’s authors had been trying to communicate for years with thousands of slippery words.

Two NBA seasons later, Bloomsbury USA is publishing FreeDarko’s The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, a field guide to the lens of style through which FreeDarko views the NBA.  And while the en vogue book in the blog world right now is Drew Magary’s excellent and hilarious Men With Balls [Ed. Note: Drew will handle posting duties on With Leather tomorrow to promote the book], I found FreeDarko’s move from blog to book the more rewarding of the two.

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The Friars' Club had a roast for former Major League pitcher and author of Ball Four, Jim Bouton, that would have made even Dana Jacobsen blush:

Susie Essman, who turned to Bouton's wife, Paula, and said, "Honey, he didn't give up his career for you! He gave up his career because his arm didn't work any more!" Essman also cracked, "I could have had sex with Jim but I didn't. I held my ground. I got up off my knees from that bathroom stall with my dignity." Dave Konig, from Sirius Radio, said, "I always wanted to be an athlete as a kid but couldn't. But after reading your book and learning how athletes gambled and drank and chased women, I knew I could be like them."

Apparently, Bouton is not important enough to receive the Friars' 'A' crew, but Essman and Konig really delivered some zingers, didn't they? No, they didn't. The 1963 All-Star would have been better served by Rip Taylor and the exhumed corpses of Slappy White, Henny Youngman, and, of course, Mickey Mantle. -KD

As toned and tan reader John pointed out, today's Page Six has a little nugget from the exciting world of children's book publishing:

WE HEAR… THAT Simon & Schuster's children's imprint has inked Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy to write a picture book for kids about a class clown who finds inspiration to follow his dreams.

Being an outstanding NFL coach pretty much guarantees that you've been a super-organized Type A asshole your entire life, so I don't know what the hell Tony Dungy thinks he knows about being a class clown.  Finding inspiration?  Following dreams?  When you're the class clown, inspiration is fart noises and following your dreams is making fart noises. 

But something tells me the inspiration for this story has a lot more to do with Jesus than with fart noises.  Which is another hole in the story.  No class clown would ever give up fart noises for Christ's eternal love.  I'm sorry, but fart noises are just too funny.