It’s impossible to overstate the brilliance and cultural impact of ‘The Simpsons’. It’s the reason why most of us think what we think is funny is funny, whether we’ll admit it or not.

It’s just as impossible to agree on what constitutes the “golden age” of the show. Everyone agrees that there’s a certain time frame in which ‘The Simpsons’ was the best show on television (and possibly ever), but we all have a different interpretation of when that era started and stopped. Some people think it was the first 9 or 10 season. Some people narrow that down to 1-8. Some people with impossible f**king standards think it peaked from seasons 3-5, or even 4.

For this week’s Sports On TV column, I used the most generally agreed-upon definition of the show’s prime: season 2 through season 8. Tackling the best sports moments of a monster like ‘The Simpsons’ is tough, so consider this a Part 1 of its own series, destined to include a Part 2, Part 3, and even a Part 4, should we delve into those wretched, later season guest star hives like “Homer and Ned’s Hail Mary Pass”.

So please enjoy the 20 best sports moments from the golden age of ‘The Simpsons,’ and be sure to drop us a comment and share your love. Special thanks to Ari Amaru for the screencaps.

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On the last installment of Sports On TV, we tackled ‘The Wire’, a romanticized look at inner-city life and law in Baltimore, Maryland. If we drive an hour, then get into a fight on a basketball court and fly across the country, we’ll be ready for ‘The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air’, the 1990s sitcom that launched rapper Will Smith into mega movie stardom and gave ‘Silver Spoons’ star Alfonso Ribeiro an awesome paycheck for like seven years.

‘The Fresh Prince’ is one of my sentimental favorites (as longtime readers of The Dugout may know), so I was excited to tackle its 20 Greatest Sports Moments. I got something like 15 just from season 1 guest stars. Biggest possible thanks goes to Josh Koebert for helping me out with the images. Follow him on Twitter, he deserves your love for making this happen.

You’re probably already singing the theme song in your head, so let’s make this happen. The 20 greatest sports moment of ‘The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air’.

/high-five
/pshhhh

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Every few years, a TV network or a shoe company decides that sports guys should be super heroes. It happened with NFL Superpro, it happened with the Super Sluggers and now it’s happening to Kevin Durant. Or a Powerpuff Girl that sorta looks like Durant, I haven’t figured it out yet.

From the YouTube description:

The evil Dr. Deflation has escaped from Air Max security prison and is hellbent on stealing all of the world’s air. The Air Alliance made up of Charles Barkley, Ken Griffey Jr., Bo Jackson, Clay Matthews, Kevin Durant, Megan Rapinoe, and Allyson Felix, are on a mission to defeat him. Nike’s best Air products are available at Foot Locker including the Nike Air Max Griffey Fury, Nike Diamond Turf II, and the Nike Air Max NM.

If I’m making a Kevin Durant super hero named “Durantula” I’m gonna give him eight arms, or at least some sort of spider power more obvious than creating basketball Hadoukens.

Regardless, check out the preview video after the jump.

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I went to an interleague game at Safeco last May. Giants at Mariners: Randy Johnson was looking for career win #299 in his final start in Seattle (he gave up one run in 5.1 innings and left to a standing ovation), and the game ended in 12 innings on Jose Lopez’s RBI single off the left field wall, but the most memorable part of the night belonged to Ken Griffey, Jr.

With the bases loaded and two outs in the ninth inning of a tied game, the 39-year-old Griffey approached the plate to the loudest I’ve ever heard a sports stadium — and I’d seen Griffey hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth to tie a game in the Kingdome some sixteen or seventeen years prior. For four pitches, we were all on our feet, refusing to stop screaming or clapping, generating electricity, doing everything we could do to will this aging hero to one more feat of greatness.

On the fourth pitch, Griffey unleashed that classic swing, hit a towering fly ball to deep center, and for a few breathless seconds, as I tracked the ball’s flight, I was a kid again, full of wonder at my childhood idol… until Aaron Rowand made the catch at the wall.

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One of the most ignorant and irritating aspects of the steroid discussion engulfing baseball is the presumption of innocence that still exists with regard to certain players. How a person that knows anything about baseball could say,”This player did steroids and cheated; and my favorite player would never do that.” This idiocy was exposed to some degree last week when Ortiz and Ramirez were both revealed to have tested positive in MLB’s 2003 PED audit. And yet that attitude still seems to exist, as presented in a reader submission to GameOn, posted yesterday (emphasis added):

If a player is injured, or is just a contact hitter, then that player does not receive the love that the power guys do. Take Ken Griffey Jr., for example. He has had a great career but during the years that he was injured, he was largely dismissed by fans. Griffey did not take steroids to get back into the lineup like he could have. Instead, he let his body heal naturally. via.

There are two types of players in baseball right now: those that have reportedly tested positive, and those that haven’t. There is no “clean” or “dirty,” because nobody knows who’s “clean.” There’s no point in outing anyone as a “cheater” if we don’t know who didn’t “cheat.” How can you chastise those that failed when (a) there’s still the equivalent of more than three entire teams’ worth of players that failed the 2003 test, and (b) you have absolutely no idea who those players are?

This whole witch hunt is the only thing keeping baseball in the national consciousness. It’s time to pull the plug.

That hipster moan you heard in the greater New York City area yesterday was Ufford enjoying the return of Ken Griffey’s return to the Mariners in his own special way. Junior hit a home run and the Mariners won, and then Matt had a scary trip to the dentist, but he was really nice and everything turned out fine!

And how the hell did Griffey get lauded with the public’s certainty of never having done steriods? We don’t know that he never did steroids. And if he’s really the only one that never did steroids, can we then assume that everyone else actually did do them? And then admit that Barry Bonds is being persecuted simply for being a crabby black guy that doesn’t feel like talking to people while he’s changing clothes? Or is that a crime in California, also?

Whatev. Here are some more scores, and here‘s a vid of something so creepy, it would be an injustice to even describe it. And eventually we’ll do coverage that doesn’t involve complaining about steroids and non-sequitur vomit-inducing videos. Just not today.