After a brief hiatus, the Sports On TV column returns with one of the most requested shows ever: Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s 16-season strong cultural landmark, ‘South Park’.

‘South Park’ has been around since 1997, and has changed along with the times. When it started, Parker and Stone were getting $1,200 to make video Christmas cards for Fox executives. In 2012, they are influential, Tony Award-winning, multi-millionaire media moguls. One thing hasn’t changed: in season one, Kenny was getting ripped apart by football players. In season 16, Tom Brady is guzzling a Gatorade bottle of a child’s semen. Sports are one of the weirdest, stupidest, most ritualistic and overly-glorififed things human beings can do, and ‘South Park’ has been in tune with that since the very beginning.

So, in the Interest of easing us back into regular Thursday columns, here are my choices for the 20 greatest South Park sports moments. Like a lot of the shows we do, there are a ton of moments we had to leave out, so a part 2 will probably happen. If we left out your favorite moment, or you have something to say about a moment we chose, be sure to drop down into our comments section and let us know.

As an added bonus, participating in the discussion and sharing the column on Twitter or Facebook (courtesy of one of those handy buttons at the bottom of the post) will net you the BAT DAD BADGE. You don’t want the Bat Dad Badge? I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA.

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According to this video, everything rapper T-Will Da Deal do “Saint Lou”, including:

• Walking
• Talking
• Owning clothing
• Posting homemade World Series anthems to YouTube
• Calling your homemade World Series YouTube anthems “films”
• Featuring a plush “rally squirrel” on the track who does that annoying “unh! unh! Yeah! We goin’ all the way!” thing people do before rap songs, except in a sped-up chipmunk voice
• Having said squirrel announce that he’s “just trying to get a nut”, because get it
• Giving a shout-out to his “haters”, because irrational hatred is the only reason to not like a squirrel-centric baseball rap song where somebody rhymes “mayor” with “McGwire” by saying neither of them properly

The tags on the video are even better, and include “BET”, “KANYE”, “JAY-Z”, “DEF” and “JAM”, “JIVE”, “RAMS” and both “FRED” and “BIRD”. I’m not sure if he’s trying to get on television, get a record contract, get into the NFL or just meet Fred Bird, but his video production and the fat that he’s rapping to actual music puts him ahead of any efforts we’ve seen from Texas Rangers fans. I’m not sure if he got the “I’m just trying to get a nut” thing from a Wal-mart t-shirt or from another rapper (where he appears to have picked up everything else), but the knowledge that a Cards victory would cause Lance Berkman to “get a nut” makes me really want to root for Texas.

“Dave Seville-style Rally Anthems” are the next logical step in St. Lou’s Rally Squirrel phenomenon, following shaped chocolate and inspirational taxidermy, and I hope the trend lasts long enough for Tony La Russa to try and bring in four different rally squirrels in an inning.

[h/t Outside the Boxscore]

Back in April, we shared with you a video of Sports Illustrated model and equestrian teen fantasy Kate Upton doing “The Dougie” at a game wherein a hot lady doing a dumb dance was the most memorable moment. Not only did this become the redefining moment of our With Leather mission statement (“post pictures of Kate Upton nonstop, every day”), it became what we look for in our collegiate sports news. That has been a relatively dry well, until today.

The above video was taken after the Oklahoma State Cowboys beat Texas A&M on Saturday, and what you should be looking for (besides Mark McGwire crying … that is Mark McGwire, isn’t it?) is coach Mike Gundy doing a Godless amalgamation of “The Dip” and “The Humpty Dance”. He gets low, low, low, low, and because the Internet exists we can now enjoy his Caucasian Dance Party set to nearly any song, including — you guessed it — a parody version of Cali Swag District’s “Teach Me How To Dougie”. The lyrics now include Gundy’s famous “I’m a man! I’m 40!” rant, which really should’ve included the line “I DRIVE A DODGE STRATUS!”, for extra hilarity. Oklahoma State should already be calling up Kate and paying her to drink SoBe in her underwear to this.

Please to enjoy, by way of Brian Floyd at SB Nation:

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The St. Louis Cardinals have a new batting coach in Mark McGwire and all the joys of the media circus that comes with him.  McGwire admitted last month to juicing during the most monumental portion of his career.  Instead of just kicking off his first day on the job in the cages, he also got roped into yet another Q&A session with the media. He just wants everyone to know that he’s super sorry, and he just wants to move on from the whole debacle and focus on his new role.

“I think people understand how truly sorry I was for what I did.”

McGwire refused to back off his assertion, much criticized, that steroids allowed him to recover from injuries and stay on the field, but didn’t help him break Roger Maris’ single season home run record in 1998. McGwire said it was the evolution of his swing and not a body enhanced by drugs that enabled him to hit 70 homers that year, smashing Maris’ 37-year-old record of 61, and 65 more in 1999.

“Like I’ve said, people are going to have their opinions,” McGwire said. “Listen, it got me the opportunity to get out there and get more at-bats, and I got the chance to play.”–Fox Sports

If I just confessed to shooting up and put a juicy question mark over the legitimacy of my homerun records, I would want to hurry up and move on, too.  OF COURSE he is going to say he’s sorry, because he knows he has to in order to even attempt to regain credibility in the baseball world.  But come on, Mac, you’re really still going to compartmentalize this issue?  To say that using ‘roids only had an affect on his ability to recover and not his power shows that he either a) is in denial, or b) thinks we’re a bunch of slack-jawed knuckle draggers who sit around and drink beer and play video games all day long.  Either way, it detracts from his apologies when he says he’s sorry with an asterisk.  Maybe now he’ll try to tell us that Sammy Sosa isn’t white, or that it’s not cheating if it’s just the tip.

The Colbert Report isn’t really one of my favorite shows, but they do a nice takedown of Mark McGwire’s steroid confession that stays true to their form, along with a mock defense of Gilbert Arenas. I don’t really think that McGwire believes that whatever PEDs he was on didn’t help his career, but I don’t think you can make a case for belonging in the Hall of Fame
while giving all the credit to the drugs. But it’s time for a serious question here–what the hell is going on with McGwire’s NECK?! Did it have triplets? Was there some baby fat amputated from there as a kid? That’s some nasty business, bro. How about wearing a scarf next time? –DC Sports Bog.

We knew Mark McGwire was on whatever it is that we’re calling “steroids” now. We knew it when he broke Roger Maris’ single season home run record in 1998. We knew it when he dodged the U.S. House Government Reform Committee in 2005. And we knew it before he came forward yesterday and finally admitted it. But what did McGwire gain by coming out now? What was he thinking? Here are my best guesses:

To dodge the media. McGwire was hired by Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa to be his hitting coach going into 2010, and you can make the pharmaceutical training jokes on your own. But with McGwire heading back into the public eye–not to mention a major-league dugout–it was high time to introduce the elephant in the room. Nobody since Amelia Earhart had fallen off the map like Mark McGwire had, and the only thing more impressive than that self-imposed exile was his decision to end it and finally give the media the story that they wanted.

To dodge the Feds. One news agency reported that the statute of limitations that the federal government had to prosecute McGwire expired in 2007. McGwire pled the fifth in front of Congress with his now famous quip, “I’m not here to talk about the past.” He may as well have been saying, “I’m not about to go to jail and take it in the ass.” That sort of transaction was saved specifically for the trainer’s room. But that little dodge seemed to save him all the grief that followed around Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, both of whom said under oath that they didn’t take any so-called PEDs.

To get into Cooperstown. There’s already been talk of McGwire pinch-hitting this year, which would re-start the clock on his eligibility for the Hall of Fame. If McGwire appears in a 2010 game, his name would come off the ballot for four years, and then re-appear on the next eleven, or until he received less than five percent of the vote. It’s on par with the level of craftiness one would expect from Tony LaRussa.

McGwire’s admission also gives baseball an opportunity that it desperately needs: to look its soiled, chemically-enhanced past squarely in the face and come to terms with it. Because those inflated home run numbers won’t be going away anytime soon. Neither, apparently, is McGwire, whose curiously-timed re-entry into the game will be something to watch this season, and probably will be for seasons to come.