Youkilis, Varitek, Papelbon: OH MY FUCKING GOD THE HATE!

Damon: MONKEY! He is a MONKEY! Oh how I hate the monkey!

Anybody who hits Mariano Rivera: You go to hell. You go to hell and you die.

Pretty much the entire Oakland A's organization, past and present, players and fans included, with particular shining fiery hate for Billy Beane and his stupid stupid moneyball.

There is more, so much more …

On what the hate does for me: It's as much a part of the game as the love. I have bonded with people over my hate for players from A-Rod to Eckstein for my entire baseball-loving life. If I had to curb my hatey, ranty outbursts during games, I would have no goddamn fun at all. Thankfully my husband is the same way — we get a good old rage on, pretty much every game. Our neighbors probably think there's a cult murder type thing going on in our house, about 150 times a summer, what with the yelling and the screaming. Good times!

*side note: yesterday, my sister took a drink of her soda and realized, too late, that there was a bee in it. The bee stung the inside of her (now fat) lip. We now have definitive proof that drinking a bee is painful. I'm sure eating a bee would be just as painful.

Strangely enough, I always quite liked Paulie, though. First off, I thought he was hot, and he did have a sweet swing.

He also played a starring role in one of my favorite of many stupid baseball-related adventures. My sister and I had a friend visiting from China, and we thought it would be great fun to take him to an Ms/Yankees game. He didn't know baseball AT ALL, and was bored senseless from the get-go. It turned out to be a great, epic game, and went into extra innings, and at one point Paul O' Neill threw the first punch in a bench-clearing brawl that got one manager and several players tossed.

Our friend sat quietly through it all, looking more and more distressed, until we finally asked what was wrong. "I thought there were nine innings," he said. He'd been counting down to his escape the whole time, and couldn't figure out why the game was still going.

This one's for you, haters!

Albert "I knew you when you were Joey" Belle. JOEY JOEY JOEY. He threw things at us, he chased trick-or-treaters with his car (and *hit* one of them–they had eggs, but *still*!), he's a nasty, nasty man. (My parents' house is about five minutes from where he used to live; we always used to joke about trick-or-treating there, and then he chased the kids with his car). But the whipped cream on the nausea was him badmouthing Cleveland after he left here. You DO NOT do that. We Clevelanders have a fierce pride about our city–we are unfairly the butt of national jokes, and many of us almost take it personally when someone disses our city.

Unfortunately, we're also kind of like an abused spouse where sports are concerned. We just want to be loved (read: win something for once). So we put up with all sorts of crap from Joey while he was here and let him treat us badly because he bought us flowers sometimes (read: hit pretty well) And then he had to rip us just before peeling off west on I-90. Fuck you, Joey.

I went to college in Chicago, where a group of transplanted Northern Ohioans all found each other and attended a White Sox-Indians game together, taking great, great pleasure in heckling him. Incidentally, Comiskey II? HAAAAAATE, if you've got a ballpark division.

My father hates Bud Selig with the florescence of a thousand suns, going back to the Seattle Pilots and their relocation.

Mark McGwire's probably winning this one right now though. I'll be in the other thread.