Today's story is from Richard Hoffer, a former Sports Illustrated senior writer. He is the author, most recently, of Something in the Air: American Passion and Defiance in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

You'd think these stories — and there quite a few of them now that I think about it — would be born of some unwholesome prurience, or voyeurism. In fact, sports writers are not particularly interested in the relative size of their subjects' members. Really. Nakedness in a locker room is a working condition, and is no more provocative or remarked-upon than a three-piece suit in some other (perhaps — I say, perhaps — more dignified) occupation.

Still, there are these stories. I don't want to name names, but a colleague of mine is famous for his set-piece of a certain football player's magnificent appendage. The point of the story is not how immense it was — it may or may not have been the size of two orange juice cans duct-taped together, I don't remember — or even whose it was. I don't remember that either. The point is that just about anything can be a worthwhile challenge for our observational powers. I have heard the story many times but have never heard it repeated. The filigrees of elaboration have become a kind of improvisational theater, a one-man show, like Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain. Anyway, the last time I heard it, there was, for the first time, the mention of substantial veining, "like ivy encircling a massive trunk." I remember two writers in attendance doing spit takes.

My own contribution to this genre, a little entry about Pedro Guerrero, is slight in comparison. Probably everyone who ever covered baseball, which features the most immodest mind-set in all of sports, has a similar anecdote. Dicks are always out, flaunted, bandied, waved and wiggled in a clubhouse. It's the most exaggerated exhibitionism this side of the Internet. And everybody was used to Pedro, in particular, flaunting, bandying or wiggling his. He was a good hitter in those days, but also wildly inappropriate, even by the standards of baseball. If you were in your interview crouch, transcribing some Dodger's quotes, you knew to jump if you felt something brushing your neck.

Even so, it was something of a shock that night when Pedro, naked as always, slathered his member across the banquet of post-game cold-cuts. It must have finally occurred to him that he simply could. I want to say he did it with relish, but that goes without saying. In any case, the clubhouse was seized with a kind of trauma, the players' eyes wide, their mouths agape at the singular destruction of dinner. We'd all seen Pedro wield his instrument in any variety of ways but never in the vandalism of free food.

Now I've been telling the story for all of these 30 years, more often than not when alcohol was available, but even so have never stooped to describing the offending anatomy. Whatever the veining, I'll leave it to others who were in the clubhouse that night. The size, the state of its circulation, the grip — none of it important. To me the whole point of the story rests with the sudden appearance of Bill Russell, that innocent from Kansas, returning to the clubhouse after one of those dugout interviews, the ones where the star of the game chats with the radio guy for a free Timex or a car wash coupon.

My memory can't be perfect and who knows if, after all this time, a flourish hasn't crept into the anecdote, an embellishment, a harmless ornamentation. It's been 30 years, after all. But I'm quite sure, I can see it in my mind's eye, that Russell surveyed the spread before him, however strangely unattended, and set about making his customary sandwich. Free food is free food.

I seem to remember that at one point Russell looked up from the construction of this monstrosity, perhaps puzzled by the stunned silence around him or just the unnatural attention he was receiving. Why, in this normally ravenous clubhouse, was he the only guy at the buffet? And why was everybody looking at him? Still, all that food. As I recall he paused just briefly — "What?" he said — then bit deeply into that meaty torpedo.

Then again, he may have said nothing at all. Like I said, it was a long time ago.

Again, any sports journalist out there with a story to tell — print, online, broadcast — should send it along to darkside@deadspin.com. You know you've got a million of them.

This got The Stephen A. Smith Heckling Society of Gentlemen thinking: Should there be a Veterans Committee for the Deadspin Hall of Fame? Therefore, throughout 2008, TSASHSOG will be stating the case for several figures from the past, and at the end of the year, we'll vote on them all. Today's nominee: Pedro Guerrero, after the jump.

————————————-

The nightmarish (but not-quite-Nightmare-Ant-ish) Y2K-scenarios that occupied the minds of so many at the turn of the century were not as far off base as most remember them. True, no planes fell from the sky, and to the extent that governments did stop functioning, it wasn't the fault of computer programmers who failed to acknowledge the dangers of the number 2. But as 1999 flew by and the film "Gladiator" hurtled toward undeserved immortality, an Internet related disaster was, in fact, developing. Retired major leaguer Pedro Guerrero had been re-unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. And in a pre-Deadspin age, no one was around to properly immortalize the event on the web.

The following is our attempt at righting that wrong. Pedro Guerrero, when the robots have taken over and all that remains of mankind is what the sentinels are able to siphon off Gawker's servers, You Will Be Remembered. You, Alexey Vayner and the Assimilated Negro.

Background

It was 1999. The earth continued its gradual cooling after the O.J. Simpson verdict and had already, for the most part, gotten over the 14-year Major League Baseball career of Pedro Guerrero. A five-time All-Star and co-World Series MVP with the Dodgers, Guerrero had retired in 1992 as a Cardinal and slunk off into relative obscurity. Or so we thought.

On October 10, 1999, a 911 operator in Dade County Florida responded to the following call:

Operator: "Where's your emergency?"
Simpson: "We have a problem here. I'm trying to get a girl to go to rehab..."
Operator: "Does anyone need rescue?"
Simpson: "She's been doing drugs for two days with Pedro Guerrero, who just got arrested for cocaine, and I'm trying to get her to leave her house and go into rehab right now."
Operator: "Is anyone hitting anyone right now?"
Simpson: "No, no. It's nothing like that."
Operator: "Does anyone have any weapons?"
Simpson: "No, no..."
Operator: "Does the girl need a rescue?"
Simpson: "No she doesn't need a rescue..."

O.J. Simpson's new ladyfriend, who looked startlingly like someone else from his past, had apparently quarreled with her infamous (and possibly murderous) beau, resulting in a 911 call that both parties would later downplay. But what of Pedro Guerrero? Guerrero had been charged with a cocaine related conspiracy just days earlier. Was he so bold, or so addled, as to do it again so soon after his run-in with the law? Just as importantly (and much more hilariously), what about Pedro Guerrero was so terrifying as to make the prospect of his girlfriend doing cocaine with him for two days worse than the thought of her doing cocaine for two days alone?

The question was somehow further muddled several months later when Pedro Guerrero was acquitted on those drug charges — for being too stupid to commit the crimes alleged. A Miami jury believed Guerrero's lawyer's claim that, with an IQ of 70, the former slugger was incapable of making his bed or writing a check, let alone arranging a $200,000 shipment of blow.

Potential comment extravaganza? Potential comment extravaganza! And now, through the wizardry of modern science and creatively deployed anachronism, we get to see it happen.

Retro-Projected 2000 Deadspin SHOTY Finish

Guerrero would have had a difficult path to the SHOTY title. We've run the year 2000 through our Deadspin Retro simulator and come up with the following Final Four:

(Ed. Note: We think Rocker's tragically underseeded.)

As you can see, Leon Smith - the dud of a high school draftee who eventually overdosed on Aspirin and claimed to be an "Indian fighting Columbus" would have been upset by French basketball player Frederic Weis. The former Knick dud draftee's only accomplishment in 2000 was getting dunked on by Vince Carter. But in an age in which millions of everyday Americans were just getting acquainted with Microsoft Paint, consider Frederic Weis the proto-Ned:

Guerrero's general stupidity is objectively funnier than John Rocker's 1999 xenophobic stupidity, and so Guerrero would have coasted into the final. But a nuts in the face are nuts in the face, and so an honorable run would have ended there.

Retro-Projected Deadspin Hall of Fame Plaque

Voters have become more discriminating over time, but back in 2000, this would have been an easy call.

Retro-Projected Stephen A. Smith Wisdom

According to the folks at Wikipedia, Stephen A. Smith wasn't known beyond Philly until 2005—well after the Pedro Guerrero saga. It is difficult to imagine a sports issue of any sort without Stephen A. Smith to offer his considered opinion. Fortunately, thanks to advances in retro-projective science, we don't have to do so. Behold, the Retro-Projected Stephen A. Smith Wisdom:

Until next time.