The Ugliest Baseball Player Ever

I could talk all day about ugly professional athletes. The Major Leagues, the NFL, and the NBA are filled with them, to the point I could write an ugly athlete essay without even mentioning the WNBA. I even wrote about this subject a year ago in my blog entry “Ugly as Sin” (http://spidgetales.blogspot.com/2006/04/ugly-as-sin.html). But when we talk ugly, 1950’s baseball player Don Mossi takes the cake. I would describe him to you, but I’ll instead let baseball writer Bill James do the honors:

“The Man Who Invented Ugly” by Bill James. From his Historical Abstract

“I always kind of identified with Don Mossi. Don Mossi had had two careers as a major league pitcher, one as a reliever and one as a starter, and he was pretty darn good both times. No one who saw him play much remembers that, because Mossi’s ears looked as if they had been borrowed from a much larger species, and reattached without proper supervision. His nose was crooked, his eyes were in the wrong place, and though he was skinny he had no neck to speak of, just a series of chins that melted into his chest. An Adam’s apple poked out of the third chin, and there was always a stubble of beard because you can’t shave a face like that. He looked like Joe Torre escaped from Devil’s island…

Don Mossi was the complete five-tool ugly player. He could run ugly, hit ugly, throw ugly, field ugly and ugly for power. He was ugly to all fields. He could ugly behind the runner as well as anybody, and you talk about pressure…man, you never saw a player who was uglier in the clutch.”