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Welcome to the MLB Star Power Index -- a bi-weekly undertaking that determines with awful authority which players/baseball entities are dominating the current zeitgeist of the sport, at least according to the narrow perceptions of this miserable scribe. While one's presence on this list is often celebratory in nature, it can also be for purposes of lamentation or ridicule. The players/living baseball phenomena listed are in no particular order, just like the phone book. To this edition's honorees/dishonorees ...

America's Best Father

Baseball appeals to us at an atavistic level because we are all at heart fly-catchers. The instinct to become a rangy, sure-handed center fielder is as much a part of our suite of ancient proclivities and crude bodily tools as the pointy canine teeth we use to chomp, chomp, chomp a full serving platter of hot wings while on the commode. 

When your first-edition signed copy of the Bible falls from its top-shelf aerie, your hands reach out to secure it as though piloted by spectral marionette strings. The same happens when you open a kitchen cabinet and the opened jar of JC Penney mayonnaise tumbles forth – mottled with legless maggots – as your loving arms find themselves already in place for the catch. When a stupid, loser toddler totters and plummets, your hands reach out once more, but then a second, stronger, deeper impulse recoils them so that the stupid, loser toddler smashes his face on the flagstone walk and thus learns to do and be better in the service of species survival and advancement. 

Along such preternatural lines, when the baseball game-goer takes time away from stomping and clapping to reach for a struck baseball he or she does so without volition or agency. It follows, then, that the rooter who interferes with a batted ball is not to be condemned or punished. Rather, that rooter is to be celebrated for conforming to the evolutionary processes that have allowed us to develop across epochs into idealized baseball viewers. 

This brings us to a Gentleman of Verona who attended Sunday's Yankees-Astros game at Minute Maid Park. In the sixth inning, Houston cloutsman Yordan Alvarez had the gall to hit a baseball in tantalizing proximity to Where the People Are Seated, and he got what he deserved. Please witness via the magic of the anaglog color television set embedded just below: 

If anything, our hero is to have praise heaped upon him for sparing Alvarez from a certain out, as Yanks outfielder Everson Pereira had the ball in his sights. Instead, our hero put the outcome in the officious paws of the baseball judicial system and at least gave Alvarez some hope of prolonging his time at the plate.   

As for our hero and his laudable instincts, please drink deeply of his already timeless remarks to St. Buster the Confessor: 

Charlie Ray's Papa Bear, please do not apologize. It is the inferior remainder of us who should be apologizing to you for taking this long to know you. The "little bit of lust, baby" for a falling object of which he spaketh has been with us since we were roasting trilobites in paleolithic caves. And praise be to the jurisdictional authorities for resisting any calls upon the pallid lips of mountebanks to eject this man from the premises. 

There is no such thing as an ample tribute to this right-wise buccaneer, but engraving upon the Minute Maid Park edifice the consecrated words "They cannot stop me from supporting the Asteroids" will have to do as a merest starting point. 

People of Baseball, if something comes your way, reach out for it without ceasing. Our common soul beseeches no less of you. 

This Other Guy

Every tale of heroism has a villain, and this forthcoming practitioner of the Bitter Beer Face is the one presently afflicting his betters:   

Now for fitting emphasis, a screenshot of the UHF programming seen above: 

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It is typically unwise to engage in far-removed judgments of a stranger's visage, but such unsparing interpretations serve as a warning to others who may be tempted to stand athwart righteousness in such a way. Besides, an anagram for "fan interference" is "effete inner narc." Take from that knowledge whatever assumptions you wish. 

As for the sourest of pusses in our midst, may he strive to do and be better – not unlike the toddler allowed to realize the consequences of his fall.