MarkB

Mark,

Man, what a great early Christmas present to see you back here. This site will never be the same without you around. Thank you for the kind words. You, Y4L, and Jim have all been my positive influences in my rookie year, here at MVP Mods. I’m very happy to see your re-appearance and I hope you have a great Holiday.

Take care friend.

Dennis

You too man, take care, and have a great Christmas. You've been fantastic for MVPMods since you've joined, and it's been a pleasure chatting to you in the forums.

Mark - Thanks for the kind words. It's good to see you again and I hope you continue to visit regularly.

Happy holidays Mark, nice to see you around now and then.

Thanks guys, and happy holidays to you and everyone else as well, I forgot to put that at the end of my post. Not a Christmas guy, what can I say? :)

Maybe they're multiple personality and each personality likes baseball but forgets they have a user account at MVPMods....

Just a thought.....

Right?

That multiple personality thing seems to have been happening quite a bit in the last few months. Very odd.

I can't be bothered with this site anymore. Jim, you are a class act, and it was a pleasure serving a long side you. You will always have my utmost respect.

JoeRudi26, you are a two face hypocrite. I heard and saw what you did to Yankee4Life in the shoutbox. You are a ******* disgrace to this site...but keep on keeping on playa....what a joke.

As for Trues...well, what can I say, you were a pleasure to deal with until the end...then I don't know what the hell happened. It wasn't that we were removed from staff, it's how you did it. Now, none of the old staff could be bothered to show their faces around here....and I don't blame them. Tossed out like trash. May MVPMods be put out of it's misery soon...

Three months ago, I'd have laughed at the suggestion that I agree with most of this post.

Since I'm in the random thoughts thread (even though it isn't Sunday) and just got caught up on the happenings of MVPMods after clearing my PM inbox, I might as well take this opportunity to echo the thoughts of DJ and drop a few names, just in case I don't get another chance.

Jim, it's always been a pleasure to work with you. Your contributions to the site have been no less than awe-inspiring. Quite frankly, I don't know where this place would be without you. When there were dry periods of mods for MVP and MLB2k9 and 2K10, there was always Total Classics mods being worked on and released, and everyone on this site owes you, Stecropper, 112155, AlexTony, OTBJoel, PaulW and any other Total Classics modder whom I forgot a debt of gratitude for all the hard work you have all put in.

RQ and Sean, I'm glad, sincerely, that you guys are back on staff. With you and Jim manning the fort, MVPMods should continue along the right track without any outside influences.

Y4L, Maestro, DJ, tebjr, HFLR and carter - as above with Jim, it was a pleasure and an honour to have worked with you guys. Every one of you get my highest respect, and I'd do it all again at the drop of a hat. Again, there's no telling where this place would be without you. RQ and Sean, this applies to you guys as well.

Modders - KCcitystar, Dylan, MarlinsMY, Hyman, Totte, The Big O, Homer, rolie, Pirate, DennisJames and jogar84.

Thank you all, every single one of you are legends in your own right, and not only have you contributed massively to the community, I have appreciated your mods, advice or information on a personal level. For that I'm eternally grateful.

Posters - mcoll86, emath2432, olyrunner, meteamo, catzrthecoolest, xiberger, basesloaded74, philthepat, rookie_rick, D-Unit, fenway389, pistonj92 and the guys who I normally chatted with in the shoutbox.

Some of you guys provided great debate, some of you helped out in the forum when others were having problems, some of you were just great for a laugh on a bad day, all of you were appreciated. I've spoken to some of you in PM's as well as in the forum, and it's always been a pleasure dealing with you guys. I wish you all nothing but the best for the future if our paths don't cross again.

To anyone I forgot, my apologies, it was far from intentional.

Everyone else not mentioned, I hope my presence on the forum in whatever capacity - staff member, PC support, modder or just resident geek - has been, in one way or another, useful, and I hope I've managed to help some people with their problems in the past few years and improve some people's games with a few mods.

I'll be sending out some PMs later tonight or tomorrow, so I'll probably speak to some of you in those. If you want to keep in touch outside of the site, drop me a PM. Regardless, though, just in case worst comes to worst, I've enjoyed my time here, and am proud that I can "walk-away", metaphorically speaking, with my head high and my pride intact, knowing that the majority of people who I had day-to-day interactions with can be considered friends now. I've never been ashamed to call it like I see it, unlike some others, and that's not something I'll apologise for.

And just for the record, I'm not planning on leaving the site. I just thought I should post this just in case I don't happen to get back to regular posting for whatever reason.

Fantastic, thanks Y4L. I already have the video of this game, so the audio will be a great addition to the collection.

First heard of this book by chance while reading a story on the NY Daily News site and saw an excerpt from it on the sidebar. Here's the excerpt.

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/yankees/2010/10/13/2010-10-13_the_last_boy_excerpt_1_mickey_mantle_finally_opens_up_about_childhood_sexual_abu.html

Exclusive excerpt from 'The Last Boy': Mickey Mantle finally opens up about childhood sexual abuse

Author Jane Leavy chronicles the life of one of New York's most beloved sports figures, Mickey Mantle ...

... in her book, 'The Last Boy'.

In this exclusive excerpt from Jane Leavy's new book, "The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood," Mantle discusses a lifelong secret.

Mickey Mantle's first panic attack occurred in the air. In April 1987, he had to be carried off a plane in Dallas – he thought he was having a heart attack. His heart was breaking, but not physiologically. The center could no longer hold.

One night, sitting at his booth in the restaurant – Mickey Mantle's – with [owners] Bill Liederman and John Lowy, a woman approached his table. Autographs were on the house for diners, and Mantle kept a stack of postcards with him for that purpose. "He's in a great mood," Lowy said. "He's the perfect Mickey. He starts to write the autograph. The pen runs out of ink. He takes it and hurls it into the wall. He threw it so hard and he was so furious, she just stood there and she started to cry. She finally had to leave.

"He could be one person one moment and a totally different person the next and go back and forth – though usually once it flipped into the bad Mickey, it didn't flip back. When he was the good Mickey, he was funny, friendly, generous, kind, gracious even. But he could turn on a dime."

The two Micks were as puzzling as they were unnerving. Lowy thought, "There was something from a very early age that happened to him."

Something Mantle had never confided to his wife. One night, long after they had separated, they spent an evening in Dallas watching a TV movie about a child who had been sexually molested. "That happened to me," he said.

He told her that often when [his parents] Mutt and Lovell went out to a Friday-night barn dance, her teenage daughter, Anna Bea, babysat for her half siblings. He was four or five years old when she began molesting him, pulling down his pants and fondling him while her friends, "teenagers and older," giggled and smirked, Merlyn Mantle told me. "They started playing with him," she said. "And, of course, he got an erection. They laughed at him. He remembered how embarrassed he was." That was the only time they ever spoke about it. "It could have been why he turned out the way he did," she told me.

"He had kept a secret to himself for nearly his entire life," she wrote in the family memoir A Hero All His Life, published a year after his death. "That night I thought I understood more clearly than I ever had why his ego was so fragile. He was a loner who loved a crowd, when they cheered from a distance. He never respected women. He demonstrated it in the ladies he chose for his one-night stands, in the crude way he talked and acted in front of women when he drank. And in the way he treated me, with too much credit for raising our sons and too little for being an adoring and faithful wife."

In fact, he had not kept the secret entirely to himself; nor was Anna Bea his only abuser. He had confided pieces of the story to friends, female and male, Linda Howard, Greer Johnson, Larry Meli, and Mike Klepfer. One evening at Mickey Mantle's, Meli was watching a football game with him at the bar. Meli was troubled by Mantle's decision to take Johnson to the house in Dallas when the boys were there and have her sleep in his wife's bed. "I told him how wrong it was," Meli said.

Mantle told him about Anna Bea. "It was almost like 'Screw the sons, look what I had to go through!'" Meli said. "He was sober and melancholy. Mickey was so embarrassed that it was a half sister that he said it was an aunt!"

Years earlier Mantle had raised the subject with Klepfer over a hand of gin rummy. Theirs was an intense two-year friendship late in Mantle's life, so close that the Klepfers outfitted an apartment in the basement of their Binghamton, New York home for Mantle and Johnson. Mantle fished in their pond, tucked into Katy Klepfer's home cooking, and learned how to build a fire in the fireplace. On trips to New York, he and Mike would play cards while Katy and Greer went shopping. The two men had a natural kinship. Like Mutt, Klepfer's father, Ellis, was a miner – he went to work in the coalmines of West Virginia at age nine. Like Mutt, whose mother died when he was eight years old, Ellis got little maternal nurturing; his mother, who Mike said, was "a coal-town *****."

He told Mantle about his father's wretched childhood. "That's when he broke out talking about his early childhood. He started telling me, 'If you wanna know about abuse as a child ...'

"And then he more or less shut up, went quiet, and said, 'I can tell you stories about that. I just know what it's like.'

"He asked, had anybody ever fiddled with me?"

Klepfer had never told anyone what had happened to him on the porch on Doubleday Street in Binghamton. But he told Mantle the whole story. "They were playing with my johnson. I didn't know what was going on because I was so damned scared."

"Yeah, I know about that," Mantle said.

He listened closely as Klepfer described his inability to fend off the assault. Like Mantle, who was known as Little Mickey around Commerce, Oklahoma, Klepfer was a small boy who grew into a hulk of a man. Mantle had osteomyelitis; Klepfer was asthmatic. "I couldn't fight anybody because I couldn't breathe," he said. "And Mickey laughed and said, 'Everybody talks about my arms and how strong I was. I was a ****-*** sissy, too.'"

Mantle told him that an older boy in the neighborhood had pulled down his pants and fondled him and that it had happened more than once. "He told me, 'Well, that's how I learned how to run like lightning,'" Klepfer recalled. "'If I got wind that something like that was going to happen, I got the hell outta there. And I could run.'

"What happened to him as a kid drove him nuts. He lived with his situation where he was being abused for a while, long enough for it to be indelible. It was something that he had never forgotten."

Mantle alluded to the abuse by Anna Bea but never told Klepfer the details. Anytime the subject came up after that, Klepfer said, "He would just get drunk. Massively drunk. The drunkest ever. There'd be no talking about it the next day."

There is no way to know how often or for how long he was abused by the neighborhood boys or by his half sister – he told Merlyn that it continued until Anna Bea moved out of the house. She worked in the bars around Commerce, married, and died young. By 1956, when New York scribes descended on Commerce to document the all-American childhood of the new Triple Crown winner, Anna Bea had been written out of the family script.

In high school, he was seduced by one of his teachers, Merlyn told me. "She just laid over him," she said. He took her to Independence, Missouri, to meet his roommates in 1949, his first year in the minors. "She was a hot date," Jack Hasten recalled.

Mantle laughed when he told Greer Johnson about her decades later: "That's how I got through high school was screwing the teachers. That's the only way I was able to graduate."

No doubt the "Mrs. Robinson" attentions of an older woman made him the envy of the Independence Yankees. But the seduction was no joking matter. It may have assuaged lingering, unarticulated hurts and insecurities but it was also a violation of innocence and trust, an exploitation of a hormonally charged teenager who wet his bed until he left home to go away that season.

Richard Gartner, a New York psychologist and the author of the definitive work on the subject, "Betrayed as Boys," says the incidence of abuse does not necessarily determine its impact, nor does the age at which it occurs. "I've treated people who have had one relatively mild incident and yet were deeply affected all their lives, sometimes more than people who were chronically abused," he said.

Abuse by an older sibling is a violation of the gravest tabooóincest. Abuse of a heterosexual boy by other boys undermines an emerging sense of manhood. Abuse by an older woman in a position of authority is an abuse of power, even if, Gartner says, it "made him feel like a man."

Every boundary had been crossed – familial, gender, professional – which could account for why Mantle crossed so many lines of behavior and decorum. If it was okay for others to violate his boundaries, it was okay for him to violate those of others.

To experts in the field, Mantle's story is consistent with a cluster of symptoms often seen in survivors of childhood abuse: sexual compulsivity or extreme promiscuity; alcoholism or substance abuse; difficulty regulating emotions and self-soothing; bed wetting; a distorted sense of self; self-loathing, shame, and guilt; a schism between a public image and the private self; feelings of isolation and mistrust; and difficulty getting close to others.

Those deeply held feelings of isolation and shame would abide. Mantle nodded tearfully when Bob Costas told him in a 1994 interview on NBC Now that he had always sensed a deep sadness in him. "I don't get close to people," Mantle replied, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. "I'm weird or something, I guess."

Today, many victims of childhood sexual abuse are diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder – the term used to distinguish long-term trauma. "A sense of a foreshortened future" is one of the clinical criteria for making a diagnosis of complex PTSD.

Like many abused boys, Mantle may well have downplayed these early traumatic experiences. He would have had good cause to do so. As Gartner points out, American culture leaves no room for men to see themselves as victims; if they are victims they are not men. Nowhere would it have been more essential to hide those feelings than in a major league locker room.

One night, over a candlelight dinner at the Klepfers' house, after grace had been said, Mantle looked up at his friends and asked: "Why do you people have anything to do with me?"

***

On Labor Day, 1988, Mantle returned to Cooperstown – as a paying customer – with Greer Johnson and Mike and Katy Klepfer. He told them that he hadn't been back to the Hall of Fame since his induction. In fact, he had filmed A Comedy Salute to Baseball there with Billy Crystal in March 1985. As they got into the car with a thermos of Bloody Marys – Katy always poured light for The Mick – Johnson remembered the five-by-seven-inch autographed cards she always brought along when they went out in public. She went back into the house and got a thick stack of them, anticipating a swarm in Cooperstown.

Though he had seen his plaque when it was presented to him in 1974, he had never taken the time to visit the Hall of Fame gallery on the first floor, where the earliest inductees are honored. Klepfer hung back as Mantle read every plaque, squinting through the dollar cheaters that Klepfer had purchased at the drugstore. Then he put his hands up to his face and cried. "'Y'know,' he says, 'until today I thought I was a pretty good ballplayer.'"

Klepfer thought, "He was humbled by greatness."

Or perhaps they were "what if" tears. Mantle articulated his regret in a private conversation with Costas: "He said, without a thimble-full of bravado, but wistfully and with affection and respect for the other players involved, 'I know I had as much ability as Willie. And I had probably more all-around ability than Stan or Ted. The difference is none of them have to look back and wonder how good they could have been.'"

No one disturbed him. No one asked for an autograph. No one recognized Mickey Mantle – not even the staff at the Hall of Fame Museum.

Mantle was wearing a white Oklahoma Sooners windbreaker, a white Sooners cap, and a pink golf shirt. "Toward the end, he took his hat off and said, 'Well, maybe if I don't have my ball cap on they'll recognize me,'" Klepfer said.

They posed outside on the front steps, trying to attract attention. Hey, Mickey, a little over to the side, Mickey. Hi, Mickey! How are you, Mick? You're here in Cooperstown! No one noticed. They had lunch at the Otesaga, the old inn on the lake where inductees annually gather for the Hall of Fame Weekend. Klepfer tried one more time. "'Do you have a reservation for Mantle?' The girl says, 'No, I'm sorry, we don't. You don't need a reservation. You can go right in.'"

I haven't read beyond the first 2 paragraphs yet, but if you want to check the book out, click here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLh4HdSkpxs

Thanks Y4L. Had a week from hell last week, so haven't been around. Just trying to get caught up now. :lol:

I know I'd never divorce one, that's for damn sure. :lol:

Love 'em both, Y4L.

apocalypse - "Italian" was irrelevant. If you had just said "girl parking a car", I'd have predicted the same outcome anyway. :lol:

Very nice, thanks Y4L!

I still have the '09 ALCS and World Series to upload, so when they're done, I'll post links to them.

That kid will grow up emotionally retarded.

Serves him right, though. He's too old to be crying.

This guy notes that he's been "a Republican in times good and I have been a Republican in times bad." I don't know why he bothered noting that. After seeing him talk, it's pretty obvious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMgyi57s-A4

I don't know if I've ever seen anyone more worthy of having his voice box ripped out by a bulldozer and his body thrown into a vat of salt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPelP6HG7ig&feature=player_embedded

Wow. Just wow.

-Yesterday I went to my city's downtown and found a little Sports Store and found a nice Mariano Rivera collectors figure at a very cheap price, I even bought a Yanks pinstriped jersey.

That figurine is insanely cool. Nice attention to detail.

Random thoughts, short and sweet;

Didn't have a good week this week. Various reasons, none of which I feel like typing right now. Suffice it to say when you're high, you're really high, and when you're low, you're really, really low.

Seriously considering sending an e-mail tomorrow which could land me in a job as a bus driver. No idea what will come of it, or if I'll even send the e-mail. At this point, though, it's looking mighty good in comparison to another 7 months of unemployment. From I.T. Support Specialist to bus driver, all in a short "OMFGTHEECONOMYISDEADWTF" year.

Finally decided to add a new playlist to my phone, full of quite epic randomness. GnR, Metallica, Bruce Springsteen, The Jam, The Eagles, Roger Miller, Billy Joel and Elvis Costello all make appearances. Will be expanded in future.

Also, a few films I strongly recommend watching - Into The Wild, Speak and Ca$h. All very interesting in their own ways.

Last but not least, spent this morning chatting to 4 complete strangers about anything, everything, and nothing - and it was the most insightful, intelligent, rewarding and mature discussion I've had in years. I didn't even know their names, and yet we managed to have discussions on life, animal biology, book recommendations, personality disorders, physics, Mark Twain, stereotypes, geography and etymology, evolution, and so much more. And it was all unplanned, the topics as much as the meeting. Totally and utterly random. Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

This concludes my thoughts on a Sunday morning for this week. Makes a change - I say short and sweet, and, for a change, it actually is. Well, short, anyway. The post, that is. On the forum. I know how some of your minds work.

Contains language some may find objectionable. (Replace "some" with "introverted social retards".)

See kids? That's what you get when you cross inbreeding and hippies.

Hilarious video going around:

And the remix:

Amazing - both of them. The first video...

That guy just looks far too much like someone who enters prison male and leaves female, if you know what I mean, but I can totally believe the video is real. The whole thing is like a bad Redman skit from one of his albums.

The song, however, is epic. I couldn't help but think of The Lonely Island - in fact, I thought the two white guys in the video were them until I checked it out on YouTube. Hilarious, and the tune is remarkably good. :clapping:

Sweet, thanks Y4L! I'll be checking tomorrow to see if I have any left to upload. :lol:

Never have I heard someone scream like this for such a stupid reason.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klCSyq0Ii14&feature=related

Couldn't help but watch this multiple times...and laughed my *** off each time.

Good old fashion ejection and a free gift in the ball park.

Pirates need to promote Gary Robinson to the Majors he showed more passion in this video than John Russel in his entire time as the Bucs manager.

This was mentioned during last night's game and led me to wonder how many spare bases each stadium has on hand. If both managers do that and there are no spare bases to be used...would be an interesting scenario. :lol:

Fix friend's PC.

Speak 2 days later. "All working fine?" "Yep, great, thanks".

Next day, phone call. "Yeah, I've got this XP Antivirus 2010 popping up saying I have a virus, how do I get rid of it?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E29iOPSxF94&feature=player_embedded

A wise move, my friend, a wise move.

Hell Yeah, and it appears she's on the market guys: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/12/earlyshow/main6766272.shtml?tag=cbsnewsTwoColUpperPromoArea

Yet, he still has that dumb-*** grin on his face. Good for her. I doubt it'll teach brick-for-brains a lesson, though; looks like nothing short of a bullet could penetrate that jar on the top of his neck.

Oh yeah?? Why I ought to...wait I can't.

Why not?