Ted Williams' Head

(which would make a decent name for a college rock band, incidentally)

I was just appalled by this when I heard Colin Cowherd and Jim Rome talking about it this morning. I assume by now you've heard this horrible story, but if not:

Workers at a cryonics facility mutilated the frozen head of Hall of Fame baseball player Ted Williams, the author of a new book alleges.

In "Frozen," Larry Johnson, a former executive at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., describes how Williams' frozen head was repeatedly abused, the New York Daily News reported.

The book due out Tuesday alleges gruesome behavior at the facility, where bodies are kept suspended in liquid nitrogen in case future generations learn how to revive them.

Johnson writes that in July 2002, shortly after the legendary slugger died at age 83, technicians with no medical certification used crude equipment to decapitate the majors' last .400 hitter. Williams' severed head was then frozen, and even used for batting practice by a technician trying to dislodge it from a tuna fish can, according to the book.

(via FoxSports)

The Boston Herald's website, naturally, gives a few more details:

Red Sox great Ted Williams’ head was treated like a "grotesque pinata" by a pair of Arizona cryonic lab workers who bashed the legendary slugger’s frozen skull with a wrench to dislodge it from its pedestal: a Bumble Bee tuna can, an explosive new book alleges.

"Little gray chunks of Ted’s head flew off, peppering the walls, skittering across the floor and sliding under the machinery,"

Pretty sure the adjective "grotesque" is just overkill there, "pinata" says it all. Taking batting practice with this legend's (or anyone's) head using a monkey wrench? Disgusting. Rome called it "appalling and despicable," he was probably a bit too restrained there.

I'm not one of those Christians who've drunk too deeply from Plato and think of our bodies as mere containers (or even prisons) for our souls--but I don't consider the physical aspect of humanity as sacred either. I do embrace the biblical teaching that we are made body and soul--and the union between them doesn't end at death (this would be one of the cool things about resurrection, the reuniting of that which belongs together). Mistreatment of a corpse (or part thereof) is as heinous as mistreatment of a living body.