Maybe Gore hired Bagdad Bob as a speechwriter?

Dr. StrangeGore is rapidly reaching escape velocity from reality.

One word, Al: Thorazine.

Actually, timing-wise, this is just par for the course for the sad sumbitch.

I'm not the first one to make the observation, but Gore is becoming a remarkably accurate weathervane. That is, if he's blowing his hot air, say, eastward on one day, it's pretty safe to say the wind will shift to the west the following day. Or die out completely.

Charlie Brown's favorite baseball player!

Yeahp. And just the sort of baseball player Chuck would like. An indifferent hitter with poor fielding skills who eventually gets traded to an expansion franchise.

Al Gore's similarity to Chuck is uncanny, except that Chuck is grounded, wise, and good-natured.

Nice, Zetetic. I guess you spent your youth paging through Peanuts books too.

"an indifferent hitter"

...you call a lifetime .004 average "indifferent" ?

("I guess you were still excited by your bloop single.")

...err...I think I spent *way* too much time paging through Peanuts books...

Was his average really that bad?

I figured it was something like .124.

LOL. That shithead Gore just can't buy a break...

Ann Coulter called him the kind of guy "who dives into the mosh pit just as the crowd parts."

spelled "Shillabotnick" or "Shillabotnik"

I knew Joe without Google.

Two other questions:

What was Joe's batting average? (Gold star if you know that.)

Who was Roger Kaputnik?

Oops. Cross post.

The .184 sounds right to me. I though .004 was Chuck's average.

Oh, and Ace? Damn you very much for getting the song "Mrs. Robinson" stuck in my head. And without any cowbell.

IIRC Kaputnik was the protagonist of Dave Berg's "Lighter Side of..." strips in Mad magazine.

Aw c'mon, Ace, wrong Joe. You missed the real comic strip doppelganger for Al Gore: Joe Btfsplk, the world's worst jinx.

OK...IIRC Joe's batting average was .004. I also remember he was a lousy manager too. (Both Joe and Charlie were player-managers and shared the pain of futility.) In one strip, Joe called for a sacrifice bunt with the bases empty.

Charlie's batting average was higher (or at least his slugging percentage probably was) because I remember one strip where he actually hit a home run that won the game. But as was typical for him, his buzz was immediately when Sally (although it could have been Patty) responded to his feat with the simple word: "YOU???" No idea what his final average was though.

I guess for you sabremetrics fans (Moneyball devotees) that means Charlies OPS (Slugging + On base percentage) was higher than his hero's too, making Charlie the clearly superior player, and a likely addition to the Oakland A's if Billy Beane gets wind of this.

Don't know/remember who Roger is/was.

I now return you to your regular programming, and crawl back under the "useless baseball/comic knowledge" rock from whence I emerged.

In one strip, Joe called for a sacrifice bunt with the bases empty.

Hah! Ol' Joe was a crafty one.

Isn't Joe the guy that invented the internet?

"In one strip, Joe called for a sacrifice bunt with the bases empty."

Sounds like Joe is now managing the Mariners.
.

It's spelled "Joe Shlabotnik." I especially remember the Sunday strip where CB went through hundreds of bubble gum wrappers to find a Shlabotnik card without success, only to have Lucy find one on her very first purchase of a single piece of gum.

BTW, Ace - you do know Fantagraphics has begun a "Complete Peanuts" 10-year project, don't you? Volume 1 (1950-52) is out now.