I’ve stared into the abyss of the anagram generator. And the abyss has stared into me. In an effort to move on with the rest of my life, I offer this comprehensive clearinghouse of my favorite anagrams from active baseball rosters. For this week, anyway.

Ron Gardenhire — Groin Hardener

Josh Beckett — The Best Jock

Tim Wakefield — A Midweek Lift

So Taguchi — Ciao, Thugs

Rafael Furcal — Alfalfa Curer

Andre Ethier — Reherniated

Bengie Molina — Boiling Enema

Yorvit Torrealba — Lavatory Orbiter

Dustin Pedroia — Super Addition

Ty Wigginton — Witty Noggin

Ryan Theriot — Try “Antihero”

Homer Bailey — A Beer Homily

Dusty Baker — Study Break

David Ortiz — Ditz or Diva?

Pedro Feliciano — A Periodic Felon

Nelson Figueroa — Felonious Anger

Fernando Tatis — Anointed Farts, Roasted Infant

Damion Easley — Moaned Easily

Ricky Nolasco — Sickly Raccoon

Salomon Torres — Solemn Orators

Matt Chico — Mitt Coach

Wil Nieves — Evil Swine

Troy Glaus — Sorta Ugly

What a joy it was to see my new favorite baseball player leap off second base with the final out in his hand to end the Rays-Red Sox series last night. Akinori Iwamura: There is something pleasing to the ear about those two words, four syllables apiece, the third syllable stressed in both. Ask Bob Sheppard, who told George Vecsey in September that his favorite name to say, in 57 years as the Yankee Stadium P.A. announcer, was Shigetoshi Hasegawa. It scans the same as Akinori Iwamura. And I should know. I’ve been singing both names all week, to the tune of “I’ve Been Workin’ On the Railroad.”

For a while I thought the Rays were going to win Game 7 and then I thought they weren’t, and it was like that pretty much all week, their domed stadium behaving as a canopied flirt, batting its lashes, alternately, at Red Sox and Rays fans. Has there ever been a stadium that’s yielded more anagrams than Tropicana Field, A Canopied Flirt now but, for most of its troubled youth, a Florida Acne Pit?

I always think of roofed stadiums as those silver-domed serving trays that butlers brandish in old movies. They remove the domes with a flourish before saying — French with an English accent — “Voila!”. (That’s French for “There it is” and not to be confused with “Viola!”, which is Minnesotan for “sweet music”).

We never really knew this team — there are still more Famous Ray’s in New York than there are Famous Rays in Florida — and so there is a there-they-are quality of discovery about these players, as if some butler has removed the roof of that Tropical Fiend, Tropicana Field, and revealed (voila!) some weird new treat. Dioner is served.

“There’s a beach in the outfield?” my wife asked while watching the game last night, and when I said yes, she asked why anyone in St. Petersburg would want to go inside to a beach? To judge by attendance figures, nobody does. But you have to say this much: It is a distinctly Floridian place, fusing the National Pastime with beach and orange juice and tropics — and all of it indoors: The perfect place to play Crocodile Ball or to host a Crocodile Ball or to just sit and watch — rearrange the letters now — Rocco Baldelli.

There are two kinds of bunting: The kind you do in a baseball stadium and the kind you hang in a baseball stadium. Sadly, by the time Joe Mauer was reduced to the former bunting in the Twins one-game playoff against the White Sox this week, it was clear that none of the latter bunting would festoon the Metrodome this October.

Twins hitters were stymied by Sox starter John Danks, who called to mind the Ogden Nash poem “The Bronx?/No Thonx.” (“John Danks? No Thanks.”) After John Danks came Bobby Jenks, and after him would come Ernie Banks and Herman Franks and George Binks, if necessary, such was the Sox’s inexhaustible reservoir of bluntly named baseball people with connections to Chicago. (And what is the plural possessive of Sox, anyway? Sox’? Sox’s? Discuss.)

The Sox win deprived the world of a Twins-Rays playoff series, contested entirely indoors in the two ugliest ballparks in existence. I exempt the Tokyo Dome from this discussion because it is the Metrodome, minus the Hardware Hank billboards. And come to that, how did the Sox fail to throw him at the Twins: John Danks, Bobby Jenks, Hardware Hank?

I say they are the two worst ballparks “in existence” because the departed Kingdome in Seattle was even worse than the Metrodome, its exterior concourse views of the Seattle cityscape more than undermined by its interior grandstand views of the Seattle Mariners.

As for Tropicana Field, it joins that select group of things – the English bulldog, the Pontiac Aztek, a pair of purple and green Adidas I own – that are so ugly they’re beautiful. Don Orsillo pointed out the other day that there are baseballs from batting practices past still hung up on its catwalks. They remind me of the frozen hikers whose bodies have been left on Everest. It is possible that a high fly striking one of those catwalks could excite a half-dozen or more AWOL baseballs, hailing them down on some unsuspecting centerfielder who – given quick enough reflexes and an oversized novelty fielder’s glove – could record the game’s first unassisted sextuple play. We can only wait. And hope.

Few men wear a higher hat than Cubs’ manager Lou Piniella (above, several inches beneath his cap). The only one who springs immediately to mind is Dodgers’ manager Joe Torre (below, wearing his Yankee cap like a bishop’s mitre). Torre sees Lou’s hat and raises it by a good two inches, suggesting a direct relationship between the height of a man’s hat and the height of his achievements. (Best president: Abe Lincoln. Best Seuss character: The Cat in the Hat. Best chef: Boy-R-Dee. And so on.) So unless the Cubs dismiss Piniella during this week’s playoff series against the Dodgers, and replace him with the guy from Jamiroquai, I like Los Angeles in four games.