Williams

Written By: Chris Manley

Posted on May 30, 2007

Tuesday, November 8, 2033

Williams Beta to argue records case

by Reade Seligmann
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) – Commissioner of Baseball George W. Bush will today hear arguments on both sides of the continuing battle over the achievements of Yankee’s infielder Ted Williams Beta. Bush is not expected to make a decision until late next week.

Lawyers for Williams Beta are expected to argue that the slugger’s accomplishments – in particular this season’s on-base-percentage of .612 – should be added to the official MLB records for the original Ted Williams, now known as Ted Williams Alpha. Williams Alpha once held the major league record for career OBP at .481, but was surpassed by Barry Bonds during the 2008 season. The addition of Williams Beta’s percentages from this and last season would regain the record for the collective Ted Williams.

Clone rights advocates fear that the Williams case will re-open a wound well on its way to closing: whether clones are themselves unique individuals or extensions of their former selves.

“We’ve come too far,” said Darrin Miles Beta, reproduced from late Scottish meat magnate Darrin Miles Alpha. “We felt we were only a few years away from finally beating this silly Beta label, and now this. If Williams wins, he’ll set back clone rights five, maybe ten years.”

Miles and others worry that while they have gained a superficial level of acceptance in the US, most Americans are waiting for a reason to reject them. The oldest clones are only 25, and have not yet had a chance to establish themselves in communities. Williams Beta, at 24, is in one of the few professions in which someone so young can gain such national recognition. Many fear that a ruling in his favor all but damns the case of clone rights, especially considering the US Supreme Court’s increasing reliance on the precendents of professional sports decisions.

“It’s like the Brett Favre thing back in, what was that, 2010?,” Miles Beta points out. “Once the NFL said you had to count five Mississippi before rushing him, suddenly the Court agrees that, yeah, some people are important enough to require special treatment. Sports dictate the direction of this country. I just don’t want to see everything we believe in change because of some silly records.”

But not everyone takes Miles’ devil-may-care attitude towards the stat books. Reached for comment in his suburban Los Angeles home, former San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds – who currently holds the single season On-base-percentage record of .609 in 2004 – said he didn’t believe Williams Beta’s case had any merit at all. “What the [expletive] is everybody so puzzled about?” Bonds asked. “This guy, he’s not even a real person. He was made in a little bitty tube. That’s not sports, science people. That’s [expletive] is what that is.” Bonds has held this position since the announcement of Henry Aaron Beta in 2017. It is widely rumored, though never substantiated, that Bonds tried to clone himself, but that the boy produced was the scrawny, wiry teenager Bonds now calls his youngest son.

This is not the first time the name Ted Williams has been associated with controversy. Williams Alpha, a Boston Red Sox great in the 1940s and 50s, died of heart failure in 2005. His head, body, and some DNA samples were suspended in liquid nitrogen with the hope that medical advances would one day allow him to be thawed and re-animated. The procedure was at the time considered ghastly and absurd, and Williams Alpha’s children fought bitterly – and publicly – over the fate of the body. But while it and its brainy counterpart still sit frozen, some DNA samples were used in 2009 as the first high-profile use of the then emergent technology of human cloning. In fact, it was the cloning of the Williams DNA that spurred US lawmakers to finally deal with what was on the brink of becoming a shadowy black market industry.

It seems the only person not speaking publicly about the case is Williams Beta himself. Despite the debate between the conservative right – claiming that clones are nothing more than soulless copies of real people – and the progressive left – who believe that clones are unique and fully human – Williams Beta has refused all requests for interviews. Perhaps he desires only to rise above the squabbles of a nation divided and to stick to the real business of America, which is sports.

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