Some sports fans might be amused at the topics that come up on a sports desk while producing a newspaper.

Arguments, declarations, declamations … it’s like being in a sports bar 365 days a year.

And today’s topic?

The ugliest athletes. Any sport.

I don’t remember how this got started. But someone looked up a particularly homely soccer player, and off we went.

To be fair, what the human race tends to consider unattractive often is a function of pathology or wounds or acne scars or something as basic as misaligned teeth.

Studies seem to indicate humans prefer symmetrical faces. And having one is an accident of genetics or proper nutrition or exposure to orthodontists and skin specialists.

Given that, some of us are less fortunate than others, and the internet seems awash with “ugliest” athlete lists.

Here is a list of 10 ugly soccer players.

Here is a list of 50.

Here is an North America-centric list of 25.

(Warning: All three of those lists are click-throughs.)

While we were doing internet searches, some of the usual names came up. Sam Cassell, whose nickname was “ET”. Randy Johnson, who had both bad skin and jaw alignment issues. And Iain Dowie, who apparently is the gold standard among homely soccer players.

As this discussion was going on — and granted, not all of those involved in the discussion are a delight to gaze upon — I held my tongue.

Because I knew I had the trump card of “sports unattractive”.

And then I dropped it on all concerned, and they went quiet, perhaps in awe.

Don Mossi, former baseball pitcher.

Don Mossi played in the major leagues from 1954 to 1965 and was an above-average performer. His career record was 101-80 and his career ERA was  3.43.

And he might have slipped into quiet anonymity if not for Bill James, the famed sabremetrician who in one of his compendious baseball history books nominated Mossi as the ugliest player of his era.

Wrote James in his Historical Baseball Abstract:

“Don Mossi had two careers, one as a reliever and one as a starter, and he was pretty darned good at both.

“No one who saw him play remembers that, because Mossi’s ears looked as if they had been borrowed from a much larger species and reattached without proper supervision. His nose was crooked, his eyes were in the wrong place, and though he was skinny he had no neck to speak of, just a series of chins that melted into his chest. An Adam’s apple poked out of the third chin, and there was always a stubble of beard because you can’t shave a face like that. … He looked like Gary Gaetti escaping from Devil’s Island.

“One of the problems with choosing the ugliest and handsomest players is that a player who looks short of grotesque in one pose or one photograph will look fine in another. Susie, [James’s wife], showed me a picture of Hoyt Wilhelm in which he looked positively handsome. I assured her it was just a bad shot.

“You never had this problem with Don Mossi. Don Mossi was the complete five-tool ugly player. He could run ugly, hit ugly, throw ugly, field ugly, and ugly for power. He was ugly to all fields. He could ugly behind the runner as well as anybody, and you talk about pressure… man, you never saw a player who was uglier in the clutch.”

And that passage, which tends to stick in the mind and is fairly clever, if certainly harsh, seemed to bring the topic of Mossi’s mug into his post-career life (he is now 86) and return him to a mix of players none of us would want to join.

(Though many of us would be fine with being unattractive/more unattractive if we could have a 10-year big-league baseball career.)

Anyway, Don Mossi ended the “ugliest athlete” discussion in the sports department of The National. At least for the day.