Every spring, much fun is made regarding players adding muscle or losing weight or having done yoga, or eating 20 raw eggs upside down every morning, or carving pentagrams into their pectorals.
Even the aptly named Bob Hamelin, whose dumpy bottoms are forever burned into my memory, participated in the “best shape of his career” gimmick:
Jason Kendall, who had what is probably going to be career-ending shoulder surgery last summer, who was accused of abusing Adderal by his ex-wife (with whom he is engaging in a nasty child custody battle), and who in recent years has looked haggard as hell
or even meth-addled
When I look at R.A. Dickey, I see only one thing — and that thing is not even R.A. Dickey himself.
This man climbed Kilimanjaro.
It’s a long running fantasy of mine and of my friends to build a comprehensive, dramatic film about MLB. Often this includes spinoffs — most recently one that features Razor Shines and Rance Mulliniks as ballplayers by night, buddy cops by day/late night, complete with Derek Bell as a no-nonsense Chief of Police. (Very possibly, a outline for this “film project” will appear at NotGraphs in the near future.)
Chief Bell
Once, Glen Gorbous was included by the Cincinnati Redlegs in a trade to the Phillies for Smoky Burgess, the 29th best ML catcher of all time.
Once, in 1957, after his major league career was already over and while playing American Association ball in Omaha, Glen Gorbous threw a baseball 445 feet, 10 inches, which remains a record today.[1]
The 1986 MLB season is the first that I can remember. The main reason that I remember it was 1986, I think, is that it was the year that I started collecting baseball cards — those Topps cards being so recognizable to me now.
While I grew up in Milwaukee, one of my mom’s best friends lived in Long Island at the time and was/is a huge Mets fan. Starting in 1986, he would collect all of the Mets cards from the year’s Topps set and send them to me. I remember Darryl Strawberry and Gary Carter being big, though I wouldn’t comprehend the extent of their greatness or tragedy until twenty years later. Read the rest of this entry »
Razor Shines was not a very good Major League Baseball player. He accrued 88 big league plate appearances over four years with the Montreal Expos, which cost his teams 0.6 Wins.
But as you can see here, we was awesome in many other ways.
Joke’s on you: I’m awesome.
Eddie Gaedel[e] has gotten a decent number of mentions at the FanGraphs subsidiaries and elsewhere. As I noted last week, poet and biographer Tom Clark has a long poem about him.
I am not here to weigh in on whether rostering little people constitutes a demeaning gimmick or is the answer to a market inefficiency in baseball.
Instead, I am here to offer you an opportunity to hold Eddie Gaedel’s real life game-worn jockstrap.[1] You need only travel to the Baseball Reliquary in Monrovia, California where it is safely housed.
Smell it.
Return to Easter Mountain
Above is Luke Easter looking all bemused, badass, and Tunde Adebimpe at the same time. In these specs, it’d be difficult to tell whether he’d be prepping to weld scrap metal into an awesome toboggan for his niece, play a show in the Bowery with his genre-defying, brass-steeped side-project, or deliver a lecture on comparative literature — he seems equally capable of each.
