A certain Philip Humber entertained 27 gentlemen on Saturday afternoon, and dismissed them all. In honor of this feat of unblemished restraint, I’d like to reacquaint you all with the very first individual to have accomplished it: the very pioneer of perfection, Mr. John Lee Richmond of the Worcester Ruby Legs. There are at least three things worth noting about Mr. Richmond and his fabled 1880 exploit.
Well, it’s shaping up to be another mind-numbingly predictable season. Orioles atop the AL East…Rays throwing grapefruits…Reds offense punchless…Pujols disappointing yet again…all-too-familiar names atop the leaderboards…Omar Infante…Jake Westbrook…yawn. Wake me when something happens, will you? But do you know what we do, here at NotGraphs, when suspense is at a premium? We manufacture some, that’s what. I present to you today a leaderboard heretofore never seen: a collection of stats that go beyond mere on-field performance to assess the vitality of a team’s entire culture. Could this completely revolutionize baseball analysis? That’s not for me to say, but yeah, probably.
Dear NotGraphs,
I have a decent collection of baseball cards. At least, I imagine it is decent, or would have been, had I not chosen to collect baseball cards at a time when they were very popular. From 1990-1993, you couldn’t walk half a block without stepping on a discarded foil pack. My city had 15 card specialty shops. It now has 1. And I have lot of nice looking, worthless cards. Question is, what should I do with them?? It seems a shame to destroy them, but a 1988 Rookie card of Hall of Famer Roberto Alomar is still only worth 5 bucks. Maybe. There must be some way to get value out of them again.
I leave my question to your capably pondering mind.
The nomination process, which requires a credit card number for automatic renewal, is complete. But, lo, there is news!: The Iron Council of Patriots Speckled with the Blood of Quislings has ruled that, in this instance, an entire team is eligible for the nickname in question, which is “50 Free Quality Sales Leads.” So you are encouraged to vote your conscience, so long as your conscience is right-wise and informed by sanctioned holy texts.
So, land-owning Episcopalian citizens, you may now cast ballots on who — or what! — should forevermore be nicknamed “50 Free Quality Sales Leads” …
Thank you for exercising the franchise.
That was the date of Jamie Moyer’s first win. Retrosheet’s box score and play-by-play here. Steve Carlton, now 67 years old, was the opposing starter. Kent Tekulve, now 65, made a relief appearance for the Phillies. Davey Lopes, now 66, was Moyer’s third baseman and the leadoff hitter for the Cubs (he went 0-for-2, walked 3 times, and stole a base).
A week after Moyer’s first win, a man named Eric Thomas developed LISTSERV, the first e-mail list management software. Two weeks after the win, Lindsay Lohan was born. Three months after the win, The Oprah Winfrey Show premiered. Four months after the win, President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik to discuss scaling back their missile arsenals. Six months after the win, Desi Arnaz (I Love Lucy) died.
The #1 single when Moyer won his first game was “On My Own” by Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald. Five days before the win, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released in theaters. Theaters were places people watched movies, and paid money to do so.
[The FORTUNE cover in the photo was from a month after the win, July 1986, and the full article about Microsoft’s IPO is here.]
You might remember a complacent Mark Reynolds munching some sunflower seeds after a Red Sox homerun last year. NotGraphs’ Navin Vaswani commented upon what quickly became one of the years biggest and best baseball memes.
Wondering, though, did anyone notice that last night, as the Orioles trounced the White Sox, that Reynolds took his seed addiction to a new level? During a plate appearance in which he would record an RBI double, Reynolds went to bat holding a sack of his preferred David’s brand sunflower seeds, ranch flavored. Upon arriving at second base, Reynolds rewarded himself with a mouthful of said.
Like a sugared carrot dangling afore a donkey, so are David’s ranch flavors to Mark Reynolds.
Mark Reynolds, toting the treat that would be consumed.
Oh, Red Sox. Why’d you have to start the game so early yesterday?
Yep, Shields and Bard, both on my bench. 1 earned run. I lose my week by less than 80 points, and I’m putting a curse on the Red Sox. Another one.
1. Major league baseball players have romantic liaisons with each other all the time.
2. These liaisons are often extremely sensual, and can be surprisingly sweet and tender as well.
3. They are documented in persuasive detail (under the delicate guise of “slashfiction”) on hard-nosed sites like this one.
4. They make for better reading than you might think.
4/13: Ellsbury injures shoulder in 4th inning of Rays-Red Sox game. “In a lot of pain.” “Felt something move a little bit.” Leaves ballpark for further evaluation.
4/14: Diagnosed with “subluxed shoulder.” Expected to miss a minimum of six weeks. Surgery remains a possibility. “I haven’t heard the word surgery,” says manager Bobby Valentine. “Whatever the best possible care is, that’s what we will give him.” Ellsbury expected to be re-evaluated in a few days.
4/17: Ellsbury’s other shoulder injured en route to his re-evaluation. Expected recovery time for original injury remains six to eight weeks; other shoulder “felt something move a little bit, also seem to be foaming at the mouth.”
4/19: Ellsbury diagnosed with a second subluxed shoulder.
4/27: While recuperating, Ellsbury develops “Mountain Fever,” which is the opposite of “Valley Fever” in that instead of causing decreased strength, it causes increased strength. In attempting to use this increased strength to lift a car, Ellsbury drops the car on his foot. He is diagnosed with a subluxed foot, which isn’t even a real thing until Ellsbury becomes the first person to ever have it. Estimated recovery time: 10-12 weeks.
I’ll just be honest: my fondest wish is someday to create an Internet Meme. I dream of taking part in something bigger than myself. I dream of jostling, however minutely, the course of popular culture. I dream of trawling the infosphere’s uncharted seas, leaving ever-expanding ripples of LOLs and WTFs in my wake.
