When You Think About It, Trivia Isn’t Trivial (Part 2)

Duke Snider, right, never recorded 200 hits in a season, but got 199 twice. (via Screen Gems)

Duke Snider, right, never recorded 200 hits in a season, but got to 199 twice. (via Screen Gems)

Second question: In Medieval Latin, the word trivia no longer referred to a road that forked into two, but, rather, to the three disciplines in the lower division of the Artes Liberales. What were those three liberal arts?

Answer: grammar, rhetoric and logic, into which we now attempt to journey.

A Game of Firsts

– Who was Levi Meyerle? Besides being a guy with a career .731 fielding percentage, Long Levi registered the first double and first triple in big league history, in April 1876.

– The first assist is credited to the aptly named Davy Force, in 1876.

– The first player to wear a helmet in a game: Giants catcher Roger Bresnahan, in 1905.

– First to bat in Canada? Lou Brock, against the Montreal Expos, on April 14, 1969.

– First to receive five intentional walks in a game: Andre Dawson, on May 22, 1990, the final time just before Dave Clark, pinch-hitting for future manager Lloyd McClendon, singled in future manager Ryne Sandberg with the winning run in the bottom of the 16th.

Baseball, like any sport, is a game of continual triumphs and corresponding defeats, and together they fill a moment until its replacement arrives with its balance primed for a tilt. As members of the audience, we abide these little contests with various levels of interest, waiting with angst or patience for the routine flies and six-pitch walks to yield to the drama of the extraordinary act. And when that act at last arrives – a triple to complete the cycle, a strikeout to finish the no-hitter – it seems without equal or precedent, an exploit sui generis. And yet despite whatever ovation has crowned the moment, it almost always has a predecessor and, if so, an archetype, even if it arrived at a time that now appears quaint.

Every field of endeavor must have its pioneers, those who populate the frontiers of experience while claiming, without necessarily intending to do so, the groundbreaking feats to which the annals might give notice. The first to answer nature’s call during a ballgame? History doesn’t say. But it does say who hit for the first cycle – Athletics outfielder George Hall, in 1876 – not only because Hall managed to hit a single, double, triple and home run in one game but also because he did so at a time when the league had gained official recognition and when the act was codified and recorded.

Timing isn’t everything, but it also isn’t trivial. That Hall’s was the first didn’t make his the best, and that Brock Holt’s is the latest doesn’t make his the least. But for as long as the record books acknowledge the ordinal succession of achievements, there will always be a post-Cuddyer cycle but never a pre-Hall cycle. His exploit is the answer to a question, regardless of whether we ask it, but is never diminished by its role.

Now we wait for the next cycle. It won’t be diminished, either.

It just won’t be first.

All-Star Minutiae

– Who earned the victory in the first All-Star game, in 1933? Lefty Gomez. The save? Lefty Grove. Neither Lefty retired National League pinch-hitter Lefty O’Doul. That job went to righty General Crowder, who enticed a Gehringer-to-Gehrig groundout.

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

– The oldest All-Star: Satchel Paige, 47. The youngest: Dwight Gooden, 19.

– The most positions played in All-Star competition: five, by Pete Rose.

– Dodgers catcher Mickey Owen went homerless in 1942 but for his pinch-hit dinger in the All-Star game, the first in the history of the Midsummer Classic. In his only other All-Star at-bat, in 1941, he flied out to AL left fielder Ted Williams, who’d go on to hit the game-winning homer in the bottom of the ninth and then dash happily around the bases.

Once upon a time, in those old midsummers when a man like Larry Walker could turn his helmet backward and bat from the other box, the All-Star game ranked as the most trivial of baseball affairs, a breezy pageant whose first runner-up went away undamaged and whose winner took home no prizes other than memories and pride.

In that blithe era – indeed, at its sundown – Barry Bonds could respond to a stolen homer by hoisting the thief, Torii Hunter, upon his absurdly inflated shoulders, and Hunter could respond with a laugh. Back then, an All-Star selection likely meant more to each player than the outcome of the game itself: a boost to the ego, a bump to the paycheck and a chance to play his way into new TV rooms, but nothing that might track him into October and flip his batter’s box from home turf to hostile territory.

The final score was a secondary consideration, important, yes, but still a trifle when compared to the joys of getting there and being there. Larry Walker could go Bizarro World against the Big Unit, and everybody would laugh. Cal Ripken Jr. could go yard in his final appearance, and everybody could cheer. Severed from team spirit, rooting interests could have their Kumbaya in the players playing the game for fun.

Then, in the year after Bonds played clownish linebacker to Hunter’s impish tailback, the atmosphere changed so dramatically that it seemed the product of a separate and distinctly dystopian biome. Baseball lost its midseason recess, and All-Stars their midsummer playground, when Commissioner Bud Selig declared that the home-field advantage in the World Series would hinge, more or less, on the eighth-inning sacrifice bunt of a second baseman from the (insert the name of the last-place team that supplied a lone representative).

No longer would the All-Star game commit its prime resource to the enjoyable minutiae of memory. No longer would an at-bat like John Kruk’s in 1993, when he mimed a heart attack in response to the Big Unit’s heat, serve as the enduring image of a game without big ripples. No longer would home runs like Reggie Jackson’s in 1971, a 530-foot blast off the transformer at Tiger Stadium, stand apart from the win it might have aided.

Now, according to the propaganda, it mattered.

And now, according to many fans, it sucked.

So there’s your answer to a trivia question: When did Bud Selig drain the carefree spirit from the All-Star game by making its outcome a matter of consequence? Yep! – in 2003!

The answer is a lot less trivial than it should be.

Oddities, Ironies and Coincidences

– As a pitcher, Warren Spahn registered 363 wins; as a batter, 363 hits.

– Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn posted his first bit league hit on July 19, 1982. Twenty-four years later, on July 19, 2006, Tony Gwynn Jr. posted his first hit in the bigs.

– Lou Gehrig hit his first home run on Sept. 27, 1923, and his last on Sept. 27, 1938.

Duke Snider twice posted 199 hits in a season and once 198, but never 200.

– In 1973, the season in which he got the yips, Pirates pitcher Steve Blass walked 84 batters, the same number he had issued — in 161 more innings — the previous season.

– Lou Brock never stole home.

Don Mattingly hit six grand slams in 1987 but none in his other 13 seasons.

Numbers must bow to their own power. They must submit to the authority to which their large populations lay claim, and to the probabilities that issue from the office of countable digits. Which is simply this to say: Given enough opportunities, what we might rightly call coincidence – and rightly or wrongly call irony – will always emerge from the field of play. And what we call oddity – six slams in one season, none in the 13 others? – will always distinguish itself from the millions of mundane operations that seem poised, with all the other cans of corn, to lift one at-bat or date into permanence.

Today’s double take – whoa, that’s incredible! – springs not from yesterday’s singular instant, or not always, but from its most routine. Had a forgettable dribbler been ruled a hit and not an error, the name Duke Snider would have shifted to another statistical grid and another explanatory tale, about how the future Hall of Famer legged out an infield hit to join the 200-hit club.

Had some forgotten umpire called a full-count fastball a strike and not a ball, the name Steve Blass would have remained firmly installed in the eponymous tale of players who suffer performance anxiety, but sure enough, it would have been absent from a tale like this one, about actions that find within the range of probability a way to last in weirdness.

Still, you have to admit that a momentary quirk had no bearing on at least one fact, and that it’s odd that Brock never stole home.

Tragedies of Relative Proportion

– On Oct. 15, 1892 – the final day of the season – Reds right-hander Bumpus Jones threw a no-hitter against the Pirates in his first big league start. It would mark the last time that the distance between the mound and home plate measured 50 feet. The following season, baseball would extend the distance to 60 feet, six inches. Jones would pitch in just seven more games.

– On Sunday, Oct. 3, 1937, in the first inning of the season’s final game, Cleveland third baseman Odell Hale let a Hank Greenberg ground ball get past him, allowing Detroit’s Pete Fox to score. It would be the only run of the game, perhaps preventing Indians starter Johnny Allen from going 16-0 and tying Walter Johnson’s American League record for consecutive wins.

John Paciorek, brother of 18-year big leaguer Tom, debuted on Sept. 29, 1963, and went 3-for-3 with two walks, four runs and three runs batted in. Owing to a back condition, it would be his only big league game. He would retire with a line of 1.000/1.000/2.000. Seven years later, pitcher Larry Yount, brother of Hall of Famer Robin, would make his major league debut by entering a three-run game in the top of the ninth inning. Due to elbow pain, he would leave without throwing a pitch and never return to a big league mound.

No, not everyone can make it. And even among those who do, some will reach early peaks that yield to falls so precipitous that you wonder if the climbs were worth it, if the players would have preferred a dawning sadness to the pain of the sudden drop. Perhaps the realm of John Q. Citizen is more bearable if you have never known the summit.

Others will achieve sustained success, with the bold-faced stats to prove it, but by a few degrees of a baseball’s bounce will fall just short of the rank of the great ones. Deaf to petitions of wishful thinkers, the guards of stardom will point to that one instant – that one defining action – and call it tragic but everlasting. Perhaps the realm of good-but-not-great is more tolerable if you have never glimpsed the greatness on the other side of the veil.

Still others will grab that one cup of coffee, that one sip of what is and will always be, and live for the rest of time with its taste. You wonder about that flavor, and how it might have changed with the years: bitter, sweet or bittersweet, or maybe some other tang that the rest of us can’t imagine. From Flame Delhi to Reds Gunkel and Lutz, and from Moonlight Graham to Larry Yount, these men emerged from scattered points and times to reach the shining diamonds that motivated their boyhood throws, only to fall away so quickly that the memory of their time there must have mingled immediately with dreams of getting back. And yet they never got back. They followed the light, and the light brought them in and destroyed itself.

But now each tragedy, such as it is scaled, has turned into trivia – a lifetime of effort reduced to a peak of achievement that doubled as a disappointment, and the disappointment reduced to an interesting fact. Still we return blood to that fact, breathe air into what remains of its ghosts, and while we wonder about the sorrows of Bumpus Jones and Johnny Allen, we wonder, too, if men like Larry Yount and Flame Delhi might have happily volunteered to miss a record-setting win by the space of a glove. And while still in a state of inquiry, we might also wonder if players like Elmer Gedeon and Harry O’Neill – each killed in battle, O’Neill after catching two innings of his only big league game but never getting to bat – would have volunteered for a lifetime of baseball disappointment in lieu of the sad alternative.


John Paschal is a regular contributor to The Hardball Times and The Hardball Times Baseball Annual.
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DJG
8 years ago

Eric Gagne pulled off a Mickey Owen-esque feat in that 2003 All-Star Game; despite being 55 for 55 in save opportunities in the regular season, he blew the save in the Midsummer Classic. With a two-run lead and two outs in the top of the ninth, Gagne gave up an RBI-double to Vernon Wells followed by a lead-changing home run by Hank Blalock.

The AL team was thus guaranteed home field advantage in the World Series — not that it mattered, the Yankees lost in six to the Marlins.

John Paschal
8 years ago
Reply to  DJG

One explanation: Baseball is weird — so, so weird.

trampslikeus
8 years ago
Reply to  DJG

Gagne probably overdid the steroids on that occasion due to excitement and nervousness. Jim Rome had it right…Eric Gagne was a piece of crap.

hopbitters
8 years ago

Good stuff, John. When I see that clip of Bonds and Hunter, I can hear Kyle Farnsworth in the background going “No, no, you’re doing it all wrong.”

John Paschal
8 years ago
Reply to  hopbitters

Indeed!

Matty Zero
8 years ago

Agreed. The All=Star game died in 2003 when Bud Selig gave a Tony Soprano-ish shrug, ‘Hey,whaddya gonna do?’

John Paschal
8 years ago
Reply to  Matty Zero

Yep. No arguments here, Matty Zero.

Richard Chester
8 years ago

Stan Musial: 1815 H at home, 1815 H away.

Tommy Henrich: 4 GS in 1948, none in his other 10 ML seasons.

A favorite trivia question of mine: Who drove in the first RBI in All-Star game competition? Hint: His initials are L. G.

Answer: Lefty Gomez

John Paschal
8 years ago

Great stuff, Richard. That Musial factoid is especially amazing.

And that Lefty Gomez factoid? It gives hope to pitchers everywhere — except in the All-Star Game, ironically, now that designated hitters are the rule.

Rich Dunstan
8 years ago

My favorite trivial baseball factoid: the only two major leaguers born in Siluria, Alabama, made their major league debuts on the same day, as teammates: Willie Kirkland and Jim Davenport of the Giants, April 15, 1958. In fact, they made their debuts at the same moment, as they were in the home team starting lineup, running out on the field to play defence in the first major league game ever played on the west coast.

John Paschal
8 years ago
Reply to  Rich Dunstan

That is so cool. If ever I win a pub quiz on the strength of that answer, I will raise a glass to you, good sir.

Kahuna Tuna
8 years ago

Floyd Wicker hit one home run in his major-league career. He hit it in 1970 off Floyd Weaver.

John Paschal
8 years ago
Reply to  Kahuna Tuna

OK, the only way you could have known that is if you’re related to either Mr. Wicker or Mr. Weaver.

Right?

ajnrules
8 years ago

My favorite oddity/irony/coincidence?

Randy Johnson’s 150th win: June 4, 1999
Randy Johnson’s 300th win: June 4, 2009

Too bad his win on June 4, 1989 wasn’t his first major league win. Instead it was his fifth.

And I had a classmate in medical school (Brian Barkley) who pitched in six games with the 1998 Red Sox. He didn’t advertise this accomplishment and I had to hear it from somebody else. Later I found out that his grandfather Red played in the major leagues in the 1930s and 1940s. Not only that, but all of Red Barkley’s managers are in the Hall of Fame. (Rogers Hornsby and Jim Bottomley for the 1937 Browns, Casey Stengel for the 1939 Bees, and Leo Durocher for the 1943 Dodgers.)

John Paschal
8 years ago
Reply to  ajnrules

Great stuff, ajnrules. Fascinating. Thanks for posting!