One of the big ideas that had been floating in my head when ESPN laid me off was an all-time fun fact bracket, the 64 greatest baseball fun facts divided into four regions. The four regions became apparent when I started surveying ballwriters about their all-time favorite fun facts and figured out that pretty much every baseball fun fact falls into one of four categories:
The Extreme. As in:
In Bob Gibson’s nine World Series starts, Cardinals relievers combined for just 1 inning pitched. (Suggested by Jeremy Frank of @MLBRandomStats)
This is where a player’s greatness (or fastness, or badness, or strikeoutiness) is well known, and the role of the fun fact is to startle you into appreciating it anew. It’s the million Barry Bonds fun facts.
The Surprising. As in:
Glenn Brummer, a catcher who stole four bases in his entire career, has the majors’ last walk-off steal of home1. (Suggested by Sports Info Solutions’ Mark Simon)
This is the sort of fun fact that operates by overturning your assumptions and leaves you to sort out how it is possible. Like: The worst single-season ERA in major league history belongs to…. Roy Halladay. That fits here.
The Coincidental. As in:
Cecil Fielder hit 319 career home runs. His son, Prince Fielder, hit 319 career home runs. Nobody else in history had ever hit exactly 319 career home runs. (Suggested by MLB’s Sarah Langs)
These turned out to be the most popular fun facts in my survey. They create an illusion of symmetry and/or prophecy and/or order in an otherwise disordered universe.
The Simply Weird. As in:
Madison Bumgarner once dated a girl named Madison Bumgarner. (Suggested by Jordan Shusterman of Cespedes Family BBQ and Dan Hirsch at Baseball-Reference)
A classic of this genre is that Martha Stewart babysat for Yogi Berra. I sometimes think of these as Madlibs fun facts, because they’re unexpected nouns and verbs that could as easily be replaced by other unexpected nouns and verbs.
Most fun facts land in one category and one category only. There is one MLB fun fact that I know of that hits all four, and could arguably be a no. 1 seed in any of the four brackets. It is about an event that is the signature evocation of a Hall of Famer’s greatness; it is among the most unexpected moments that ever happened on a baseball field; it is a coincidence that was described in the next day’s paper as a “one-in-a-trillion” event; and it’s so, so weird. You’ve perhaps already guessed it? It’s what tomorrow’s piece is about.
Top photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Okay, Brummer’s walk-off steal is the last in the regular season. Marquis Grissom technically had a walk-off steal in the 1997 ALCS, but that came on a busted squeeze play and a pitch that got away from the catcher, not a straight steal.
Are we speculating in the comments? My guess is Randy Johnson exploding the bird. Definitely fits the most into the "simply weird" category, but I could see it in all four
Sam... is there a sack of flour involved here?