Joe Posnanski Blog: Ten good years

Lotsa good HOF stuff from Poz here, but I’ll run with the “When I heard something jerkin’...Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins” bit.

It’s interesting to me that at their best, Harold Baines and Mark Grace put up the same OPS+. I remember once being in a minor league press box in Charlotte with Jimmy Piersall, who was some sort of roving instructor for the Chicago Cubs then. He was, as you may have guessed, an odd duck, and at some point one of the writers in the press box asked what the heck was wrong with Mark Grace. The writer had Grace on his rotisserie team, of course, and he really wanted a bit more power out of the guy.

Well, Piersall went ape. He started screaming about how this was what was wrong with society, how Mark Grace was a great hitter, he was hitting .310, and it was ludicrous for anyone to question him, and it was especially ludicrous for fat people who had never swung a bat to question him, and it was ESPECIALLY ludicrous for fat people who sat up in a press box and had never swung a bat and had never done anything in their lives except write stupid stories that nobody read to question that. And anyway, finally, he asked an open question to anyone in the box: What do you think YOU would hit in the Big Leagues?

At which point the official scorer said: “Oh about .340.”

At which point Jimmy Piersall exploded into 10,000 tiny pieces.