A weak Birthday Team today. A couple times a year, I'm reminded that two different people named Bob Sadowski played in the big leagues in 1963. The odds against that have to be astronomical.

I looked it up; there are 122 people in the United States named Robert Sadowski or Bob Sadowski. I didn't spend any time looking into Bobbys Sadowski or Robbies Sadowski or any other minor variant.

There are 120 Steve/Steven/Stephen Ontiveroses, so if the Steves Ontiveros had overlapped it would have been at least as unlikely.

C: Chris Stewart (1.3 WAR)
1B: Gail Hopkins (3.2 WAR)
2B/Manager: John Morrill (23.0 WAR)
3B: Josh Fuentes (1.0 WAR)
SS: Alvaro Espinoza (3.9 WAR)
LF: Dick Siebert (7.0 WAR)
CF: Don Taussig (0.4 WAR)
RF: Josh Reddick (25.0 WAR)

SP: Dave Stewart (26.5 WAR)
SP: Miguel Batista (12.6 WAR)
SP: Daniel Megden (2.1 WAR)
SP: Tom Earley (0.9 WAR)
SP: Bob Sadowski (1.0 WAR)
RP: Tim Burke (12.1 WAR)
RP: Dan Otero (4.9 WAR)
RP: Keith Atherton (4.4 WAR)

Fun name: Uke Clanton
Scout/Fun name/Place where you lay down after you drop acid: Trip Couch
Broadcaster: Dave Niehaus
General Manager: Walt Jocketty

There are 17 George Griffeys, and two of them were teammates with the Mariners, who also drafted a third one.

There are 17 George Griffeys

There are more George Formans than that in one family!

Fun name: Uke Clanton

Notable antagonist of Wuatt Earp...

There are 13 people in the U.S. named Jeff D'Amico and two of them were right-handed pitchers active at the same time.

Fun name: Uke Clanton

A one game MLB career, highly forgettable (he played ten years in the minors). One at bat, one strikeout; two innings in the field at first base, one error in two chances.

Would it be worth it for Dan or RoyalsRetro to post this Goldstein article?

Which Kinds of Prospects Were Most Affected by the Year Off?

Seems like it might be a good kick off for an interesting question.

Young guys returned from service in WWII, Korea and Vietnam, but I guess they'd be hard to draw any info on as we only know about the guys who did that and made the majors. But maybe there's anecdotal info their from biographies.

It doesn't seem to have phased Al Bumbry, who seems like the kind of guy who'd be hurt by missed time. According to his SABR Bio, he only played baseball as a senior in college. He had been focused on basketball.

He got out of the army and proceeded to OPS .947 at Aberdeen, then tear up Asheville and Rochester the next season. Then he was an Oriole. As Bumbry puts it:

The only way I can describe it in terms of baseball is people say, ‘Gee whiz, you missed two years of your baseball career.’ I say, ‘No, I didn’t.’ Why? Because before I went to Vietnam, I was in a Class A league, and I hit .178. And then I come back, and, in a year and a half, I was in the major leagues. So I can’t complain.

So I guess the lesson here is to take those inexperienced but toolsy guys and press them into services with life-threatening responsibilities. They should have all been working ICU's in 2020. Or working the meat packing plants.

The streaming service Pluto TV has a 24/7 Price Is Right channel. Right now this guy is a contestant and in the showcase:

Jim Tyrone

He said he's been in Japan four years, so it must be a 1982/1983 episode.

Apparently, college baseball has instituted a rule that if a player makes an effort to get hit by a pitch (a real issue at the high school level, I know, and I'm sure at the college one), the pitch is automatically a strike.

Needless to say, this has led to immediate here.]controversy[/url].

I've long advocated that players should not be required to get out of the way to earn a HBP if a ball is thrown in the batter's box, but also that a player who gets hit with a pitch outside the zone should not be awarded one.

As for this particular scenario, I think a simple ball if the ball is in the box, a strike if it's outside would suffice. It's less of a worry at the big league level, as you don't find the blatant examples of trying to "wear it" that you do at a few of the lower levels.

I always saw Jeter as a master of exploiting that - spinning his backside into a pitch to get hit, violently enough to look like he was trying to move away but really wasn't.

I always saw Jeter as a master of exploiting that - spinning his backside into a pitch to get hit, violently enough to look like he was trying to move away but really wasn't.

Don Baylor mastered the quarter-shoulder turn.

I just noticed that link is all messed up. The story is here.

Ron Hunt got so good at it that at some point the league sent a directive to the umpires. I don't remember exactly what it said, but it was basically, Watch Hunt. He's twisting into the pitch. After which his HBP rate dropped back to merely high from unbelievably high.