It’s got to be Mel Ott, doesn’t it?
EDIT: Guess not.
I don’t think Mel was his full name. There’s got to be quite a few true 6 letter players. I’d bet there is at least one 5 letter.
Well done playa
Just googling (as I’d never heard of him), but that wasn’t his full name either - it was Nathan Edward Ott.
C.C. Lee
Really ? I got it from Mel Allen’s twib notes💔
1 Like
Lee May is the shortest I can think of where that’s the actual full legal first and last name.
1 Like
The REDSOX strike out 7 times in the first 3 inning while Hunter Green dominated allowing just one hit. Now he may not make it out of the 4th.
Edit: 3 2/3 6hits 4ers 8ks 0 bbs and pulled. One of the craziest starts I have seen in some time.
I’ve got a FOUR LETTER PLAYER, the only one in a database of 20,370 players dating back to 1871. You all ready for this?
1 Like
True six characters (debut year) are:
Roy Lee (1945)
Lee May (1965)
Ty Tice (2021)
Edge cases:
There was a D. C. Moore who went by “Dee Moore” which could arguably be D. Moore. Some other cases with initials like that and also some Korean players like Jin Ho Cho. I did not count periods in names like D.C. and A.J.
There’s also an AJ Puk if we’re letting initials go in place of full names. They tie Ed Hug and Ed Ott as the only potential five character names.
Fu-Te Ni has 54 major league innings
don’t know if any of that above is short for anything or not
Cease on the 12th of May
11 strike outs in 4 innings
gave up 6 runs
1 Like
Weird results that probably only interest me: Miami scored 26 runs in a doubleheader against Colorado…and split. 14-1 and 12-13.
2 Likes
Because of a bunch of injuries to pitchers (not to mention two key hitters) and a stretch of 14 games in 13 days, the Brewers have had to promote four pitchers to the big league club for the first time. In the last three games, two Brewers have made their MLB debuts starting on the mound. Actually, the first of those featured a Cubs starting pitcher making his debut, as well, which was the 29th time in MLB history that opposing starters made their debuts together.
How do we grade the hyphen or the dash?
This is why we watch baseball. U are not alone.
1 Like
Adley is a bust with zero swagger/ personality to boot, bless his heart.
I am casually making my way through Joe Posnanski’s The Baseball 100, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s a list of the 100 best/most important/favorite/whatever baseball players of all time, but what makes it so good is Posnanski’s storytelling. It isn’t just a dry recitation of facts and statistics. Instead, one story might cover a player’s father-son relationship, while another might sideline into an important player-manager relationship, or even a discussion of nicknames. I’m not certain I’ll remember many specific facts from the book, but it’s just such an enjoyable read that I’m sad in advance that it’s going to end. (I’m at No. 28: Randy Johnson right now.)
Here’s a flavor of what it has - the story of my favorite player of all time: Johnny Bench. One of the themes of this story is that Bench was, from a small boy, uber confident that he’d be a major league ballplayer. To the extent that he religiously practiced his signature as a 7th/8th grader, knowing that he’d need it to be perfect for all the autographs he’d be asked to sign.
Here’s how Posnanski describes it after retelling the story:
But here’s the best part of all: You know the story is true by simply looking at Johnny Bench’s autograph. It’s flawless. It’s spectacular. It’s a work of art. You see ballplayer autographs, and some of them are illegible and some of them are majestic and some of them seem halfhearted. All of them tell a story, and when you see Johnny Bench’s sublime signature, perfectly balanced, the same every time, and you see his story, you see all the hopes of a 12-year-old boy in Oklahoma signing autographs at the local gas station because he knew that someday he would be the greatest catcher in the world.
It’s true. When I look at my autographed baseball and I look at the stamped signature on a glass from his Home Plate restaurant, they’re both perfect:
A couple of other fun things I read in the last few stories:
- Cy Young’s real name: Denton True Young. Cy comes from the fact that he was nicknamed Cyclone immediately after joining the league.
- Baseball is very unusual in allowing its varying ballparks to have completely different dimensions. But I never realized how much this affected some of the most famous plays of the game. 2 examples:
- Bobby Thompson’s Shot Heard 'Round the World that won the Giants the 1951 pennant? It was a fly ball down the left field line at the Polo Grounds, where the left field fence was only 279 feet. It might not have been a home run anywhere else.
- When Vic Wertz hit the long drive to centerfield that Willie Mays famously caught (“The Catch”), it was a roughly 440-foot drive. It probably would have been a home run anywhere else, but at the Polo Grounds, the centerfield wall was between 450-475 feet deep.
Anyway, this book is fantastic and if you have any fond memories of baseball history, it is 1,000% worth a purchase.
6 Likes
I read this last year and it really is fantastic.
The funny thing is he starting writing this book on his free website years and years ago, just publishing the individual player stories as articles. I think he got to number 70-something before he stopped and realized he probably shouldn’t be giving away this stuff for free.