Friday, March 27, 2020

The Incredibleness of Baseball-Reference

Great shout-out on The Ringer, with people pointing out some strangely fantastic bit they've found. A fave of mine, from the Cup of Coffee page:
I recently rewatched Field of Dreams, the movie that made Moonlight Graham a household name. Graham played an inning in the outfield on June 29, 1905, but he didn’t get to bat, and he never made it back to the big leagues. “Back then I thought, ‘Well, there’ll be other days,’” the movie version of Moonlight, played by Burt Lancaster, says. “I didn’t realize that that was the only day.”
Hundreds of players have had only one day in the big leagues, and Baseball-Reference’s cup of coffee player pages (one for hitters and one for pitchers) put them all in one place. Graham wasn’t the only hitter who never held a bat in the big leagues: A couple of players (Pedro Santana and Joe Hietpas) have had the same experience this century. Among the hitters who have batted, the results have varied widely, from Ron Wright, who infamously struck out and then grounded into a triple play and a double play in his lone game with the 2002 Mariners, to John Paciorek, who singled three times and walked twice in his only major league look as an 18-year-old with the Houston Colt .45s. Wright never got an opportunity to improve on his colossal dud of a debut, and Paciorek never got the chance to repeat his spectacular success. Somewhere, a seasoned sports veteran is intoning, “There are no guarantees in this game.”
WTF was John Paciorek never given another shot to play??????

Oh: injuries. And there's this:
Paciorek is rare among Major League Baseball players in having a perfect batting average of 1.000. He is the only player to achieve this distinction with more than two turns at-bat"

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