Grab Bag

Page 3



The Archibald Wright "Moonlight" Graham Lonely Hearts Club:
Melancholy Wanderings Through the MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia, 9th Edition.



[Complete Career Stats of:]


 Harry Frank Brooks
 B. Nov. 30, 1865, Philadelphia, PA. D. Dec. 5, 1945, Philadelphia, PA.

Year
Team
Games
BA
SA
AB
H
2B
3B
HR
HR%
R
RBI
BB
PO
A
E
TC/G
FA
Pos
1886
NY-AA
1
.000
.000
1
0
0
0
0
0.0
0
0
0
1
0
5
6.0
.167
OF-P

Oh for the love of a handgun...

So Harry gets called up, gets his big chance, and what happens? What happens is he lives on, 59 years past the time his dreams died gasping on a field somewhere... Look at it, he came up to bat once, and nothing for it. He's scrambling around in the outfield, the opposing team has been reading his mail, and baseballs rain from the sky. Five Errors. He drops five of six. One can only imagine, carefully, without investing too much, the animal din that might have come down from that crowd. It must have darkened the sky. And this is not all, no, there's more! He also pitched, and in the same game, mind you. Two innings, took the loss, got banged for 9 hits, walked 4, "allowed" 8 runs... you figure it out.

Now, which is more or less probable: Does he commit 5 errors under silently scudding clouds, and they scratch their chins and decide to invite him in closer to try throwing the ball? Or does he get hammered off the mound and get exiled, shell-shocked and bleeding, to the far reaches of the park, where, hands on his knees, head bowed, he slowly blows all of the air out of his lungs and prays to be left alone... please...


Coming Soon, Probably...

  • "Take Me Out to the Ballgame, the Movie, Lovingly Deconstructed."

  • Expansion on: "The Unfolding Topography of Each Game..."

  • "Every Schoolboy Knows." [A diatribe.]

  • "Jackie Robinson: Quick, Someone Name a Single Attribute of Prejudice..."

  • "Exhibition, Perry Field, 10th & Weschler, Erie, PA, 1913: The Cleveland Naps led by LaJoie and Shoeless Joe Jackson lose to the Erie Sailors of the Interstate League. With box scores and florid newspaper accounts and everything. Honest."

  • "What Kind of Fan are You, Anyway? The General versus the Specific."

  • "Roger Clemens & Dwight Gooden: the Seven Year Convergence."

And More!!


"Eight hundred life spans can bridge more than 50,000 years. But of these 800 people, 650 spent their lives in caves or worse; only the last 70 had any truly effective means of communicating with one another, only the last 6 ever saw a printed word or had any real means of measuring heat or cold, only the last 4 could measure time with any precision; only the last 2 used an electric motor; and the vast majority of the items that make up our material world were developed within the lifespan of the eight-hundredth person."
—R. L. Lesher & G. J. Howick, NASA Report, 1966







Next Page BB10K Homeplate Home Page © 1994 Rick Lopez

























* "Moonlight" Graham, immortalized in the film Field of Dreams, whose career numbers, or rather number, was 1. One game, period. No at-bats, no plays in the field, no nothing... just one brief moment to stand there, looking at the sky, glad to be alive.

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