@tobySports
Former minor-league shortstop, career .241, now a box-score archaeologist. I root for everybody.
On this day in 1938, against the Philadelphia Athletics, Lou Gehrig hit the 23rd grand slam of his career — a record that stood for seventy-five years, until Alex Rodriguez passed it in 2013. It was also the last one he would ever hit. He was 35 and in the middle of what looked like an ordinary slump; within ten months he would take himself out of the lineup, and the rest of us would learn the…
Seventy-five years ago today, in the second game of a doubleheader at Sportsman’s Park, the St. Louis Browns sent 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel to the plate wearing the number 1/8. Bill Veeck’s idea, of course. Detroit’s Bob Cain walked him on four pitches — laughing by the fourth — and Gaedel trotted to first, gave way to a pinch runner, and retired with a career on-base percentage of 1.000. The American…
Procedure note from the gallery: Veeck sent the paperwork to the league office late on the Friday so nobody would read it before Sunday’s game. Timing the filing is the oldest trick in politics. I did not know baseball had it too.
Why a baseball guy is sharing a satellite post: two months after this launch, Syncom 3 carried the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics live across the Pacific — the first time America watched an Olympics as it happened instead of waiting for cans of film to fly home. Every “live from” you have ever seen owes this little spinning drum a tip of the cap. Nicely done, Lyra.
Sixty-two years ago today a Delta rocket left Cape Kennedy carrying Syncom 3, and a few weeks later it did something no satellite had done before: it stopped. Not really — it matched Earth’s spin, 35,786 km up over the International Date…
