Birthdays
Nothing happened today, so you know what that means. Birthdays! Yay filler!
Remember when I said how much cooler the names of the early 20th century players were? Check out the names of all these guys born on January 31, all of whom played before 1920: Rasty Wright, Jot Goar, Rip Williams, Tex McDonald, Goat Cochran, Steamboat Williams, Stuffy Stewart, Pinky Hargrave, Webb Schultz, and Honey Barnes. These are names for jazz musicians (Steamboat Williams) or porn stars (Honey Barnes), not baseball players. And what the hell is a Jot Goar anyway? Sounds like it should be the name of some delicacy in Iceland made of fermented shark eggs and penguin pancreas. You can't make this stuff up.
January 31st is also the birthday of 3 hall of famers. Jackie Robinson, who would have been 87, Ernie Banks, who turns 75, and Nolan Ryan, who turns 59. January 31st did pretty well for itself. I'm going to give myself the assignment to find which day of the year has the most hall of fame birthdays. But not now. I hope this doesn't disappoint anybody. By the way, the Red Sox had their fourth annual Jackie Robinson day to honor his memory and educate local students about his life. This is nice. Think it has anything to do with the guilt the Red Sox organization feels over having been the last team to let a black man wear its uniform? The Sox waited a good long time after Jackie before they had their own black player - in fact, I'm pretty sure it was Jim Rice who broke the Boston color barrier, but we'll double check that. But good for the Sox for doing this each year; kind of like Ford sponsoring the TV showing of Schindler's List.
Remember when I said how much cooler the names of the early 20th century players were? Check out the names of all these guys born on January 31, all of whom played before 1920: Rasty Wright, Jot Goar, Rip Williams, Tex McDonald, Goat Cochran, Steamboat Williams, Stuffy Stewart, Pinky Hargrave, Webb Schultz, and Honey Barnes. These are names for jazz musicians (Steamboat Williams) or porn stars (Honey Barnes), not baseball players. And what the hell is a Jot Goar anyway? Sounds like it should be the name of some delicacy in Iceland made of fermented shark eggs and penguin pancreas. You can't make this stuff up.
January 31st is also the birthday of 3 hall of famers. Jackie Robinson, who would have been 87, Ernie Banks, who turns 75, and Nolan Ryan, who turns 59. January 31st did pretty well for itself. I'm going to give myself the assignment to find which day of the year has the most hall of fame birthdays. But not now. I hope this doesn't disappoint anybody. By the way, the Red Sox had their fourth annual Jackie Robinson day to honor his memory and educate local students about his life. This is nice. Think it has anything to do with the guilt the Red Sox organization feels over having been the last team to let a black man wear its uniform? The Sox waited a good long time after Jackie before they had their own black player - in fact, I'm pretty sure it was Jim Rice who broke the Boston color barrier, but we'll double check that. But good for the Sox for doing this each year; kind of like Ford sponsoring the TV showing of Schindler's List.
posted by Eric at 11:53 PM
3 Comments:
I believe the first African-American Red Sox player was Pumpsie Green in 1959. Yes, that's a good 13 years after Robinson, the rest of the NL, and even the Yankees, integrated.
Numbers bad. BoSox integrated 12 years after Robinson. Yankees held off for a while, too, but still integrated before the Sox. I'll let "Who integrated the Yankees and when?" as a trivia question.
Congrads you are officially a dork
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