Grid 230
Where have you gone, Chico Escuela, today's grid turns its lonely eyes to you (woo woo woo)
ERIK: I was hoping to use Chico Escuela for my METS/BORN OUTSIDE US spot, but for some reason he didn’t autofill.
I do like my Mets row. Millan is the most memorable Met there. Yogi had all of nine at-bats with them, hit two singles, scored one run. At least the Duke of Flatbush played most of a season with them, his second-to-last, hit .243 with 14 homers. Not bad. Then he limped through a season with the Giants, the Dodgers’ mortal enemy, and was done. His final game was Oct. 3, 1964, the second game of a home double-header against the Cubs. In the bottom of the ninth, he pinch hit for Billy Pierce, another transplant, pitching in relief, and also playing in his last game. Duke hit a single, then scored when Willie Mays hit a homer. Giants still lost but that’s a pretty good way to go out.
Puig was a dumb choice. Too memorable, and too memorably a Dodger, and too memorably a Dodger who was born in another country. To be honest, I thought I’d get dinged worse than I did with Teoscar. A lot of options there, I guess.
That’s the thing with the (NOT) BORN IN THE USA category. It’s such a recent phenomenon, expansions aren’t much handicapped. The Mets began in 1962 but they actually have had more foreign-born players than the Dodgers, who are not only an original 16 team but broke the freakin’ color barrier. Hell, even the Blue Jays, established in 1977, are right on the Dodgers’ ass:
Mets: 268
Dodgers; 245
Blue Jays: 226
Can I gripe over an aspect of this free game BR has given us? I do wish the answers for categories like 300+ HOME RUNS were specific to the team, and not *every guy* who’s hit 300+ home runs. Makes it tough to find the answers. Particularly since, in their chart, the player names are far left, the team names are far right, and sometimes both don’t fit on the screen at the same time. You wind up toggling back and forth, and … blah. Even worse if it’s a team like the Angels, and you have to search for LAA, ANA and CAL. Or the Giants: NYG, SFG. Or the A’s: PHA, KCA, OAK. And now LVA? Poor A’s. I wrote an in memoriam about that bullshit yesterday. Godspeed, guys, and fuck John Fisher.
TIM: I never knew that about Duke Snider’s late career going back to New York. And then back to California. Have to keep that in mind. I’d already used him in the top right tonigth anyway, though.
I didn’t feel like taking the time to spiffify the grid output tonight, so here it is in its as-provided ugly format.
I did the first column first, of course going with all Japanese guys. The Dodgers had Nomo, Kenta Maeda, and Ishii—too late I remembered Norihiro Nakamura, the Osaka Buffaloes star that briefly played 3B for LA, got sent down, and then went back to Japan. I flipped a mental coin for the Blue Jays, Kikuchi winning the toss over fellow ex-M Munenori Kawasaki. For the Mets I had started to use this year’s guy, Kodai Senga, but then recalled Yoshii. Good job, brain, he was only 0.3%. I think Masao Kida would also have worked? [checks] No, Kida was a Dodger, not a Met.
Then I finished out the Dodgers, didn’t think too hard on it. Then dropped down to the Toronto row and, after screwing up my Daves yesterday, used Mr. Winfield properly this time. Molitor was playing it safe—as always, anything with WAR is at least partially a guess, and I just wasn’t sure who would have qualified. Alomar, probably. Maybe Carlos Delgado, maybe Jose Bautista, maybe Shawn Green? (Alomar and Delgado, check; Bautista and Green, no.)
It was the remaining Mets boxes I struggled a little with, again not fully understanding WAR calculus. Found a safe bet with Ventura, then figured 300+ HRs would be easy until it wasn’t. I guessed Kevin Mitchell, which seemed perfectly reasonable in the moment. Nope. Not even close, really, only 234. (Not at all helped by the 9 he hit as a Mariner.) Should’ve just said Mays or Piazza. Looking at the list, I see that I could have used Delgado here too; I totally forgot he was a Met. George Foster was a “d’oh” for me, and as I said I didn’t know about Snider. Berra I should have recalled but didn’t. Curtis Granderson is on that list, that was a surprise—for whatever reason I don’t think of him as a big homer guy, although I do recall he struck out like big homer guys do. I think of him more as a triples guy, and those two don’t tend to go together. But a lot of years in the homer-happy era, so it makes sense, plus I just looked at his page and he quit being a big triples guy when he left Detroit and its grand expanse of an outfield.
You clearly pay much more attention to WAR than I do. I should bone up.