TIM:
I was procrastinating a lot today. Like, a lot. Pretty much everything I’d intended to do today is now on tomorrow’s to-do list. Or maybe Friday’s. But one byproduct of my poor time-management is that I indulged in another Grid Session.
Today’s edition didn’t have anything especially interesting in it on its face. I mean, one column was the Rays, the most boring of teams, and another column allowed anyone who’d played any outfield at all even once. Not that challenging. So I created my own challenge: Fill this Grid entirely with former Seattle Mariners.
It still wasn’t that challenging.
The hardest boxes were Padres/Rays and Yankees/Reds. There are tons of former Mariners to play for each of those clubs, but for both in the respective pairings?
I skipped the first box and came back to it last because I had to wrack my brain on it. Did Ben Davis ever play for the Rays? (Turns out, no.) Did Randy Winn ever suit up for San Diego? (No.) Hey, didn’t Bret Boone have a year with the Pads? (Yes, he did, but I wasn’t sure.) What about Rodney? Rodney played for everyone, right? Maybe? (Would have worked, San Diego fans had 28 games worth of the Fernando Rodney Experience.) Cruz Jr. played for the Rays, but never San D— wait a sec, isn’t he one of those guys that had stops in an entire division, like Steve Finley? I went for it, and yes, Cruz was a Padre for a year (2017), but no, didn’t hit the entire NL West (he missed the Rockies). Still, works here.
I had an easy answer for Yankees/Reds in Griffey Sr., but I spent a long time trying to come up with a more obscure alternative. Bupkis. So, Senior gets the square and I get my worst percentage. Looking at the list of guys fitting Yanks/Reds, I spot a dozen others that were also M’s, but only four that I feel like I should have known: Ruben Sierra, Miguel Cairo, Edwin Encarnación, and Mike Ford. I’m disappointed that I didn’t know our pal Darren Bragg was once a Red. (On the other hand, no pangs about missing Brett Tomko as a Yank or Tim Leary as a Red.)
For the rest, I had multiple options pretty easily at hand. The M’s and Padres have made a lot of deals, finding an outfielder wasn’t hard and Newfield is pretty obscure. Cameron is my man, so he was an easy pick, though Kevin Mitchell came to mind first. Probably would have gotten a better % with Mitchell. Cruz was still available for that top-left box because I didn’t use him for Giants/Rays; I had him, Romo, and Denard Span on my menu and I took a shot with the reliever; in retrospect Span was probably the low-% choice. I almost went with Mitchell for Giants/Reds, but Mitchell led my brain to another guy who was in that trade the M’s made to get Mitchell in Burba, who later went to both sides of Ohio.
The other Yankee squares gave a spot for Dustin Ackley, fresh in mind because we mentioned him while we were at the game last night, but I missed out on better obscurity with Yankees/Rays. Again, the Rays are boring, they’re hard to remember. So Tino as the sure thing. But Jim Mecir, there would have been the good answer. (Charles Gipson would likely have been the best, but I had no idea he was ever a Ray.)
Anyway, this was a fun distraction from being productive in any way, so the Grid fulfilled its purpose.