Being a history nerd is fun. Also, Shaun of the Dead was weird.
So, last night I was going to write a short blurb on Marinerds about Hugh "Losing Pitcher" Mulcahy, to honor Ryan Franklin's non-tender, but then when looking through books for notes about lousy Phillies pitchers, was reminded of the even worse luck and worse talent pitcher Jack Nabors, who pitched for the Philadelphia Pathetics in 1916. There's this great story about Nabors, well on his way to a record-setting awful 1-20 season, who was pitching in Boston one day, and supposedly went into the ninth inning holding a 1-0 lead and a no-hitter -- only to have a set of mishaps like walks and errors lead the Red Sox into tying the game 1-1 with a runner on third, so Nabors deliberately threw a wild pitch 20 feet over the plate, letting the runner score and ending the game at 2-1, "because these guys are never going to get me another run, and if you think I'm going to sit out here and pitch another eight innings in this summer heat, you've got to be crazy."
Great story, isn't it? Except the thing is... it didn't happen that way. Last night I noticed that I couldn't find a record of any game that came close to matching this description on Retrosheet, and my suspicion was that it was actually the game where they lost 3-2, but Retrosheet doesn't have play-by-plays or box scores for 1916, just the final scores and starting pitchers.
This morning, on the way to work, I stopped in at the library, briefly looked around baseball books with no luck, and then asked a clerk, "I need to access a newspaper that would have the box score of a baseball game played between the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Athletics on June 24, 1916. Can you help me?" Fortunately, we found the New York Times sports section for that day, and sure enough, the box score indicated that this Nabors anecdote, which I have seen in at least three books, is not factually correct, for various reasons. I left the library with a big grin on my face and a box score printout in my grubby little hands. Seeing the printout sitting on my desk at work all day, I couldn't wait to get home and write this article detailing my find. Man, I'm a goddamn dork, aren't I? On the other hand, I actually really sort of enjoy hunting down these historical discrepancies in baseball books -- only a month ago I also found several in a 1980's Phillies book I was reading as well. Something tells me that being a fact checker for a book publisher doesn't pay as well as being a software engineer...
Um, so anyway, work was okay -- at one point Rich and I were working on releasing some code, but we needed Jack's help, so we were going to call him since he was taking the day off, and I said "Wait, wait, if you call him you HAVE to say happy birthday," so Rich calls him like "Hey, Jack! We just wanted to wish you happy birthday! Well... er, actually, no, we wanted to ask you about these files."
After work I went to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
samildanach and llynecat's apartment for Jack's birthday party though. I met their down-the-hall neighbor Jason and we went and picked out some board games, and in the meantime, spazzychic (who I had never met but knew of for a while) and aquatwo (talk about WEIRD COINCIDENCES, though I hadn't seen him in forever!) showed up, and we ended up playing Pit for a couple of hands, during which time Jack's sister Peggy showed up. And after that there was pizza-eating and we watched the movie Shaun of the Dead, which was very funny, but I don't think I'll ever actually watch it again (I don't deal so well with all the blood and guts scenes). After that we watched the X-Men trailer, and I was feeling sort of zoned-out, so I came home.
I logged into PP and wanted to just zone out more and puzzle, so I asked Jarrett if I could sail with him -- he was doing a long trade run -- and it was EXACTLY what I needed. I'm #5 in the ocean in Carpentry again, biznatches.
Great story, isn't it? Except the thing is... it didn't happen that way. Last night I noticed that I couldn't find a record of any game that came close to matching this description on Retrosheet, and my suspicion was that it was actually the game where they lost 3-2, but Retrosheet doesn't have play-by-plays or box scores for 1916, just the final scores and starting pitchers.
This morning, on the way to work, I stopped in at the library, briefly looked around baseball books with no luck, and then asked a clerk, "I need to access a newspaper that would have the box score of a baseball game played between the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Athletics on June 24, 1916. Can you help me?" Fortunately, we found the New York Times sports section for that day, and sure enough, the box score indicated that this Nabors anecdote, which I have seen in at least three books, is not factually correct, for various reasons. I left the library with a big grin on my face and a box score printout in my grubby little hands. Seeing the printout sitting on my desk at work all day, I couldn't wait to get home and write this article detailing my find. Man, I'm a goddamn dork, aren't I? On the other hand, I actually really sort of enjoy hunting down these historical discrepancies in baseball books -- only a month ago I also found several in a 1980's Phillies book I was reading as well. Something tells me that being a fact checker for a book publisher doesn't pay as well as being a software engineer...
Um, so anyway, work was okay -- at one point Rich and I were working on releasing some code, but we needed Jack's help, so we were going to call him since he was taking the day off, and I said "Wait, wait, if you call him you HAVE to say happy birthday," so Rich calls him like "Hey, Jack! We just wanted to wish you happy birthday! Well... er, actually, no, we wanted to ask you about these files."
After work I went to
samildanach and llynecat's apartment for Jack's birthday party though. I met their down-the-hall neighbor Jason and we went and picked out some board games, and in the meantime, spazzychic (who I had never met but knew of for a while) and aquatwo (talk about WEIRD COINCIDENCES, though I hadn't seen him in forever!) showed up, and we ended up playing Pit for a couple of hands, during which time Jack's sister Peggy showed up. And after that there was pizza-eating and we watched the movie Shaun of the Dead, which was very funny, but I don't think I'll ever actually watch it again (I don't deal so well with all the blood and guts scenes). After that we watched the X-Men trailer, and I was feeling sort of zoned-out, so I came home.I logged into PP and wanted to just zone out more and puzzle, so I asked Jarrett if I could sail with him -- he was doing a long trade run -- and it was EXACTLY what I needed. I'm #5 in the ocean in Carpentry again, biznatches.
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Well, if I wasn't already married, I'd ask you to marry me right this very moment. :) Brilliant work!
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I think he made up the story about the hot sun because no one would believe he saw a UFO -- the UFO being someone's badly cloaked time machine as they went back to see whether the stories were true.
Deanna, your Marinerds article just created a loop in the space-time continuum.
Cheers,
Matt