150-146

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times. At any moment in any baseball game, you can see something that has never happened in the history of the sport or may never happen again. It’s one of the great things about baseball; as monotonous as the long season may be and despite the fact that a large majority of the game is routine, every so often, something bananas happens.

Take for instance the events of April 23, 1999. The accomplishment is quite famous: Fernando Tatis Sr. hit two grand slams in the same inning off the same pitcher. Even if you remove the caveat of it happening against the same pitcher, it still has only happened one time in MLB history and is likely to never happen again.

This fantastic article by Andrew Simon in 2023 calculated that the odds of this happening once were one in 12 million. But it did happen and certainly could happen again. This isn’t a feat that has been made impossible by the evolution of the game, like Old Hoss Radbourn’s 60-win season. As unlikely as it is that two grand slams in the same inning would happen again, there really is nothing but fate keeping it from happening in any given game.

As Vin Scully often said about certain things, “Very difficult, but possible.”

In Simon’s article, he lists that nine players since 1946 have hit a grand slam and then come up in the same inning again with the bases loaded. In the time between Tatis’ feat and the time the article was written, 34 players had come to the plate twice in an inning with the bases loaded in about one million half-innings. According to MLB researcher Jason Bernard, there were 127 instances between 1916 and 2022 of players coming up twice in the same inning with the bases loaded.

You can dive into the numbers all you want there, but the fact remains that, although the percentages are infinitesimal, they aren’t zero.

The last time someone had the chance to equal Tatis’ feat came in 2008 when Raul Ibanez hit a grand slam and then came up later that inning with the bases loaded and singled. You don’t think Ibanez could have connected for one?

Bobby Abreu had the same experience just five years earlier in 2003.

Between 1946 and 1967, six players hit a grand slam and then came up later that same inning with the chance to do it again. It happened to Carl Furillo twice in a three-year period!

There have been two really long droughts between opportunities since 1946. There was a 32-year span between Rick Reichardt’s opportunity in 1967 and Tatis in 1999. We’re currently in the second longest streak during that timeframe as next year will be 17 seasons that someone had the chance to do it. Aside from those two streaks, the longest MLB went between opportunities was eight seasons between Furillo in 1955 and Bill White in 1963.

It’s a needle in a very large haystack type of situation, but the needle is indeed in there somewhere.

Before we move on to this week’s edition of The Stud 400, here’s a look at the last five entries as we count down the 400 greatest moments in Major League Baseball history:

155: Ivy planted at Wrigley Field (1937)

154: Frank Robinson trade (1965)

153: Mickey Owen’s passed ball (1941)

152: Luis Aparicio and Maury Wills revive the stolen base (1960)

151: Brooks Robinson’s defining World Series (1970)

And now, here’s Episode LVIII of The Stud 400.

150. Mark Fidrych on Monday Night Baseball (1976)

Monday Night Baseball used to be a thing and although it didn’t approach the popularity of its NFL counterpart program, it actually pre-dated Monday Night Football by four years. MNB was a ratings albatross and after nine years, broadcasting rights went from NBC to ABC. The first year of ABC’s broadcast was 1976 and it didn’t take many games for people to start talking.

And it was all because of The Bird.

Mark Fidrych was drafted in the 10^th round out of a postgraduate program in Massachusetts and really wasn’t any kind of huge prospect. He didn’t receive any scholarship offers and the Tigers took a gamble that he would be able to harness his impressive fastball and learn some other pitches.

After a partial minor league season and stint in winter ball, Fidrych began the 1975 season in A Ball as a starter. His 5-9 record and 3.77 ERA didn’t scream success, but he was bumped to AA anyway. After a couple of weeks working as a reliever in AA and improving slightly, he was moved to AAA that same season and back to the rotation. He started six games and went 4-1 with a 1.80 ERA. It was good enough to get an invitation to Spring Training in 1976 and he made the team as a 21-year old rookie who was more of a curiosity than a budding superstar.

Fidrych got his feet wet in a couple of bullpen appearances, then made his first Major League start against the Indians. He threw a two-hit shutout and his antics on the mound drew many a sideways glance. He threw five straight complete games after that, including back-to-back 11-inning complete games. After his start on June 24, another complete game win, Fidrych was 7-1 with a 2.18 ERA. He made eight starts and completed seven of them. He also talked to the baseball, paced around the mound and got down on his knees to manicure the mound. Word had spread around baseball about this eccentric rookie who came out of nowhere and he was about to have his coming out party on Monday Night Baseball.

Fidrych and the Tigers were set to take on the Yankees on June 28 in a nationally televised game. The Yankees would go on to be American League champs that season, but first they had to deal with The Bird. Tiger Stadium was sold out and allegedly, thousands were turned away at the gate. It was the most excitement around the Tigers since the 1968 World Series. Fidrych diced his way through the Yankees lineup, sprinting back and forth from the dugout to the mound, talking to the baseball, jangling his arms and working at a breakneck speed. Fidrych pitched another complete game and the Tigers won 5-1 in a game played in 1:51, thanks largely to Fidrych’s pace. Fidrych is one of the great “what if” cases in baseball and truly one of the great characters to ever grace the mound. Much of the world saw him for the first time on perhaps the most famous game in the 22-year run of Monday Night Baseball.

149. Jim Bouton writes Ball Four (1970)

It may come as a surprise to people who think baseball was invented in 2000, but there used to be a time where fans didn’t have full access to Major League Baseball players. Fans watched them on the field, saw them on television or the movies and that was about it. Sometimes you’d get a story about a player getting married or having a kid, but players’ personal lives were not made public. Extended even beyond that was that what happened in a baseball clubhouse stayed there. Reporters knew which players drank, caroused, did drugs and cheated, but it never was spoken about and certainly didn’t get put down in ink. That is, until Jim Bouton wrote Ball Four.

Ball Four was such a landmark piece of literature that it was the only sports-themed book on the New York Public Library’s 1996 list of Books of the Century and made Time magazine’s list of the best 100 books published since 1923. Ball Four was essentially a diary written by Bouton about the 1969 season. He was a pitcher for the Seattle Pilots in their only season of competition and the book gave the first in-depth honest summary of what it was like being an MLB player. That included all the crude jokes, womanizing and amphetamine use among Major Leaguers. Bouton also discussed his disagreements with managers, coaches and front office. It was all quite shocking because none of this had been out in the open before. Even though the book was a diary of the 1969 season, Bouton also shared his stories of his time with the Yankees, including the heavy drinking of Mickey Mantle, which had been hidden from the public. Mantle had just retired from the sport and was such a wholesome All-American hero that it didn’t sit well with anyone that he caught strays in this book, even if a large part of what was written about him was positive.

The fallout of Ball Four was loud and extensive. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn denounced the book and tried to force Bouton to say many stories were embellished. Mantle didn’t talk to his old friend and teammate for decades and only reconciled in the final year of his life. The Yankees didn’t officially ban Bouton, but he was never invited to an event at Yankee Stadium until he returned for Old Timer’s Day in 1998 at the urging of his son. Pete Rose famously would yell, “Fuck you, Shakespeare!” from the dugout in the few times Bouton faced the Reds in 1970. Even the soft spoken, classy Hank Aaron had negative remarks about the book at a roundtable with Mantle and Leo Durocher on The Dick Cavett Show in 1979. By today’s standards, the book’s content would probably be seen as tame and nothing new, but when it was published in June of 1970, it was a seismic event that shook the sports world.

148. Fernando Tatis hits two grand slams in one inning (1999)

In a sport that sees the impossible happen on a pretty regular basis, there are very few feats that are just one-off occurrences. Two triple plays in one game has only happened once, Johnny Vander Meer still stands as the only person to throw back-to-back no-hitters and Rennie Stennett remains the only person to go 7-7 in a nine inning game. Another person you can add to the list is Fernando Tatis, Sr.

Tatis is the only person to hit two grand slams in the same inning and probably even more remarkable, he hit them both off the same pitcher – Chan Ho Park. In the third inning of a game against the Dodgers in 1999, Tatis came up after the first three hitters reached base. He cracked a 2-0 pitch to deep left for a grand slam. Park continued to struggle in the inning and found himself with the bases loaded and one out eight batters later. Park retired Mark McGwire on a fly ball to right for the second out and then got to 3-2 on Tatis and was one pitch away from escaping without further damage. On the other side of the coin though, Tatis was one swing away from turning a 7-2 lead into an 11-2 lead and that’s exactly what he did. Since then, two players have had the chance to match Tatis, but failed.

It’s one of the rarest events in the history of baseball, which is incredible considering there have been over four million half-innings played in MLB history.

147. William Taft throws out first pitch (1910)

There has been a long history of United States Presidents throwing out the first pitch at big baseball games, but did you realize that tradition dated back well over 100 years?

The earliest documented presidential first pitch came in 1910 and was thrown on Opening Day by sitting President William Howard Taft. Taft, who was in the second year of his term, did the honors in a game featuring Walter Johnson and the Washington Senators and Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s, who would go on to win the World Series that season. Taft repeated the honor again in 1911. After that, Woodrow Wilson continued the tradition in 1913 and moving forward, every single US President can say they threw out a first pitch at a Major League Baseball game.

The last two presidents, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, threw out first pitches at Red Sox and Orioles games, respectively, before they were elected president. They joined Richard Nixon, Barack Obama and both George Bushes who threw out first pitches prior to their stints in the Oval Office. Altogether, there have been 85 first pitches thrown by sitting presidents and Taft was the first to do it.

146. Inaugural Mets lose 120 (1962)

The 1962 Mets were in the news a lot this past baseball season and they brought with it a great debate among the fanbase. The 2024 White Sox were absolutely putrid and by all accounts, they were pegged as a possible threat to the Mets record for futility very early in the season. They started off losing 22 of their first 25 games and were 23.5 games out of first place before the calendar turned to June. As the team languished in embarrassment all season long, fans wondered just how bad it could get. The ultimate question was whether they could unseat the 1962 Mets as the worst team in MLB history.

The 1962 Mets were an expansion team and forever were the barometer for measuring futility on the diamond. They ended with a record of 40-120-1 and the White Sox finished 2024 with a record of 41-121. So, the Sox were the first team to lose 121 games in a season, but did register one more win than the ’62 Mets. Even though it really never got as heated as other baseball debates, Mets fans were divided on what result they wanted from the White Sox. Many Mets fans wanted the Sox to stay below the 40-win threshold to erase the record for awfulness out of the books. However, it seemed like many more Mets fans enjoyed their place in history.

The 1962 Mets were lovable losers led by the perfect man for the job, Casey Stengel. Stengel was 72 at the time and no amount of managing acumen could turn this team into a competent Major League outfit. They ended up 60 games out of first place, but that doesn’t mean the fanbase loved them any less. In fact, their 1962 futility made their incredible run in 1969 that much more memorable.

The 2024 White Sox might have done more losing than the 1962 Mets, but it’s undeniable that they lacked the charm that Gil Hodges, Richie Ashburn and the rest of Stengel’s boys had.

Stay tuned for next week’s episode of The Stud 400 when we take to the airwaves and to the poetry books. We’re taking a look at a mistaken identity that led to tragic circumstances and see how a jam-shot flare felled one of the all-time legends. A couple of umpiring pioneers gain a rightful honor and we pose the question as to whether 50 words could be responsible for three players being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. We’re making a Giant hit into a double, so get ready to learn the saddest of possible words next week in The Stud 400.