On September 8, 1990 Nolan Ryan was starting for the Texas Rangers against the Kansas City Royals. Bo Jackson hit a line drive, which caught Ryan in the face to start the second inning. He refused help and refused to leave the game. If he wasn’t a legend before, he certainly was now. (more…)
Classic Nolan Ryan 8×10
TTM: Shots in the Dark
I use sportscollectors.net (SCN) to track my TTM stats and look for safe bets, in terms of who I send autograph requests to. However, sometimes it’s fun to skip the safe bet and go after an unlikely candidate. This usually ends in you never seeing your cards again. I can’t tell you how many guys I’ve sent to and will never see a return from. That’s part of the game. A lot of those guys I sent to before I had my SCN account so I wasn’t trying for the long shot on purpose. In a recent case however, I did go for the long shot.
Mark Quinn played 4 seasons for the Kansas City Royals after paying for the Rice Owls in college. I’m not entirely sure why, but I always liked the guy and recently considered sending an autograph request to him. I looked him up on SCN and the numbers were glaringly bad. He had a 34% success rate and no one had been successful since 2007. I decided to put him in my TTM queue anyways and wound up sending my request a few weeks later.
38 days later I open up a self-addressed stamp envelope and find these: (more…)
Johnny Damon’s Origins Discovered!
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists have sequenced the DNA from four frozen hairs of a Greenlander who died 4,000 years ago in a study they say takes genetic technology into several new realms.
Surprisingly, the long-dead man appears to be related directly to former New York Yankee, Johnny Damon, Morten Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues found.
“This provides evidence that Johnny Damon is the closest thing we have to an actual caveman” the researchers wrote in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. (more…)
2010 Consolidated List of Non-roster Invitees
Below you’ll find a comprehensive list of the 2010 MLB Spring Training Non-roster invitees for all Major League teams, as of February 8, 2010. This information is easy to obtain, but not as easy to compile and format, into one master list so I ask that if you want to take the entire list for whatever purpose you at least cite your source. I’ll cite mine. MLB.com To make things more interesting I also add links to unofficial team blogs for each of the Major League baseball teams and on some players I added links to random blogs pertaining to the player. (more…)
Eric Lands a White Whale
I won my first “true” 1/1 on eBay yesterday. The card is a 2008 Topps Triple Threads Josh Anderson with an autograph, 2 games used jersey swatches and a patch piece. Serial numbered 1/1 of course. I just recently started my Josh Anderson PC and it has been growing pretty quickly. I haven’t found a lot of competition and was surprised that I was forced to pay $32 for this card. (more…)
What $58,245,500 gets you these days
Kansas City gets what it pays for.
At least that’s what Ben Fry’s salary vs performance graph shows as of July 2. This fun little tool measures Major League Baseball teams’ win-loss records against their payroll.
Its pretty refreshing to see the Rays with the best record in baseball — and the second lowest total payroll at $43,820,56. The cheapest talent can be found with the Florida Marlins who, as a team, make less than half of what the Rays make. That’s taking it too far though, an this graph is neat because it shows the extremes on both ends of the spectrum — the New York Yankees spend $209,081,584 on payroll compared to the next-closest team, the Mets at $137,793,376. (more…)
