True Tales from the Big Leagues

Last week we learned about the strange case of Jimmy Freeman and his 11-walk, complete game debut for the 1972 Atlanta Braves, but this week Parker Coleman joins me to talk about the weirdness of the season Atlanta had that year and some of the characters who played, managed and surrounded the team.

Some of the stories detailed are Manager Lum Harris and his firing, Mike Lum, Earl Williams, Hank Aaron, Dusty Baker, Denny McClain, Tom House, Roland Office, and oh yeah, a game that ended in a tie.

Sources for this episode include:

The 1972 Atlanta Braves on Baseball-Reference.com

Tom House via Wikipedia

July 4, 1972: Durocher, Cubs full of fireworks after sudden rain ends game in a tie

Lum Harris

True Tails of the Big Leagues is a Seldom Used Reserve Podcast and is narrated by Marty Coleman and he is joined this week by Parker Coleman. 

Co-executive producers are Parker Coleman and Marty Coleman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our first two episodes involved relatively well-known stories written in one form or another by professional writers.

Today’s episode is different, this is one of the ones Parker and I found and fleshed out wandering through the pages of baseball-reference.com and as far as we can tell nothing has been written about the first time Jimmy Freeman toed a Major League rubber.

We set out to change that.

Sources for this episode are:

Baseball-Reference.com

Jimmy Freeman on Baseball-Reference.com

Box Score from Jimmy Freeman's Debut

True Tails of the Big Leagues is a Seldom Used Reserve Podcast and is narrated by Marty Coleman. 

Co-executive producers are Parker Coleman and Marty Coleman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When I was a kid playing little league baseball Robin Yount was a model for a lot of us.

A hope and a dream that we were chasing at 12 years old.

After all, he was just a few years older than the kids playing for Coburg Dairy, Baskin-Robins and Avondale Pharmacy.

But Robin Yount at 18 years old after half a season in Single-A was a Major Leaguer playing the position where all the cool kids played - shortstop - while we were trying to figure out how to hit what passed for a curve ball. 

But this isn’t about Robin, at least not directly.

It’s about Robin’s older brother Larry, who was also a Major Leaguer.  

Well, kind of.  

Sources:

Wikipedia - Larry Yount

MLB.com - Robin Yount's Brother Larry Holds Unusual Record

Baseball-Reference.com - Larry Yount

True Tails of the Big Leagues is a Seldom Used Reserve Podcast and is narrated by Marty Coleman. 

Co-executive producers are Parker Coleman and Marty Coleman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Baseball-reference.com lists 23,114 Major League Players as of this recording.

If we assume half of those are pitchers and half are position players that gives us an estimate of 11,557 position players, almost all of whom have had a chance to bat.

Of those 11,557 batters, only one has hit for the same average in 4 consecutive seasons.

This is the story of that player…

References:

Baseball-Reference.com

Thebaseballcube.com

MLB.com

True Tails of the Big Leagues is a Seldom Used Reserve Podcast and is narrated by Marty Coleman. 

Co-executive producers are Parker Coleman and Marty Coleman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As a kid I fell asleep with a transistor radio tuned to Oakland A’s baseball games almost 2,800 miles away.  

Listening to those games that originated from what might as well been the moon for a kid in South Carolina fascinated me.

It was a time when information was garnered from the back of baseball cards bought from the 7-11 with every penny of my allowance.

I still have thousands of those cards that my son and I occasionally reference.

The images on those cards are often hilarious, but the information on the back was the gold.

Far off birth places, remote minor league cities I’d never heard of and quirky statistics or oddities about the player were for me like being and archaeologist and discovering an unknown sarcophagus of an Egyptian King.

I was on a hunt for the unusual and unexpected and I’ve been hooked on the weird and unusual in baseball ever since. 

My son and I bonded over baseball, but more than that, we’ve bonded over the weirdness of baseball…the player that hit .247 for four consecutive years, the 11-walk complete game debut, or the pitcher that won 108 games in 2 seasons...

Today we find these stories online and we share our discoveries with each other…it’s almost become a friendly competition to one up each other…And now we want to share our stories with you.

They’re silly, fascinating, weird, quirky and a lot of times unbelievable…

…these are True Tales of the Big Leagues..

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.