Archive - September, 2006

20-game winners a dying breed

The last time Major League Baseball went a complete season without a 20-game winner was 1995, when Greg Maddux (Atlanta Braves) and Mike Mussina (Baltimore Orioles) both fell one win short.

During one stretch from 1961-1980, major league baseball had a 20-game winner in both leagues every year.

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Playoff Tiebreakers: Bucky F%!#$ing Dent

Despite leading the American League Eastern division by 14 ½ games as late as mid-August, the summer of 1978 may go down in history as one of the most miserable in Boston Red Sox history.

Over the next six weeks, the second-place Yankees would catch fire while the Red Sox watched the wheels fall off their seemingly impassable lead.

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Howard innocent until proven guilty

In the wake of the Major League Baseball strike of 1994, interest in the game was waning. Baseball stumbled through the mid-90’s looking for a hero, a spark of some kind that would revive sagging attendance and interest.

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This Spud’s for You

In August 1987, Dave Bresnahan, a second-string catcher for the Williamsport Bills (AA-Eastern League), hatched an idea: what if … I used something other than a baseball to trick a runner off base to get him out?

When Bresnahan shared his idea with teammates, they laughed, then dared him. “Everybody said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ Bresnahan told Baseball America in 1988. “It started out as a dare, became a challenge, and I eventually did it.”

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