Countdown to Christmas - 98 days

Well, if you thought #99 was a bit of a stretch, try finding a #98 in baseball history! Girly sports like football have Tony "Goose" Siragusa, who played 12 years in the NFL. But baseball numbers, for the most part, are traditionally low. Part of that is based in history. The first team to ever wear numbers on their back on a regular basis was the 1929 Yankees. Prior to that, some teams experimented with wearing numbers on their sleeves. And even then, the numbers the players wore were assigned by where they were in batting order. So Earle Combs wore number 1, Mark Koening wore number 2, Babe wore number 3 and so forth. The rest of the team filled in after the starting 8.

So lets go a little history for today. In '98 we saw a batter hit a grand slam in his first ever major league at bat. While there was no Triple Crown winner that year, the leauge leader in avg. hit .385 and also lead the league in hits with 216. On the mound, the league leader in ERA had an impressive 1.88, and one player actually had 42 complete games and finished the season with a 15-29 record. No, we aren't talking about 1998, we are looking back to 1898!!

In what could be considered a drop off year, Wee Willie Keeler hit .385 that year while playing in 129 games for Baltimore. A drop off year? In the '97 campaign, Keeler hit .424. Starting in 1894, "Hit 'em where they aint" Keeler started a string of 8 consecutive seasons of 200 or more hits, a record matched only by Pete Rose. Also at the dish, Bill Duggleby of the Phillies hit a grand slam in his first ever major league at bat, something not accomplished again until Jeremy Hermida repeated the feat for the Marlins in 2005.

Clark Griffith, who later became the long time owner of the Washington Senators, lead the league with an impressive 1.88 ERA in what was agruably the best season of his storied 20 year professional career as a player. He won 24 games that year for the Chicago Orphans, with 4 shutouts over 325 innings pitched. His 36 complete cames didn't come close to Jack Taylor, though, who had 42 complete games and pitched an amazing 397 innings! Taylor pitched just one more season, and retired with a lifetime record of 120-117.

And in 1898, the commissioner with THE best name ever, Happy Chandler, was born!

And don't worry folks, there actually IS a ball player with #97 that we can read about tomorrow. In the mean time, I want to leave you with the Oscar winning performance of Derek Jeter this week.