Day: June 30, 2005

History in the plunking

In 1990 or thereabouts, I won a tremendously ugly waterproof watch from 94.9 WRBT by answering the question of who was the modern-day hit-by-pitch leader. Ugly watch aside, it’s always been one of my favorite records in baseball. Last night, Craig Biggio broke one of my favorite records in baseball, being hit by a pitch for the 268th time to break Don Baylor’s modern record. Biggio still trails two 19th-century players for the all-time lead, Hughie Jennings (287) and Tommy Tucker (272). Among active players, Jason Kendall is next with 183.

Biggio’s top HBP season was 1997, which was his best season all-around. Baylor tops him in that category, having been plunked 35 times in 1986. The Hall of Fame has asked for Biggio’s armor, which seems like an underhanded compliment to me: “Send us your armor so we can put it in a case next to a photo of Baylor’s bare arm.”

And I’m a genius, genius

Comments are working again, thanks to me!

Well, not that I did anything myself that would have caused them to start working again — but I didn’t do anything to break them beyond repair when I was trying to figure out what was going on, and that can often be more important. It’s still a mystery to me why they stopped working, and now it’s even more of a mystery why they started working again just now. My best guess is that the host of this site, Dreamhost, twice made some behind-the-scenes changes to their PHP configuration. But I know nothing about PHP.

Anyway, in actual baseball-related news, the DirecTV e-mail newsletter that I got this morning says they’ll be having another free preview of the Extra Innings package from July 14th to 18th, so perhaps I’ll check in on some teams I don’t get to see often, such as my beloved Devil Rays, or perhaps a good team like Levi’s beloved Cardinals.