Update: 6-27-2024
In case you missed it! Stone! Definitions! Willie!
In case you missed it, our guy Gavin Stone (Lake City, Arkansas, Riverside High, UCA) pitched a complete game shutout yesterday! Okay, you younger guys may not know the term “complete game.”
A complete game is a game in which ONE pitcher pitches the entire game. It is rare. Last year’s National League Cy Young winner did not have one. As a matter of fact, Blake Snell has not pitched one in his career. Maybe he has never even witnessed one!
Stone came within four pitches of throwing a “Maddux.” If you don’t remember a pitcher by that name, or know what a Maddux is, click this link. What is a Maddux?
In case you missed it, this week’s Backroads and Ballplayers weekly featured a tribute to Willie Mays and a story about Carl Boles, a doppelganger from Center Point, Arkansas. The Oxford folks define a doppelganger as an apparition or double of a living person. Boles’ Lost Story is one of my favorites.
Backroads and Ballplayers #59, Mays, Boles, and more. Link
In case you missed it, the “amazing” Cardinals won two of three from the Braves. They have won seven of their last ten, and although they had some “moments” the bullpen is holding up. Can I get a “Holy Cow?
In the early half of the 80s, I was working for the Nashville News. One summer day, Carl Boles walked into the office and asked the editor if the News would give Boles a letter stating that he was our reporter. Boles said it would get him into games (he was living in California). The editor consented as long as Carl would let us interview him. So I wrote the story about Carl's baseball life. He talked a lot about Kansas City Monarchs and the control of the Japanese pitcher's. He never brought up his "doppelganger' photo. I took one of the best photos in my short newspaper career of Carl. Sure wish I would have kept a copy. Carl asked for another letter from the News-Leader before he died.