This weekend will be exciting because we’ll get to donate our first bunch of winter hats from our Hot Stove, Warm Welcome drive, as State Senator Jessica Ramos hosts a holiday lunch for newly-arrived families here in Queens. The drive continues, as we’ll donate a hat for every hoodie we sell this month in our shop. Obviously, we wanted to get hats in time for this lunch, so we ordered some earlier in the month, and we’ll do another order at the end of the month, when there will still be winter to go!
By Jesse Spector
Some reads heading into the weekend…
It’s brutal to have lost both Mike Leach and Grant Wahl in the past week. Posthumous memorials at Channel 6 and from Grant’s wife Céline Gounder are each things to read while holding the sadness, while happier memories can be found in Spencer Hall’s 2011 boat outing with Leach, and Wahl’s introduction of an Ohio teenager named LeBron James to the world.
This isn’t a read, but an interesting and deep explanation of the impact of Leach’s Air Raid offense.
I always get a kick out of being reminded that the English soccer club Derby County used to play at The Baseball Ground.
As Twitter continues to burn down and the CEO dances about with open cans of gasoline, all are welcome on our Discord.
Free buses for NYC? At my day job, we’re deep into redesigning the bus network already. Go for it.
And back here in Queens, I have been to the Boca Juniors restaurant and I’m glad it survived the past two years and now gets to be the center of Argentina fandom in the city. And glad that they got the shine here from Hell Gate.
The Mets signed former Brewers catcher and 2021 All-Star Omar Narváez, which means that someone is leaving because that’s too many catchers. In his major league debut, back in 2016, one of the White Sox pitchers Narváez caught was Tommy Kahnle, who’s just returned to the Yankees. Kahnle appeared again in Narváez’s next game, and then his third game was a Carlos Rodón start… and now Rodón is coming to the Yankees, too. Game number four for Narváez? He caught new Mets starter José Quintana.
And then it continues. David Robertson, who made his major league debut at Shea Stadium…
…got the save in Narváez’s fifth career game, a Rodón start. It took nearly a month, until his eighth game, for Narváez to not catch someone who will be with a New York team next year, unless Chris Sale or Jacob Turner somehow winds up here.
As Narváez and all those pitchers get ready to come to (or return to) the Big Apple, old friend Noah Syndergaard returned to Los Angeles, where he’s set to become the fifth player in history to appear for the Mets, Angels, Phillies, and Dodgers. He’ll join Dick Stuart, Dennis Cook, Dennis Springer, and Bobby Abreu in that oddball club, and be the first to take the New York-Anaheim-Philly-LA path to it.
I hadn’t realized that Stuart, the man best known for his awesome nickname, Dr. Strangeglove, even played for the Mets, let alone the Angels, Phillies, and Dodgers. I knew him as a Pirates slugger, part of the 1960 World Series team… and I may have known but forgotten that his best season was with the 1963 Red Sox, when he led the American League in total bases and runs batted in.
After a less impressive, but still really good (.811 OPS, 33 homers) season in 1964, the Red Sox traded Stuart to the Phillies for Dennis Bennett, himself a future Met in 1967 when the Sox sent him here for Al Yates.
And that’s when Stuart began the Syndergaard speedrun, playing a replacement-level season with the 1965 Phillies. They traded him to the Mets in February of 1966 for Wayne Graham, Bobby Klaus, and Jimmie Schaffer.
Stuart played 31 games as a Met, with one of his four homers coming off 1969 Met Don Cardwell… as well as one off his former Phillies teammate Chris Short. After the Mets released Stuart, he caught on with the Dodgers… and hit his first homer in L.A. off the very same Chris Short.
Short was a really good pitcher, but not at the level of the last guy that Stuart tagged for a dinger with the Dodgers, Steve Carlton. After two years with the Taiyo Whales in Japan, where he hit a combined 49 homers, Stuart came back to the States and hit one last tater for the Angels, off Tommy John.
In Stuart’s rookie season, 1958, he homered off Don Drysdale, Warren Spahn, and Robin Roberts. He took Sandy Koufax deep five times, tied with Cardwell, Johnny Podres, and Stan Williams for his most against any pitcher.
Taiyo Whales is a new team name for me… they’re now the Yokohama DeNA BayStars, having moved from Kawasaki to Yokohama in 1978 and briefly being the Yokohama Taiyo Whales before doing a Tennessee Oilers kind of thing. They had a pretty cool song, if not Beatles level. (Hope you’re enjoying We Can Pod It Out!)
The Tennssee Oilers… also had a song.
That one isn’t just not Beatles level, it’s not Shitty Beatles level.
We Can Pod It Out 10: Thank You Girl