Not Safe for Work

Nine years ago today, the Cincinnati Reds, led by captain Barry Larkin, were poised to take on Shawn Green and the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first of three-game series at Cincinnati’s Cinergy Field. The players had finished batting practice, the lineups had been written, the baselines painted, and the infield and pitcher’s mound had been prepared for the night. 

The only problem? The umpires’ equipment was somewhere in New York, more than 550 miles away. While the umpires—CB Bucknor, Al Clark, Mike Vanvleet and Rick Reed—arrived safely in Cincinnati from Montreal earlier in the day, their equipment was shipped, unnoticed, to New York. 

To save the day, Rick Stowe, the Reds' longtime clubhouse manager, and a member of his crew raced off to a local sporting goods store. It was closed. Undeterred, the dynamic duo drove around Cincinnati in search of an open store. Eventually, they found one on the west side of town, and secured about $600 worth of gear, pilling shin guards, chest protectors, cleats, and face masks into the car before racing back to Cinergy Field. On their way back across town, though, they got stuck in traffic, and had to call in for a police escort to get back to the stadium, where they handed the equipment off to the waiting umpires. 

After only a 27-minute delay, starting pitcher Steve Parish finally delivered the first pitch, fittingly, a called strike, to Devon White, the Dodgers' center fielder and leadoff hitter. The Dodgers, behind four serviceable quality innings from rookie starting pitcher Eric Gagne, would go on to win the opener 9-2, and, two days later, sweep the series. 

The umpires' equipment, meanwhile, presumably made its way to the Queen City before the start of the second game.

Can We Have Our Ball Back, Please?

On this day, 56 years ago, Mickey Mantle, the then 21-year-old centerfielder for the New York Yankees, hit a two-run home run out of Griffith Stadium, home of the Washington Senators, into the backyard of a neighboring row house, located at 434 Oakdale Street, 565 feet away. Batting right-handed, the switch-hitting Mantle drove Chuck Stobbs’ first pitch toward left center, where, according to various reports, it cleared the 50-foot- high bleachers wall 391 feet from home plate and bounced off the top of a attached 69-foot long scoreboard, disappearing into the surrounding working-class neighborhood.

Before Mantle had finished rounding the bases, Arthur Patterson, a Yankees PR man, fled the stadium in hot pursuit of Mantle’s prodigious blast. Outside, Patterson ran into Donald Dunaway, the young kid who had seen the ball land down the street. After showing Patterson exactly where he picked it up, Dunaway handed over to Patterson the scuffed-up ball and, in return, received an undisclosed sum of money and, eventually, a new ball autographed by Mantle.

Jordan 3000

On April 16, 1987, the Chicago Bulls lost their penultimate regular season game 117-114 to the first place Atlanta Hawks. But don’t blame Michael Jordan. His Airness, the 1986 Slam Dunk Champion, finished with a cool 61 points, 10 boards, 4 steals, a block and an assist in 41 minutes. Jordan’s 61-point outburst was his third straight game with 50 or more points and, during the third quarter, he put up an incredible 23 straight points, a National Basketball Association record. Two of those 23 points, a lay-up, put Jordan past the 3,000-point mark for the season, making him only the second player-- the first since Wilt Chamberlain-- to scale such lofty heights.

The following night, against the Boston Celtics, Jordan scored a comparably pedestrian 17 points, which brought his season total to a ridiculous 3,041 points, or 240 less than his total minutes played for the entire season. Amazingly, Jordan averaged an unconscious 37 points per 40 minutes that year.

Number 42 in Your Program, Number 1 in Your Hearts

On April 15, 1997, in recognition of the 50 anniversary of Jackie Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig retired Robinson's number 42 during a 35-minute ceremony at New York's Shea Stadium. While 11 major leaguers, including Mariano Rivera, Mo Vaughn, Butch Huskey, and Jose "It's Lima Time" Lima, took the field later that night with "42" stitched on their jerseys, only one donned the number for the first time.

Two thousand miles away, in Arlington, 5-11 Marc Sagmoen, a former standout at the University of Nebraska, made his major league debut for the third-place Rangers in an otherwise meaningless game against the Chicago White Sox. Like Robinson, Sagmoen goes hitless in his first game but one-ups the baseball legend when he recorded his first RBI in the bottom of the 6th with a bases-loaded walk against ChiSox hurler James Baldwin. Two days later, on April 17, Sagmoen recorded his first hit in the show, an inside-the-park home run off Kansas City's titular ace, Tim Belcher. Sagmoen hung around for another 19 games, compiling an uninspiring career .140 batting average, before playing out his professional career in the minors. Sagmoen's claim to fame, though, remains: he was the last major leaguer to be issued No. 42 as his official uniform number.

Free Mustache Rides

On April 15, 1972, during the Oakland A’s Opening Day 11-inning victory over the visiting Minnesota Twins, iconoclast Reggie Jackson reportedly became the first high-profile major leaguer to appear in a regular season game with a mustache since Wally Schang wiggled his ‘stache behind the plate for the Philadelphia A’s 58 years earlier, in 1914.

Although Major League Baseball never officially outlawed facial hair, teams, for the most part, nevertheless adhered to an unwritten rule against lip ticklers until Jackson stepped on the sun-drenched, Oakland field with a shadow above his lip, and immediately stirred up a Coliseum-sized shit-storm in the A's front office. Owner Charles Finley ordered manager Dick Williams to make Jackson shave it off. When Williams relayed the message to his superstar slugger, however, Jackson politely told his skipper where, exactly, he could stick his razor. 

A few days later, Finley, a marketing genius, quickly reversed course and offered a $300 bonus for any player willing to grow his own mustache. Pitchers Jim "Catfish" Hunter and Rollie Fingers famously took him up on his offer. A trend was born. Later that season, Finley held a “Mustache Day,” which granted free admission for all mustachioed fans to the team’s Father's Day matinee. By mid-June, the entire 25-man roster sported mustaches, including the stodgy Williams. The team would ride their follicles—and an impressive staff ERA—all the way to the World Series, where they defeated Cincinnati's fresh-faced Big Red Machine in a 7-game match up of “The Hairs vs. The Squares.”