Yesterday’s Post’s Title

If you don’t know the reference, or even if you do, take 3 1/2 minutes out of your life to watch this. It was recorded a month before she married Gregg Allman. Amazing.1

Also, in Baltimore cultural touchstones yesterday, I omitted Hairspray. Apologies to John Waters.

The Compleat Bryce Elder

I am gratified to see two of you (stamton and hsmith for those keeping score) comment on my estimation of the probability of a Bryce Elder complete game, which remains around 200:1. Just a note about what that means.

Since August 2022, when he was summoned to Atlanta for good, he has made 93 regular season starts. That’s Top 50 among major league pitchers. (Logan Webb leads with 128.) Figuring him for around 30 starts a year (that optimistically assumes he never gets injured), we’d expect him to have a complete game once every seven years. He’s ahead of schedule! He’s probably good for one more, maybe two if he lasts a long time. So to pick a Bryce Elder game at random and say: “Yep. This is the one” is probably pretty optimistic.

HuffPost

Sam Huff‘s grandfather, the real Sam Huff was, for those of us old to barely remember (he retired when I was 13) a truly landmark NFL player. Those old John Facenda NFL videos highlighted play after play of awesomeness. He and Ray Nitschke were the two guys Tommy Nobis was supposed to become when he was drafted #1 by the Falcons in 1966, the first of the four years they got the first pick in the NFL Draft. (Trivia question: name the other three. Answers at the bottom.2)

So I just looked it up, and in his illustrious NFL career, Sam Huff earned around $300,000. That isn’t chump change… call it a little over $3,000,000 in today’s attenuated currency. His grandson, the Orioles backup catcher to Chadwick Tromp (while Adley Rutschman is on the IL) will have earned around $2,000,000 playing baseball by the end of this season, not counting any signing bonus he might have received. It is not impossible that the son will pass the grandfather, but it is unlikely, as he’d need another full two seasons or so, and third-string catcher is not really a thing.

By comparison, Carl Yastrzemski earned around $8,000,000 2026 dollars over his somewhat later career than the elder Huff’s, and his grandson has earned $47,000,000 playing baseball. I have no grand conclusions here. Fun with numbers.

The Game

Observation #1: The word galoot was created to describe Pete Alonso. He’s a pretty good baseball player, but he’s definitely a galoot.

Observation# 2: Bryce Elder’s quest for complete game #2 was pretty clearly not going to happen when his 50th pitch, occurring in the third inning, was yo lo tengo’ed by Jim Jarvis. At that point, you need to minimize pitches, not extend innings. Jarvis then dove and missed a single and then failed to corral a line drive to allow Sir Galoot to score the first run of the game. By the end of the third, Elder had thrown 70 pitches, and Jarvis’ bet on Kalshi that Elder wasn’t going to have a complete game tonight was secure. His 93rd pitch, in the bottom of the 5th, was deposited by Gunnar Henderson into the seats to make it 2-0. He finished with 5 innings pitched, 98 pitches.

Meanwhile, Brandon Young, pitching for the songbirds, was cruising along until a groundout in the sixth brought a run home. He was replaced in the 7th by Mark Wolfram, who probably tires of explaining to everyone why the atomic symbol for tungsten is W. Eli White hit a one-out double in the 7th which included a blown tire rounding first, but the filaments of Wolfram’s arm eliminated any further problems. If I were baseball commissioner, I would force Wolfram to wear #74. (Oddly, there has never been a major league player with last name Silver or Gold, or any other element. Silvera, Golden, Goldschmidt, Carbo, etc. But I think Wolfram is the only elementally-last-named player, at least until Fred Lithium makes the bigs. Please: somebody set me straight if I’m wrong about this.)

Victor Mederos returned to spell Elder. He too was victimized by a simple missed catch from Jarvis. Calm down, young man. (Jarvis apparently also bet on the number of times The Galoot would reach based, personally assuring two safeties.)

This game was nothing like last night’s game. In that game, a Drake Baldwin bomb off Rico Garcia erased a one-run deficit in the 8th inning. In this game, an Ozzie Albies bomb off Rico Garcia erased a one-run deficit in the 8th inning. Completely different.

With a tie game in the bottom of the 8th and the good relievers available, Mederos was not given a third inning. Didier Fuentes got the 8th. Once again, Weiss was trying to win a game before he ran out of pitchers. Fuentes was overpowering, consistently over 100 mph.

9th Inning. Nada for the good guys. In the bottom of the inning, the pixie dust wore off. Fuentes gave up a double that Dubón almost caught, brought home by a single that Ozzie almost reached.

Reylo on the mound tomorrow, and a speech from Andruw.

  1. For the true lovers of the eccentric and bizarre, try this one. This is what I spent this afternoon doing. ↩︎
  2. Steve Bartkowski, Aundray Bruce and Michael Vick. ↩︎