AGRI Biz

To commemorate Randy Johnson's retirement, here are some details about his earliest days in the majors, pitching for the Expos. The Big Unit made his major league debut on September 15, 1988 as the tallest player ever to play in the majors, supplanting 6-foot-9 Johnny Gee, a left-handed pitcher who played for Pittsburgh and the New York Giants during the Second World War. A newspaper reported: For Johnson, the road he hopes ...

With the 20th anniversary of Billy MartinÆs death on Christmas evening 1989 upon us, it's a good time to look back on Martin's impact on the Yankees and his managing style. I recently put together a compilation of some of his former players talking about Martin , including my talk last year with Mike Pagliarulo about his time playing third base for Martin on ...

Some months ago, I found some old news articles on John Wetteland's playing days and assembled them into a post on his personality during his teens, as well as his time with the Dodgers and Yankees, in 1989 and 1990, then again in 1995. Today's news about him points to a need for fans to understand something about his past and how it likely relates to his hospitalization in Texas. In 1995, ...

Some weeks back I had a spare hour on my hands, and wanting to not get swallowed up by fond nostalgia for the 1995 Mariners, I put together a starting lineup and roster of the best ex-Mariners. These are guys who played however briefly at the Kingdome or Safeco, were traded, signed with other teams, or were simply released, and went on to star elsewhere. I tried to pick ...

Today I came across the resolution Congress passed in the wake of the Yankees winning the World Series. The text of the resolution includes this: "Whereas the contributions of the Yankees' players throughout the season were all vital in securing the title; and Whereas the Yankees were guided to victory by Manager Joe Girardi, General Manager Brian Cashman, President Randy Levine, and the leadership of Hank and Hal Steinbrenner: Now therefore be it Resolved, ...

As a follow-up to my recent article about Alex Rodriguez's productivity in the playoffs as a Mariner, here are some portions of an interview I did early this year with Kevin Kalal of the Tacoma Rainiers, the Mariners' AAA affiliate, in 1995. The excerpts deal with Kalal's impressions of A-Rod back then. When I asked the readers of Mariners' fan site Lookout Landing for their response to his favorable comments, ...

A couple weeks ago, with the 90th anniversary of the 1919 Black Sox Series having just past and this year's World Series coming up, I went through the Chicago Tribune archives and put together a post on their coverage of the end of that series and the gambling rumors that were circulating around it. With the 2009 series nearing its conclusion, we can be happy that, 20 years after the Pete ...

With the soul of David Ortiz circa 2004 apparently having been transferred to Alex Rodriguez, at least for the 2009 playoffs, it's a good time to look back at the days before people thought he couldn't perform in the postseason. During his time with the Seattle Mariners, there was no sense of Alex Rodriguez choking in the clutch: he scored a run in his first playoff game, the deciding game ...

Seeing Ichiro's two-run homer last night off Mariano Rivera to redeem himself after getting picked off twice by A.J. Burnett was maybe not the greatest moment in Mariners history, but it exemplified a season that, for the Seattle fan, has been probably the most exciting since '03, maybe even '01. I was at the game, and thought I'd pass on some notes for posterity: To me, the Yankee fans didn't become ...

A while back I completed a project of chronicling most of major league baseball’s perfect games. What fun is that if you can’t make out a list of trivia about the games? So yes, the following list is trivial—but then, much of life is trivia, and sometimes trivia reveals things about life (and baseball) that bigger, more obvious facts can’t reveal. And even if it doesn’t, you can still enjoy going ...