Scribbled notes on a cocktail napkin, Part XII
A Total Eclipse of the Park … Sunday links … Waning and waxing poetically about Moon Shots, Moon Walking and the Moon Man
"Scribbled notes on a cocktail napkin" is my weekly Sunday feature that's a tribute to the sports columnists I grew up reading who penned Herb Caen-inspired three dot columns. It's an excuse to shamelessly plug my other side projects, post my favorite Immaculate Grid from the week with a story about one of the players, link to stories I found interesting, and string together loose topics on my mind.
Baseball and the moon have shared a cosmic connection over the years, objects that share a crater of similarities in color and shape, and tomorrow thousands of people will gather to watch both simultaneously.
During the total solar eclipse, the moon will appear to be almost the exact same size as the sun. The path of totality stretches across 15 states, a tailing fastball that will cut from the Gulf of Mexico to Maine, covering seven cities that will be hosting a Major League Baseball game. Six of those will be night games, but the real action is taking place in Cleveland, where over 200,000 people are expected in the city.
The Cleveland Guardians are going all-out to celebrate baseball and science. It’s their Home Opener and they’ve spent months considering multiple options. They weren’t allowed a schedule a starting time that would require a midgame break and decided against a night game.
Instead, they’ll start at 5:10 pm Eastern Time. Players will take batting practice under the sun. Gates will open at 2 pm, then entry to the ballpark will pause from 3:05 to 3:25, when the eclipse reaches its crescendo, birds start chirping, the temperature will drop like a forkball, and humans will (hopefully through safe glasses) watch in awe. A science lecture will take place and then a baseball game.
In the minor leagues, Monday is the dedicated day off for the week. But the Syracuse Mets altered their schedule for the celestial occurrence, a promotion they are dubbing “Total Eclipse of the Park.” They’re opening the gates two hours earlier, at 2 pm for a 5:05 pm game time, so fans can witness the beauty and mystery of the eclipse at 3:23 pm from the ballpark. I really wish Bonnie Tyler could sing the national anthem.
Renowned Astrophysicist Meredith Wills will educated fans in Syracuse. Wills has become the most trusted expert on the difference in baseballs the major leagues have used lately and whether it’s scientifically accurate that ball was “juiced” or not.
Back in 2017, the minor league Salem-Keizer Volcanos were given approval to start a baseball game at the very unnatural time of 10 am, played the top of the first inning, then paused the game for the first “professional sports solar eclipse delay” in history.
The Volcanoes wore black eclipse jerseys with numbers on their backs ringed by fiery coronae. The gimmick inspired a sellout crowd of 5,297 at Volcano Stadium for brunch, baseball and science.
I don’t know about you, but what inspires me the most about eclipses is that humans can predict these to the exact minute.
In Albuquerque, our nickname of Isotopes was inspired by an episode of The Simpsons, but it’s also fitting because of the nuclear labs throughout the state of New Mexico. We held a Science Night promotion in 2019, not because of an eclipse, but because we thought it would be fun. It was a blast.
Our special guest was Harrison Schmidt. He’s one of just 12 people to ever walk on the moon. Only four of them are still alive. Schmidt was the most unique moonwalker because he was a geologist, the only person without a background in military aviation to walk on the moon.
Schmidt was aboard Apollo 17 that landed on the moon in December 1972. He resigned from NASA in 1975 and ran for office, winning a seat as a Senator representing New Mexico. He still lives in Albuquerque and is a huge baseball fan. He’s an Isotopes season ticket holder.
During the game, Schmidt joined me on the broadcast for a half-inning. The director put a picture of the moon on the TV screen during the inning. I asked Schmidt how often he looks at the moon and thinks, “I walked on that.”
His response: “Every night it’s clear.” I still got goosebumps.
When the inning ending, I thanked Schmidt for joining me. Schmidt said it was a thrill for him because whenever he’s not at the game, he and his wife listen to me on the radio. His wife was in the booth with us, and she nodded her confirmation.
Harrison Schmidt walked on the moon … and he listens to me.
As Annie Kinsella might say, “far out.”
Moon Shots, not moonshots
Of all my crusades, educating people on the real meaning of “Moon Shots” is very high on my list. Please indulge me and follow along closely.
A “moonshot” is not a home run that goes a long distance. This is a common mistake. It’s an understandable mistake. A baseball is hit a long way and you might think that ball is traveling “to the moon” and call it a moonshot. That’s wrong. That needs to stop.
The real meaning of “Moon Shot” – it should be capitalized – refers to former Dodgers left fielder Wally Moon.
A left-handed hitter, Moon was on the Dodgers when they played in their temporary home of the LA Coliseum, after their move from Brooklyn. A football/track stadium, center field was 440 feet away. But left field was only 251 feet and featured a 42-foot high screen. Moon consulted with former Cardinals teammate Stan Musial and devised a change to his swing.
As the Baseball Hall of Fame notes:
Moon started using an unconventional inside-out swing and began lofting the ball toward left field. The Sporting News later referred to him as “Wrong Way Wally” because of his unusual opposite field stroke. Some writers described his home runs as “screenos” because of the strange way they cleared the enormous left-field screen.
Yet, the term "screenos" never really gained traction. Moon’s opposite field home runs soon became known as “moon shots.” Moon remembers a legendary Dodgers broadcaster as being the source of the new baseball term. “Our announcer, Vin Scully, was really the one who started it,” Moon recalled in an interview with the Akron Beacon Journal. “Remember back then that everyone was really interested in space shots [the space race], and when Scully started calling my opposite field home runs ‘moon shots,’ it really caught on.”
Actor Bryan Cranston, a huge Dodgers fan, named his production company Moonshot Entertainment in honor of Wally Moon. Cranston shared the story with me on an Isotopes broadcast a couple years ago. [Yes, this is a shameless excuse to post a link.]
Please spread the word throughout the Milky Way galaxy. A Moon Shot is a high lazy flyball to left field by a left-handed batter that goes for a home run, not a massively long home run.
This week’s “Where Ya At?” podcast guest: Lorena Nava Ruggero
I host a podcast for San Diego State’s School of Journalism and Media Studies titled “Where Ya At?” Each week, I interview an alum to learn about their experience at SDSU, transitioning from student to professional, and their current job. You can listen on all podcast platforms, including Apple Music.
Lorena Nava Ruggero is the ultimate Aztec. She’s a third-generation alumnus who earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees at SDSU. She returned to campus as a lecturer, worked in media relations, and for SDSU’s News Center.
Interviewing her was a full-moon moment. In 2009, Lorena interviewed me for a program about SDSU alumni on YouTube. I waxed poetic about my time at The Daily Aztec and waned on and on about writing books.
For this conversation, the topics orbited from SDSU memories to her current job with the San Diego Foundation, including money they’ve raised to help recent flood victims. Since Lorena worked closely with my beloved late friend Greg Block, I asked her to tell me stories. She almost made me cry.
If you want to skip ahead to that part, it comes about 18 minutes into the podcast.
This week’s not-so random Immaculate Grid story: Gaylord Perry
Pitcher Gaylord Perry won 314 baseball games over his 22-year career that spanned 5,350 innings. The most remarkable moment of his career occurred as a hitter.
Memories are not precise, but it’s believed that it was 1962 or ’63 – the first two years of Perry’s career – that a Giants beat writer named Harry Jupiter (that’s really his name) remarked one day to Giants manager Alvin Dark that Perry had some pop in his bat.
“No way,” Dark replied. “There’ll be a man on the moon before Gaylord Perry hits a home run.”
Six years later, Perry was established as a pitcher with The Right Stuff on the mound (a 20-game winner and All Star) and a swing straight from the Dark Side of the Moon. Dark’s prediction was correct. Going into the 1969 season, Perry was a lifetime .141 hitter with zero home runs.
On July 20, 1969, Perry was the starting pitcher for the Giants against the Dodgers. At 1:17 pm, an announcement came at Candlestick Park that Apollo 11 had touched down on the moon. A moment of silence ensued to pray for the astronauts’ safe return to Earth.
Thirty-four minutes later, in his 485th career at-bat, Gaylord Perry connected on his first career home run. Perry launched five more cosmic clouts before his career ended, including one at age 42 when playing for the Braves.
Moon Man Minton
Maybe it’s the San Francisco Giants who share astral affiliations to the Moon. The Giants once had a relief pitcher named Greg Minton whose nickname was The Moon Man.
Light years before Mariano Rivera became famous for using mostly one pitch, Minton utilized a devastating sinker that was so good, he’d go weeks without throwing any other pitch.
Minton discovered the pitch by accident. He used to have a high leg kick and long stride to the mound. To protect an injured knee, Minton shortened his stride, and the results were out of this world.
From 1979-81, the Moon Man didn’t give up any gopherballs, moonshots or Moon Shots. In all, he went 269 1/3 innings without allowing a home run. It remains the longest stretch without a home run in known baseball history.
The "Moon Man" nickname was bestowed upon him by a minor league manager who thought he was starry-eyed. The nickname stuck and his gravity-defying lifestyle was fitting for the nickname. He was an outdoor enthusiast — snorkeling, deep-sea diving, skateboarding, camping, dirt bike riding, skydiving — and known for his hijinks.
In 1972, Minton was partying with teammates in the minor leagues and decided to dive off the second floor of an apartment complex into a pool. He didn’t realize the depth of the pool and woke up the next day in the hospital with 12 stitches in his head.
In a real-life twist to the script of Bull Durham, Minton once turned on the sprinklers of the minor league ballpark in Amarillo, flooding the field so he could leave one day early before the end of the season.
The Moon Man did not Apollo-gize for his actions.
And neither am I for all these Lunar-tic puns.
Josh, since you’re talking so much about the moon today, there’s a story you may have heard already given you’re involvement with the Dodgers. First, when they were still in Brooklyn, the Dodgers had a pitcher named Billy Loes. He was know for a couple of odd quotes: One, he told reporters he never won 20 games in a season, because “if you do it once, they’ll want you to do it every year.” Second, after a game in which he booted an easy grounder back to the mound, he was asked why that happened, he said, “I lost it in the sun.” A few years later in LA, Sandy Koufax mishandled a ball during a night game, and when he went back to the dugout, Don Drydale asked him what happened. Koufax replied “I lost it in the moon."