Tony Santillan’s line in San Francisco put a familiar baseball quirk back in the spotlight, but the more eye-catching Reds question is one with a clear answer: the last Cincinnati player to lead the league in RBIs was Dave Parker.
Parker, the Cobra, topped the National League in 1985 with 125 RBIs. The Yankees’ Don Mattingly led MLB that season with 145.
Before Parker, George Foster and Johnny Bench each led the league three times. Foster’s club-record 149 RBIs came in 1977.
The other Reds to do it were Sherry Magee with 76 in 1918, Frank McCormick with 128 in 1939 and Ted Kluszewski with 141 in 1954. And soon to be...
Sal Stewart.
Santillan’s win, though, is the kind of thing that leaves people shaking their heads. He gave up three runs in the eighth inning, turning a 6-3 game into a 9-3 deficit.
Then the Reds erupted for seven runs in the ninth and won 10-9, which left Santillan as the pitcher of record when the comeback happened. By rule, that made him the winner even though he did nothing to earn it.
Rule 9.17(b) says an official scorer can give the win to a more effective reliever if the first one was ineffective. In this case, that would have been Emilio Pagan, who finished the game without allowing a run.
The complaint here is simple: scorers should use that rule.
The discussion of odd baseball rules didn’t stop there. On the question of a runner thrown out at second after a strikeout that gets changed to ball four by ABS, the answer was that the runner is safe at second.
Once the strike call becomes a walk, the batter goes to first and the runner is awarded second. That leaves the pitcher staring at a mess instead of two outs and nobody on.
Another reader asked about the Reds putting Eugenio Suarez and TJ Friedl on waivers and neither being claimed. The answer was blunt: yes, that is a punch in the gut.
Waivers are often used to gauge trade interest, and there are revocable and irrevocable versions. The Reds used irrevocable waivers on Suarez and Friedl, meaning if another club had claimed them, they would have been gone.
The mistake, in this view, was not keeping it quiet so the players didn’t know.
There was also a sharp look at Tommy John surgery. A study found that 90% of players return to the same level after the operation, while pitchers come back with the same success rate only 75% of the time. The bigger surprise: 38.8% of current MLB pitchers have had Tommy John surgery.
On Hunter Greene, the answer was that he could try to become a subtler pitcher like Gary Nolan once did after injuring his arm, but that’s not the likely path. Nolan made that switch before Tommy John surgery existed. Today, pitchers often throw even harder after the procedure, so Greene is more likely to try to become Jacob Misiorowski.
The column also drifted into umpiring, where Doug Harvey was named the favorite. He was described as a force who ran games with an iron head, er, fist.
Players called him God. One story involved Harvey and a young Hunter Wendelstedt arriving at a ballpark while TV cameras waited at the umpires’ entrance.
The writer intercepted them, warned them about the cameras and pointed them to another door. After that, he said, he was a big man with Harvey and Wendelstedt.
There was even a personal note about nicknames. Marty Brennaman never gave one during the second inning appearances, though Joe Nuxhall called him Harold, Eric Davis and Paul O’Neill called him Halbert, and Gary Hughes called him Hurryin’ Hal. With Brennaman, it was just Hal.
And when asked whether harness racing had become more appealing than baseball, the answer was no - baseball is still the writer’s life. But the horse racing people, he said, are far more quotable. Baseball players lean on clichés, while a horse has never said, “You misquoted me.”
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