I wrote about a man who was perhaps the most unlikely “hero” in baseball history, an ordinary man who went beyond extraordinary, all the way to preternatural.

His name? Floyd Giebell.

His last name rhymes with “feeble,” but for two hours and thirty nine minutes in 1940, he was anything but.

Well, I guess last week’s three-way debate over #1 is over for now. Last week, the ESPN computers, the Sagarin computer and the AP voters came up with three different number ones: Texas, Alabama, Georgia.

But this week:

* Texas lost to Oklahoma on the game’s final play, despite holding the Sooners to only 238 yards of offense. Arch Manning threw two critical interceptions, and the Longhorns also allowed a blocked punt.

* The other two played each other and Georgia won.

So the debate between those three is settled, and Georgia emerged as the kingpin, but that raised a new three-way debate.

• ESPN’s system now says Ohio State is #1, despite their loss.
• The AP voters prefer Georgia.
• Sagarin’s system points to Notre Dame!

Through games of October 10, 2026. Click any ranking heading to sort from best (lowest number) to worst; click again to reverse. Empty rankings always go to the bottom.

AP rankings worse than 25th are unofficial – but are based on the same logic that creates the top 25.

Team	Sagarin	ESPN SP+	AP
Notre Dame	1	3	2
Georgia	2	2	1
Ohio State	3	1	4
Alabama	4	8	6
Miami-Florida	5	4	3
Indiana	6	5	5
Texas	7	6	7
Oregon	8	12	27
LSU	9	9	22
Texas Tech	10	10	10
Missouri	11	13	13
UCLA	12	18	12
Utah	13	7	11
Mississippi	14	16	9
Tennessee	15	15	14
Oklahoma	16	30	30
BYU	17	11	8
Iowa	18	24	17
Houston	19	20	20
Nebraska	20	14	29
Kentucky	21	47	15
Mississippi State	22	28	16
Southern California	23	21	19
Florida	24	32	32
Northwestern	25	17	25
Wisconsin	26	34	26
Texas A&M	27	46
South Carolina	28	37
Wake Forest	29	35	21
Arizona	30	19	28
Louisville	31	25
Baylor	32	27
Auburn	33	33
Pittsburgh	34	36
Oklahoma State	35	22	18
Michigan	36	23
Penn State	37	38
Boise State	38	42	23
Clemson	39	61
North Carolina	40	56
Purdue	41	62
SMU	42	26	24
Duke	43	45	33
Florida State	44	54
Illinois	45	53
Central Florida(UCF)	46	57
Minnesota	47	60
Washington	48	52
Virginia Tech	49	39
Virginia	50	44

Scoreboard

Sagarin

ESPN

AP‘

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In other, less interesting results:

Indiana was very fortunate to leave Nebraska with a win. They trailed 17-6 in the fourth quarter, and were outplayed the entire game. Nebraska held on to the ball for 40 minutes and ran 83 offensive plays, compared to 44 plays in 20 minutes for Indiana. Indiana was successful on only one of 10 third-down conversions. If you look at the stats, you’d think Nebraska won by three TDs. But that’s not how it went down. The only thing that really matters is what is on the scoreboard at the end of the game. Indiana won 20-17.

Some takeaways from this game:

1) Nebraska is really good. I didn’t realize that. It’s outrageous that they were unranked with a 5-0 record.

2) Indiana showed some real grit in coming back to win against a team that was dominating them.

3) Indiana is going to have its hands full with Ohio State next week, even though the Hoosiers will be at home.

———————–

Well, I guess I can stop talking about Florida. After having been vanquished by unranked South Carolina, the Gators’ roller coaster ride through the AP voting has placed them back where they started – unranked.

The Gators had some good moments this week, but poor pass defense and three turnovers proved costly. By the way, that was South Carolina’s first conference win after three defeats.

—————

#10 LSU lost to unranked Kentucky 35-34 in OT. Weirdly enough, Kentucky won last week by the exact same score. The computers still like LSU, but the AP dropped them all the way to #22.

#13 Oregon also lost, to #21 UCLA. Neither team moved the ball well in a 17-15 game. I don’t know whether that was great D or lackluster O. The computers still like Oregon, but they have dropped all the way out of the AP rankings.

There is no consensus this week about the top team. Sagarin says it’s Alabama after they utterly demolished #16 Mississippi State; the AP scribes say Texas; ESPN’s SP+ system says Georgia. Alabama plays Georgia next week. If either of those teams dominates the other, they might end up in the #1 spot on all three systems.

The Florida Gators again provided the most interesting story of the week. In the past two weeks they were the team that jumped the most in the AP rankings, soaring from nowhere to #8 in the nation, thanks mostly to the drubbing they administered to #4 (at the time) Ole Miss. This week it seemed that their ascent had just been the initial climb of a roller coaster, as they became the ranked team with the largest drop, after being shellacked by Missouri 45-17. They showed some critical vulnerability on the defensive side of the ball, as they allowed Missouri to compile 560 yards from scrimmage. Things are not going to be easy for the Gators this year, as they drew a tough schedule. Later this month, they will have to play Texas and Georgia on successive weeks.

The AP ranking that astounds me is BYU. They were rated #10 in the AP poll last week, and did everything possible against TCU to demonstrate that they were NOT a top ten team. Their QB passed for 62 yards on 11-for-24. They accumulated only 216 total yards against a mediocre team (outside of Sagarin’s top 50). So what did the voters do? Promoted them to #8! Well, in two weeks they will play Notre Dame, so we’ll learn whether they are for real.

Shout-out of the week: Braden Atkinson, QB for Oregon State, was 31-for-34 for 427 yards and 5 TDS. He also leads all FBS college QBs in passing yardage for the season.

Scoreboard.

This week’s big story is Florida, which has vaulted from “unranked” to #8 in just two weeks, with wins over Auburn and Ole Miss. They showed a powerful offense against Ole Miss, scoring 52 points and grinding out about 500 yards from scrimmage. They dominated the time of possession, 37-23 against a team that had been in the top five, so the voters got a wake-up call.

The other major surprise was that Wisconsin proved better than expected, handing Penn State their first loss. The Badgers didn’t show much offensive pop, and their QB was 18/38 with three INTs, but their D-squad won the game. They held Penn State to just 233 yards of offense, dropping them off the rankings chart.

The pattern we noticed earlier is still there, although not quite as extreme: the big disagreements are overwhelmingly in the “humans like them more” direction. The writers rank BYU tenth in the nation when I suppose they would not even be among the top ten teams in either the SEC or the Big 10.

The big surprise to me – I guess maybe Iowa really is that good. The humans think so and the computer thinks so. I remain skeptical, but I can be won over.

Were there other streaks less likely than Joe’s.

Yes, but only one.

If all players had equal ability, then Joe DiMaggio’s hit streak would be the least likely by far, simply because it was the longest by far. Think of it this way: no other player in history ever had a 46 game hit streak, but DiMaggio had 11 of them! (Games 1-46 of his famous streak, all the way to games 11-56). He’s light years beyond anyone else.

But here’s the thing: all players do not have equal ability. The odds against my hitting in two consecutive games would be greater than the odds of DiMaggio hitting in 56. I won’t be getting a chance, but unequal ability also affects the odds in the real world.

Hit streaks are a factor of two things:

(1) How likely was a player to hit in each game?
(2) How many games did he play?

In turn, factor one has two components

(1a) How many times did he get to the plate?
(1b) How likely was he to get a hit each time?

Joe DiMaggio was almost uniquely positioned among modern players to succeed in factor one.

(1a) He played for a great offensive team, and batted near the top of the line-up, so he batted frequently. His likelihood would have been even higher if he had batted lead-off, because he would have come to the plate an additional .33 times per game. That doesn’t sound like much, but it would have made his streak four times more likely!
(1b) He was a great hitter who didn’t walk much, so he had a high likelihood of getting a hit in each at bat. He was far more likely to get a hit in any given appearance than, for example, Ted Williams, because Williams walked a lot, and walks don’t count toward a hit streak.

On the other hand, DiMaggio didn’t rank very high on factor two in 1941.

(2) He played in only 139 games, meaning that he only had 84 opportunities for a 56 game single-season streak. Any streak begun in game 85 or later would have to end before it could reach 56.

The great achievement of DiMaggio’s streak rests on the value of an exponent. Sure, he had an 80% likelihood to get a hit in any given game, but any likelihood taken to the 56th power becomes a very small decimal. Even with Joe D’s great ability, the odds against that hit streak were about 8000-to-1.

And yet, there was another hit streak of only 33 games that was not only less likely than Joe’s 56, but far less likely.

DiMaggio’s streak was highly unlikely, even with DiMaggio’s hot hitting that year. If you were to replay DiMaggio’s season again and again on an infinite loop with our statistical model of his 1941 performance, he would reach 56 or more every 7,797 seasons. It was a statistical anomaly, even with expectations raised in deference to the talent of the great DiMag.

But Uggla’s streak was beyond anomalous and into the territory of miraculous. Dan Uggla was less likely to hit in 33 consecutive games than DiMaggio was to hit in 56. Far less likely. About 16 times less likely. In order to match the statistical probability of Uggla’s streak, DiMaggio would have had to hit in 69 consecutive games.

Somehow, Uggla hit in 33 consecutive games despite having relatively few plate appearances per game and a very low probability of getting a hit in any one of them. How did it happen? Uggla, a mediocre hitter, simply went on one of the all-time hot streaks. In those 33 games, he batted .377 with 15 homers. During the rest of the year, Uggla batted .194. That 183-point difference is uncanny.

DiMaggio batted .408 during the streak and “only” .321 the rest of the year, but it isn’t especially strange for a hitter of DiMaggio’s caliber to have a long hot streak in which he maintains a .400 average. In 1939, Joe D was batting .443 for the entire season as late as July 13. The explanation for 1941 is not that Joe D avoided hitless games. He had many of them, 25 to be exact. The magic of 1941 is how those 25 hitless games were distributed. They managed to stay out of the streak. That distribution was rare, but there was really no radical upswing in his performances. It is not unusual for DiMaggio to hit like DiMaggio.

But it is unusual for a .194 hitter to hit like DiMaggio, and Uggla did just that. DiMaggio’s OPS was 1.181 during his streak. Uggla’s was 1.200 in his.

Nobody can explain it. It just is.

Were there some streaks that were more predictable?

Yes. Sort of. There was never a streak of 30 or more that was an even-money bet, but there were a few that had a good chance to occur.

‘

If the model were to recreate Ed Delahanty’s season on that infinite loop I mentioned, it would reveal that Big Ed would post a 30-game streak approximately every five years. While DiMaggio was performing at the top of his game, and Uggla seemed to have signed a short-term pact with Satan, Delahanty was simply conducting business as usual. Yes, he batted .422 during the streak, but he also hit .406 in his other games. That mere 16-point difference compares to 87 for DiMaggio and 183 for Uggla.

Were there individual seasons that were even more streak-friendly, but didn’t produce one?

Yes, there is one that really stands out, and a few honorable mentions, but there is nothing in the past hundred years.

Hugh Duffy had the most likely season to produce a 30-game streak. No other season came close. He accumulated nearly five plate appearances per game and got a hit in more than 38% of his plate appearances. Both factors are close to all-time records at the modern pitching distance. He was so efficient in 1894 that he was about an even bet to pull off a 30-game streak, but he did not. He did reach 26.

Of the eight seasons most likely to produce a 30-game hit streak, only three actually did.

Note that George Sisler has two seasons on the list. His 1920 season did not produce a 30-game streak, but his 1922 season more than made up for it with a 41-game streak, which remained the 20th-century record until DiMaggio obliterated it in 1941, and still ranks third in the century behind DiMaggio and Pete Rose.

It was, for the most part, another week of jobber games, with the big powers posting huge victories over their designated patsies. Two of those are worth discussing.

James Madison posted an outrageous 87-3 victory over the mighty Wagner Seahawks. What a day for their placekicker, who got to kick twelve extra points. That score makes it sound like JMU piled it on, but I took a deep dive into that game, and they absolutely did not. They played everyone, and they just kept scoring. They used eleven different receivers, and none of them caught more than three passes. Seven different players rushed the ball. They scored three touchdowns on punt returns, tying an NCAA record. Their offense was just unstoppable. You may remember that they somewhat unexpectedly made the playoffs last year, and while they didn’t win, they managed to score 34 points against Oregon with 509 yards of offense, so they know how to move the ball.

Miami took a narrow 77-0 lead into the fourth quarter. The teams then agreed to shorten the final quarter by five minutes, apparently citing the Geneva Convention. I’m not fuckin’ witcha. That really happened. The announcers always say, “It looks like they’re not going to give up.” Florida A&M said “fuck that” and went home early.

In real games:

Speaking of Oregon, they have proved to be the disappointment of the year so far. They started the season at #2 in the preseason rankings. They looked vulnerable against Boise State in game one, causing a plunge to #6. They lost this week, although favored by 23.5 against unranked Oklahoma State. It’s not like they lost to a surprising powerhouse. Oklahoma State lost last week to fucking Tulsa! This week’s loss dropped the Ducks to 21st in the polls – and Sagarin says they’re overrated!

#4 Texas made an improbable comeback against #1 THE Ohio State University. They trailed by twenty going into the final quarter, but scored three TDs in that final period while shutting THE down. Before that game, AP No. 1 teams had been 197-0 when holding a 20-point fourth-quarter lead. Since nobody in the country roots for THE Ohio State University unless they either attended the school or live in Columbus, about 99% of the nation was as thrilled as I was with my Longhorns. Hook ’em Horns!

(Why am I cheering for my grad school instead of my alma mater? I went to Fordham. How bad are they? Well, they have about the same chance of winning as The Really Rottens in Scooby’s Laff-A-Lympics. I’m not exaggerating. According to Wikipedia, the Really Rottens had a record of 2-21-1 on that series. Fordham’s record was a nearly identical 3-21 over the past two seasons.)

Michigan got a measure of redemption this week after last week’s embarrassing win-not-win debacle against Western Michigan. The Wolverines defeated #11 Oklahoma. So the eleventh-rated team in the nation did worse against the Wolverines than Western Michigan.

As I mentioned last week, the spread on the Texas Tech game seemed absurd. #13 Tech was favored by nearly four touchdowns over Oregon State. Tech did win, but Oregon State was actually ahead early in the fourth.

#19 Washington struggled in what was supposed to be a jobber game against Utah State. The Huskies came into the game favored by 28.5 against a team that had just lost to an FCS opponent, but the final score was 16-14. Utah State is part of the newly reconstituted Pac-12, which is not back up to 12 yet, but has managed to cobble together eight mediocre football teams – six more than last year!

#21 Iowa, 14-point favorites, needed two last-quarter field goals to overcome Iowa State, including a 42-yarder to break the tie with 15 seconds left.

Boise State beat Memphis 38-20. They were effectively the two leading contenders for the Group-of-Six CFP route, and Memphis actually led 20-17 at halftime before Boise pulled away. The NCAA specifically singled it out as potentially important to the playoff picture.

Illinois State beat Northern Illinois 28-24. That’s an FCS team beating an FBS team. That’s the fourth FCS-over-FBS upset already this season. Last year, FCS teams managed only four such victories all season. The jobbers are fighting back: Tarleton State over Bowling Green, Idaho State over Utah State, The Citadel over Charlotte, and now Illinois State over Northern Illinois. The most chaotic was The Citadel’s 43-41 victory over Charlotte in three OT’s.

Useless fact of the week #1: Sagarin’s two best college football teams are both in Indiana. That sentence sounds as though somebody accidentally loaded the basketball ratings.

Useless fact o’ the week #2: Every football team in the new Pac-12 is “Something State.”

This week’s human/computer comparison:

Last week’s overview

There isn’t much to talk about in week one. You know the drill. The big teams play at home, padding their resumes against jobbers.

Jobbers?

Maybe you remember the wrestling “jobbers.” That’s really what they were called, and their “job” was to make the headliners look good. Back in the day, the televised wrestling matches served no purpose other than to develop and market story lines for the live events. In the TV matches, no headliners clashed. The heroes du jour would defeat some poor jobbers in short order with “scientific” moves. The main villains would abuse other jobbers with trash talk and dirty tricks, while boiling over with braggadocio about how they would do the same to our heroes in the live events.

The same jobbers came out every week to get slaughtered. Among the notorious perpetual losers were such luminaries as The Duke of Dorchester, Iron Mike Sharpe, the Brooklyn Brawler, Barry Horowitz, and Leaping Lanny Poffo, who happened to be the son of one wrestling legend, Angelo Poffo, and the brother of another, The Macho Man. The first four usually lost to heroes, while Poffo normally squared off against heels. Four of those guys were at least trying to be colorful, with the nicknames and all. Iron Mike Sharpe even billed himself as “Canada’s Greatest Athlete.” (Sorry, Gretzky!) As for the fifth guy, I don’t know what the deal was with Barry Horowitz. He could have been “Bart Howitzer” or “the Florida Flash,” but no-o-o-o-o. He just remained plain old Barry Horowitz. That’s not a moniker likely to strike fear into your heart, unless he’s auditing your tax returns.

Anyway, discarding my light racism and moving on to the real topic of this post, college football also has its jobber matches. Uninspiring programs manage to make big bucks by traveling to the home stadiums of powerhouse teams, fully expecting to lose by 40 or more. You recognize some of the names: Bethune-Cookman, UAB, Austin Peay, Lindenwood, Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Southern Utah, Albany, Akron, Charleston Southern, Gardner-Webb, Western Kentucky, Western Michigan, Western Carolina … basically any team that starts with “Western.”

As a general matter of honor, there are two conventions that apply to jobber games: (1) the big teams usually only schedule these teams in the first weeks of the season, before conference play begins, although the SEC sneaks in a “cupcake week” in November; (2) the big teams shouldn’t run up the score any higher than 70. Sometimes the jobbers are so weak that the big teams go over 70 unintentionally, even when they play all of their reserves, because their fourth-stringers keep scoring. They try to tamp it down. They use every running back and every receiver. By the end of the game they’re calling plays for members of the marching band, but even that sometimes fails. Sometimes the chubby tuba guy rushes for a first down.

Unlike the wrestling jobbers, one of the patsy teams occasionally receives the smile of Lady Fortune and wins a game against a power team. A few years back, NIU defeated #5 Notre Dame on the Irish home field in South Bend. That was the first win in history for a Mid-American Conference team against an AP top-five team, following 51 consecutive losses. If you saw that coming, you could have been a rich man. NIU paid off 25-1 on a bet to win outright. It has not been reported how much action was on NIU to win outright, but probably not much, unless Nostradamus is still alive and follows American college football.

No such surprise happened this week, but maybe one should have. Western Michigan had mighty Michigan defeated 12-7, and the Broncos were celebrating on the field after Michigan missed a last-ditch Hail Mary. But it was not to be. Michigan got the do-over treatment formerly reserved only for the Russian Olympic basketball team. They were going to get more Hail Marys than a full rosary. Officials called for a review. Although TV replays showed the clock hitting zero before the ball hit the hands of a Western Michigan defender, officials ruled there was one left on the official game clock. Mary answered the second prayer, and the Wolverines got the W. Win or not, are they so weak that they almost lost to a MAC team? We’ll find out next week when they face Oklahoma.

The other jobber games went as expected. The big teams put up a lot of scores in the 50s and 60s, and their opponents put up a lot of single figures.

There were a few legit games:

– #2 Oregon took on always-tough Boise State, and emerged with a 34-27 win.

– #4 Notre Dame took on Wisconsin, which sounds like a good match, but the Badgers’ program has been struggling in recent years, so the Irish won by four TDs.

– Ole Miss and Louisville, both in the top 25, battled to a standstill. Ole Miss broke the tie with three seconds left.

– LSU-Clemson looked like it would be a good match-up, but LSU was much better than expected, or Clemson much worse, or both. It was a blow-out, 51-10.

Preseason rankings:

Sagarin has seven teams standing above the others.

1 THE Ohio State University A = 102.33
2 Oregon A = 101.04
3 Notre Dame A = 100.33
4 Indiana A = 99.79
5 Texas A = 97.91
6 Georgia A = 96.82
7 Miami-Florida A = 95.22

The human polls fill out the top seven slots with the same teams in a slightly different order.

– I suppose Oregon will drop behind the Irish after posting a close-call victory against Boise while Notre Dame was running roughshod over a Big Ten team. The Ducks may even fall lower than #3.

– LSU looked so strong they may sneak past some of the big seven above.

Scoreboard.

As I expected, Oregon dropped on both the computer rankings and the human polls, while Notre Dame improved on both.

The chart below lists the AP top 25, and their Sagarin rankings. The final column shows how many places higher they are rated by the sportswriters. I suppose that means that the teams at the top are theoretically overrated and the teams at the bottom are underrated, but:

(1) I don’t put much stock in the computers after one week. They don’t have enough info to make a worthwhile calculation.

(2) Humans love to vote up teams outside the Big Two (SEC and Big Ten) because humans are dreamers and want bullies to topple. I’m no exception. I would love to see Texas Tech, my nephew’s alma mater, topple the SEC and Big Ten powers, because I am a dreamer as well. I would also love to see Fordham beat Ohio State and Don Quixote defeat the windmill.

WTF o’ the week:

Texas Tech is favored by 26.5 over Oregon State. Sagarin suggests they are only about 13 points apart. Vegas is setting the odds as if it were a jobber game.

Just after his high school days, when young John Dikšas, aka Johnny Dickshot, was the athletic superstar of the Lithuanian-American community in Waukegan, his baseball coach in the local industrial league called him “Baby Dick.”

So not only was “Ugly” one of the most unflattering nicknames in baseball history, it may actually have been an upgrade.

Johnny didn’t care. He had fun playing the game, and had even more fun embellishing his legend for sportswriters. He embraced his name, referring to himself as “the ugliest man in baseball.” As he told the story, a fan once approached him and asked to stand at his side, because “I want my wife to see you, so she’ll appreciate me.”

Although he was a multi-sport star in Waukegan, and his best sport seems to have been basketball, he claimed to have chosen baseball because of the steel plate in his head. A hammer once dropped on his head and he felt nothing through the steel plate. If a hammer couldn’t bother him, he reasoned, neither could a beanball or a hard line drive.

The irony of his self-deprecating humor is that the man really could hit. He played parts of six major league seasons, and once finished third in the AL in batting average. In 1939, Casey Stengel watched Dickshot hit in spring training and declared that the big galoot had the inside track on the centerfield spot for the Boston Bees. Then he watched Johnny field, and sold him to the Giants, who soon shipped him back to the minors. They didn’t call Johnny “Rubber Gloves” for nothing.

It was in the minors that Ugly played himself handsome. He was the toast of the town in Buffalo, Jersey City and Hollywood, having batted higher than .350 in all three cities. Those clubs were at the level just below the majors, so Johnny was so close to big league stardom that he could nearly grasp it. If Buffalo had been the Big Apple, Johnny would have been Broadway John.

But Buffalo is Buffalo, and Johnny was Ugly Dickshot. He made the best of it, which is all life can expect from any of us.

Further reading: Blogger David White gathered some of the best Dickshot yarns and spun them together with a nice bio on this page.

Cuckoo Christy was a Cincinnati outfielder who led the NL in on-base percentage and finished second in batting average in his rookie year. That was not as impressive as it sounds. That era had different requirements for the league lead in percentage-based stats. The top four qualifiers for the batting average championship were part-time players by today’s standards! Cuckoo himself had only 329 at-bats.

But the man could hit. Cuckoo never hit a major league homer, but even without any power, a .350 batting average and the league lead in on-base percentage represented an impressive level of achievement for a rookie. Yet Cuckoo was essentially a one-year wonder. He was back in Columbus by the end of the following season. Because he batted so well in 1926 and so infrequently after it, Cuckoo’s lifetime major league batting average was an impressive .315! That was no fluke. His career in the minors spanned 15 seasons, mostly at high levels, and his lifetime average was .310.

So why didn’t he get a longer look in the big show? Well, they didn’t call him Cuckoo because he collected novelty clocks. He deserved his nickname and embraced it.

A local paper once described him out on the town in “a brown ensemble splashed with cuckoos.”

He once held out and announced that the fans could decide what he was worth.

During batting practice, he chased down fly balls from the sidecar of a motorcycle.

During real games, he did somersaults in the outfield. The history of the minor league St. Paul Saints recounts, “One of the Saints’ impressive youngsters was 22-year-old, 5’6 ½” center fielder and leadoff batter Walter (Seacap) Christensen. Christensen also was known as ‘Cuckoo Christy,’ an extrovert whose antics pleased the fans, but sometimes drove managers up the wall. He enjoyed doing somersaults in the outfield, usually when the ball was not in play. Sometimes, however, he would somersault while waiting for a lazy fly ball to come down.” Unfortunately he lost at least one game with his shenanigans. In “Nuggets on the Diamond,” Dick Dobbins wrote, “With the (Mission) Reds leading by one run in the bottom of the ninth and runners on base, Christensen went after a fly ball, did a somersault, then dropped the ball. The Reds lost the game, and an angry (manager Red) Killefer chased Christensen all the way into the centerfield clubhouse.”

The fact that Cuckoo could let his shenanigans bleed into the box score may go a long way toward explaining why a .315 hitter had such a brief NL career.

Yes, that was really his name.

And not by an accident of birth. He chose to be Tony Suck. He was born Charles A. Zuck in Chicago on November 11, 1858. Somewhere along the way, for reasons unrecorded and shrouded in mystery, Charles Zuck decided that what his baseball career really needed was a new identity: Tony Suck.

According to the OED, the term “to suck” did not acquire its modern meaning until 1971, so poor Tony Suck could not have known how we would view his name. But suck he did. Sure, there have been other major league hitters who truly sucked. Bill Bergen, Casey Wise and Ray Oyler, all of whom had lifetime batting averages in the .170s, come immediately to mind. But none of them sucked like Tony Suck. His major-league batting average of .151, with an OPS+ of 24, was only the tip of his sucking iceberg, because he achieved even that minimal level of success in the Union Association, a marginal major league at best. His batting average in a brief NL stint was a perfect .000. He couldn’t even hit in the minors. After a year out of pro baseball, he attempted an 1886 comeback in the Southern Association, which at that time was a Class B league, and hit a sparkling .091 (8 for 88) for the Augusta Browns.

Could Tony have stayed in the game with his glove skills, à la Bill Bergen or Ray Oyler? I doubt it. He played 32 major league games at catcher and made 32 errors. He played 15 games at shortstop and made 16 errors. He also subbed in the outfield, where his fielding percentage was .783. While fielding stats from the 1880s are misleading when viewed out of context because the game was very different, it does not seem that Tony had enough other skills to offset his weak bat.

He just plain sucked.

There are those who say that our names play a part in determining our fates, and therefore that a guy named Duke Pfister is more likely to become a successful boxer than a guy named Murray Finkelstein. There is undoubtedly at least a grain of truth in this axiom, thus explaining why a young man named Randall Poffo thought his wrestling career might go better as Randy Savage. I wonder if things would have worked out better for a youthful Charles Zuck if he had changed his name to Charlie Starr.

I would love to tell you some colorful stories about Pebbly Jack Glasscock. From his name, I imagined that he had to turn to baseball after a failed career as the world’s worst pirate. If only he were simply John Anderson, nicknamed Glasscock for his ineptitude in the bedroom, and then Pebbly Jack because he constantly ran his ship aground. After years cluelessly adrift on the high seas or haplessly beached on the shore, he finally shivered his last timber, buckled his last swash, and turned in his cutlass for a bat.

None of that is true.

He does have one colorful element in his bio. An 1886 newspaper claimed that Pebbly Jack originated the term “charley horse,” supposedly because limping ballplayers reminded him of his old horse named Charley.

Other than that dubious bit of etymology, he was achromatic. He was a family man whose only permanent address in 89 years of life was the West Virginia house where he was born. And he was all business at shortstop. Glasscock was his real name, and he was nicknamed Pebbly Jack for his meticulous groundskeeping around his portion of the infield. He removed all the pebbles to assure a true bounce, an obsession that would have made Freddie Lindstrom‘s life considerably happier forty years later. This attention to detail, as well as his brilliant fielding, led sportswriters to dub him, “The King of the Shortstops.” He played the position barehanded, and led NL shortstops in fielding percentage seven times. He could hit as well. He led the National League twice in hits, twice in WAR, and once in batting average. When his major league career was over, he played until age 43 in the minors. There are advocates for his Hall of Fame induction, and his 62 WAR justifies their advocacy. That tops the career WAR of eight shortstops currently in the Hall. One credible sabermetrician considers Pebbly Jack to have been the best shortstop of the 19th century, and he was certainly the best of the 1880s.

Silly name; serious ballplayer.

There have been so many colorful nicknames that I could have chosen a completely different roster.

Well, except for Ugly Dickshot. He’s the top name on any list. He’s the Babe Ruth of this category.

For reference, here is what the boys really looked like.

From the left: Cuckoo, Pebbly Jack, Ugly, Suck.

Interestingly, three of those guys were very good at baseball. The other was Tony Suck. He really sucked.

Original headline: Joshua Báez becomes the FIRST PLAYER EVER to hit THREE HOME RUNS in his MLB debut!

They’ve been playing major league baseball more than 150 years, and nobody had ever done this before. The kid hit a 449-foot homer to center on his first MLB pitch – and he was just getting started. He didn’t merely hit three homers in the game; he did it in his first three plate appearances!

UPDATE: Baez is now 6-for-41 (.146). He has only had three hits since that first game, so he has batted .081 (3-for-37) in that stretch, with one additional homer. Several of you guys suggested that his first game was the ultimate flash-in-a-pan, a case of a guy who just happened to get hot at exactly the right moment. It seems that you guys were correct. Will that game be his entire highlight reel, ala Keith McDonald (see below). I guess we have to stay tuned to find out.

Two previous players had homered in their first two at-bats. One was a solid ballplayer, but the other was a career minor leaguer whose first two major league at-bats were little short of miraculous.

* Bob Nieman stayed in the majors 12 years after he accomplished the feat in 1951. He was a good hitter (.295 lifetime with an OPS+ of 132), but he never made the all-star team, and never reached as many as 75 RBI in a season.

* An obscure catcher, Keith McDonald, did it in 2000. His entire major league career consisted of only 9 at-bats, although he did add one more homer before he headed back down to Memphis. Three homers in nine at-bats gave him a lifetime slugging average well over 1.000! That performance was a total fluke. He kicked around the minor leagues for 13 years and averaged only six homers per year! In fact, he hit more homers in his 9 major league at-bats than he did in an entire season in the Florida State League in 1996, when he had 410 at-bats!