The Daily Dose/June 19, 2019
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Funniest Guy
Leading Off
This will be the third consecutive day we’ve written about George Zabel, an otherwise undistinguished major league pitcher who on June 17, 1915, pitched 18 1/3 innings as a relief pitcher, the longest relief stint in major league history. On Monday we noted the feat in On This Date and yesterday in this space we added it our list of sports records that will never be broken.
Today we are taking it off that list. Not because we’ve changed our mind. We haven’t. No one will ever throw 18 ⅓ innings in a relief appearance in a major league game, but we removed it simply because neither of our baseball record books (by the Sporting News and the Elias Sports Bureau) list this as a record. This really wasn’t a bulletin because as we wrote the first item we remember it odd we hadn’t heard of this record before, because few know their way around a big league record book like we do.
But it’s not there. We checked and neither record book lists a record for Most Innings, Relief Pitcher, Game. There is a record listed for Most Innings Pitched, Game, (26) but that’s it which, when you think about it, makes sense. This isn’t the first time we haven’t found something in the record book we thought would be there: we once looked for the record for most runs in a season by a pinch-runner, and there is not a record listed for that feat, either.
After more thought than this vital issue probably deserved, we decided that to be included on our list of unbreakable sports records the mark must be listed in an official record book because if it isn’t it really isn’t a record, it is merely an achievement. Apologies are issued, and the three records on our Records That Will Never Be Broken List remain Wilt Chamberlain’s 55 rebounds in an NBA game, the Isner/Mahut 7-68 fifth set at Wimbledon and Johnny Vander Meer’s consecutive no-hitters.
Today At The Site
The Diary of a Nobody: Please, ring the bell at the front desk. It could save you some money. Today’s Diary.
Around 0500 there was another wizard who didn’t ring the bell…I heard him milling about out front, too…Usually, I don’t do this, but I made him wait until he either rang the bell or said something…In a bit he said something and I went out and he had a couple of waters and a phone charger and some Oreos…Usually I toss the water in with my compliments, but I was peeved enough to charge him full price.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life.
The drivel simply does not stop: please click on the button to read The Diary of a Nobody. $5.99 includes all entries, past, present, and future.
On This Date
In 2018 -The United States issues its 10 millionth patent. It was issued to the Raytheon Corporation for “a frequency modulated (coherent) laser detection and ranging system”. No, we don’t know what that means, either. America’s first patent act was signed by President Washington in April 1790, with a patent board consisting of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph and the first patent was issued later that year to one Samuel Hopkins for improvements in making pot and pearl ash.
In 1846 – The first recorded baseball game in America is played, at Elysian Park in Hoboken, New Jersey. Using rules written by Alexander Cartwright, the New York Nine defeated the New York Knickerbockers 23-1 in four innings. Under the Cartwright rules, innings were known as hands and today the site is the intersection of 11th and Washington streets, though there is a monument in a nearby median. The first baseball game in North America was played in Ontario, Canada, in 1938.
In 1971 – Carole King is at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first of five consecutive weeks with the double-sided hit It’s Too Late/I Feel the Earth Move. The songs also went to #1 in Canada and were Billboard’s third-biggest songs of the year. It’s Too Late also won the 1972 Grammy Award for Record of the Year. Though one of the most prolific and successful songwriters of the Rock Era, It’s Too Late/I Feel the Earth Move remain King’s only #1 songs as an artist.
Quotebook
To be free, the slave must first refuse the master’s gruel.
Vin Suprynowicz
Columnist, Las Vegas Review-Journal
Answer To The Last Trivia Question
The act who spent more weeks at #1 in a calendar year before Webb Pierce was Eddy Arnold and Tennessee Plowboys who spent 48 consecutive weeks at #1 with five different songs in 1948.
Today’s Stumper
How long did it take the United States to issue one million patents? – Answer next time!
