Adios, Julio?

New York also jettisoned 48-year-old Julio Franco, who hit only .200 in 50 at-bats with one home run and eight RBIs, and promoted Lastings Milledge from the minors. (The Associated Press)

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Julio Franco had said he wanted to play until he was 50, and it looked as if he might reach that plateau. He'd had some decent seasons as a hitter long after everyone else his age had hung up the spikes, and he has kept himself in top physical shape.

But apparently keeping Franco around to fulfill his ambition is a luxury the underachieving Mets can't afford. Whether Milledge lives up to the hype he's been accorded the past few years remains to be seen. Fantasy Leaguers everywhere have been anticipating his finally arriving in the majors to stay and seeing what he can do for their bottom lines.

As for Franco, I often tell the story about how I remember him as a hotshot prospect in the Phillies organization when I was in high school. He was a shortstop at the time, and perennial All-Star Larry Bowa was blocking his way. Then the Phillies made the infamous deal of Bowa and an untested Ryne Sandberg for light-hitting shortstop Ivan DeJesus. Apparently figuring DeJesus was the ultimate answer at short, the Phils turned around and included Franco in the equally infamous five-for-one deal for Von Hayes.

Franco has 2,576 career hits but might be approaching (or already passed) 3,000 if he hadn't taken time off from the majors on a few occasions, with sojourns playing in Japan and Mexico. Credit the Atlanta Braves from bringing him back at age 43, and the Mets for signing him as a free agent at 47.

If, indeed, this is it for Julio's career, that leaves only two active players, Roger Clemens and Jamie Moyer, who are older than I am!

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Trivia question 49: Who were the other four players in the Von Hayes deal between the Phillies and Indians?

Night of a bunch of stars

Today, I heard sports commentators lamenting the relative lack of long balls during last night's home run derby, particularly the fact that none reached the water of McCovey's Cove. I guess the folks at ESPN were upset because they stuck anchorman Kenny Mayne out in the cove in a kayak with a helmet-cam on his head. With no balls headed his way, he had no opportunity to get into a fracas out there.

Some of the talk the past few days has implied that the home run derby is becoming the main attraction of the All-Star break, eclipsing the interest of the game, itself. I'm assuming that's a lot of hype on the part of people with a vested interest in having viewers tune in to watch the sluggers.

Frankly, the home run derby is interesting to watch for about half an hour or so. When it drags on past my bedtime ... well, I really don't care that Vlad Guerrero hit one more over the fence than Alex Rios.

Then again, the All-Star Game isn't the thrill it once was. It used to be an opportunity to see American Leaguers face National Leaguers, something that only happened otherwise in October. Now, interleague play takes up an inordinate part of the regular-season schedule, negating the All-Star impact.

The large volume of televised games also detracts from the erstwhile Midsummer Classic. When I was growing up, you could watch Saturday afternoon broadcasts featuring Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek. And for a while, ABC did Monday night baseball, inexplicably with noted baseball nonfan Howard Cosell calling the games. Otherwise, you could tune in the Braves after Ted Turner started putting them on his cable network, but they really stunk in the '70s.

These days, we have networks televising games nationally several days of the week, and if you don't catch the contests in their entirety, you certainly can see the highlights.

What's so special about seeing Alex Rodriguez in the All-Star game when he's constantly on television, pictured in newspapers and magazines, and talked about ad infinitum on the radio.

And why would anyone want to tune in to see anything in which Barry Bonds is involved?

Oh, yeah. It counts. Home-field advantage in the World Series goes to the winner of whichever league proves victorious in the All-Star game.

Let's see ... since that went into effect in 2003, the American League has won home field each time. Since then, an AL team has won the Series twice, and the NL entry, twice.

My wife's birthday is tonight, so I'm taking her out to dinner instead of worrying about parking myself in front of the TV set. Sure, I'll probably tune in for the later stages of the game.

Just as long as Barry Bonds already has been removed for a pinch-runner.

9,999 and counting

Prior to the 1883 season, the National League put a franchise in Philadelphia, figuring a team in what then was America's second-largest city would fare better financially than the club it was replacing in Worcester, Mass.

The Philadelphia squad got off to a rocky start, to say the least. The Quakers, as they originally were called, played 98 games and lost 81 of them, giving up more than twice as many runs as they scored. Taking the pitcher's mound in a majority of games was a 20-year-old rookie named John Francis Coleman, who must have had either a strong sense of loyalty or a strong sense of humor: He surrendered 772 hits and 510 runs for the season while going 12-48.

The team became better known as the Phillies, but in 124 years its situation has rarely gotten all that much better. Besides a couple of isolated pennants, a dozen or so years of consistent winning and the magical season of 1980, the Phils have been associated with losing throughout most of their history.

And they're about to rack up their 10,000th loss as a franchise, an occasion some Philadelphians no doubt will celebrate in some kind of perverse tribute to the city's general sense of ineptitude.

Personally, I've always had a warm spot for Philly. My grandparents lived in the suburbs, just outside the city limits, and many of my fondest childhood memories are from there. Some of my earliest, too; I remember a visit to the Philadelphia Zoo in 1965 and still feel the pain of seeing the helium balloon I got there float away just as I was about to show it to my great-grandmother.

I'm too young, though, to remember what happened in Philadelphia in 1964, when the Phillies committed The Choke. For anyone who was there, the numbers still are agonizing four decades later: a 6.5-game lead on Sept. 20, with just 12 games to go, then 10 losses in a row and a tie for second place. My dad says that after one of those defeats, he was so disgusted that he threw his radio out the window.

My own memories of the Phillies start when they were lousy again, around 1970, when they used to give away 8-by-10 glossies of the players at the gas station (along with free road maps and guys checking your oil, all at 33 cents per gallon). So I ended up with a bunch of nice photos of the likes of Deron Johnson, Barry Lersch, Woodie Fryman and Byron Browne.

None of that meant much of anything to me until 1972, when everyone was talking about a new Phillies pitcher, Steve Carlton, who refused to lose. By the end of the year, he had racked up 27 wins for a team that posted a grand total of 59 victories, as far as I'm concerned the most remarkable accomplishment in baseball history.

By the following season, I listened to Phillies games on the radio every night, rapidly building enthusiasm for a team that managed, once again, to finish last.

In 1974, the situation started to look promising, with second baseman Dave Cash coming from the rival Pirates to provide a needed burst of energy and young third baseman Mike Schmidt leading the league in home runs while raising his batting average nearly 100 points.

The Phillies rose from third in '74 to second in '75 to their first National League East title during the Bicentennial. Three straight divisional championships, though, provided more frustration for long-suffering fans: Philadelphia faltered in the playoffs each fall.

Then came 1980, and as a freshman in college, I watched the Phillies finally put it all together. First was the playoff win over Houston, in which the final four games all went to extra innings. Then came the World Series against Kansas City, which had exorcised its own demons by finally beating the Yankees in the Royals' fourth try.

I've seen the deciding sixth game several times, but only on videotape. While it was being played live, I was obligated to be somewhere besides in front of a TV screen. That's the way it goes sometimes.

The strike of '81 started to erode my interest in baseball in general, and the Phillies in particular. I was attending school on the other side of Pennsylvania and had a whole lot else going on in my life.

I watched the "Wheeze Kids," featuring aging members of the '70s Big Red Machine, somehow make it to the '83 Series, only to be humiliated by Baltimore. A few years later, I was living in Pittsburgh and started the gradual process of switching my allegiance. (Oh, why didn't I move to Minneapolis?)

One like still remained from my years of following the Phillies: Schmidt, who in early 1987 was closing in on 500 home runs, which was a huge deal in the pre-steroid era. The Phillies happened to be visiting Three Rivers Stadium for a weekend series with Schmidt at 498. I saw him hit a home run on Friday night, then I returned for Saturday, April 18.

Steve Bedrosian had just coughed up a lead and the Phillies trailed, 6-5, going into the top of the eighth inning. The Phils got two runners aboard, and Don Robinson ran a 3-0 count on Schmidt. At that point, I figured I'd have to come back the next day, but Schmidt smacked the ball over the left-field wall, not only for No. 500 but to win the game for Philadelphia.

On April 23, 1989, I attended another Phillies-vs.-Pirates game at Three Rivers. Schmidt, now 38 years old, came to bat in the first inning against John Smiley and smashed the ball over the left-field wall.

"He always hits a homer when I see him!" I said to my companions as I stood and clapped.

Turns out that I never saw him in person again. A month later, mired in a slump, Schmidt announced his retirement. After that home run in Pittsburgh, he hit only one more, No. 548.

As for the Phillies, I cheered when they beat the Braves in the '93 playoffs, and I turned off the television when manager Jim Fregosi brought Mitch "Wild Thing" Williams in to pitch late in the sixth game of the World Series. I had a feeling about what might happen.

And that was about it. I don't have a rooting interest anymore in the team I loved as a kid, which is kind of a shame.

Then again, I probably shouldn't admit I used to love a team that's about to lose its 10,000th game.

All-Stars? The pitchers

The story goes that a guy tried to bluff his way into the American League team photo at the 1979 All-Star Game. Finally, he admitted he was an impostor.

"That's OK," said Cleveland pitcher Sid Monge. "So am I."

The possibly apocryphal tale illustrates how the Midsummer Classic often features players that don't quite go on to have the careers of the Schmidts and Carltons ... OK, the Seavers and the Fisks. At any rate, Monge is among those whose name sticks out a little more prominently in the annals of baseball because he was an All-Star for a day.

Monge actually was having a decent season when he got the call, compiling a 2.13 earned run average prior to the break on his way to a career year of 12-10, 2.40 ERA and 19 saves for the sixth-place Indians.

Some other pitchers who were All-Stars but aren't quite remembered in the same breath as Koufax:

• Jack Armstrong, Reds, 1990. "The All-American Boy" (although he, personally, was too young to remember the radio serial) entered the '90 season with six career wins but got off to a tremendous start, racking up an 8-1 record with a 1.55 ERA by the end of May. On July 5, he beat the Phillies to improve to 11-3, 2.28, and drew the All-Start start at Wrigley Field five days later. In two innings, he gave up one hit and struck out Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. But it all came crashing down quickly for Armstrong, who won only one more game in '90, then posted records the next three years of 7-13, 6-15 and 9-17, with three different teams. He pitched his final game in the majors in 1994, at age 29.

• Tommy Byrne, Yankees, 1950. Casey Stengel selected his hurler for the All-Star Game, but didn't send him to the mound, even though the contest went a then-record 14 innings. Byrne, who now is 87 years old, is one of my favorite pitchers from a statistical anomaly standpoint. Early in his career, he had extreme difficulty throwing strikes. But as long as Byrne was with the Yankees, he posted very good records. In 1949, for example, he went 15-7 while walking 179 batters in 196 innings. He toned it down a bit during his All-Star season, issuing 160 bases on balls in 203 innings while going 15-9. In 1951, though, he got off to a horrible start, walking a total of 36 batters in three starts and six relief appearances; at that point, New York GM George Weiss figured the team would be better off with Byrne pitching for the St. Louis Browns, where he went in exchange for someone named Stubby Overmire. Amazingly, Byrne resurfaced in New York after sinking to the high minors, and with much better control, he posted a career-best 16-5 record in 1955.

• Fred Frankhouse, Braves, 1934. The second All-Star game was held at New York's Polo Grounds, the home park of the Giants' Carl Hubbell. And this was the contest in which Hubbell struck out five consecutive future Hall of Famers: Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx, Simmons and Cronin. NL pitchers Van Lingle Mungo and Lon Warneke squandered an early lead, and even Dizzy Dean got slapped around a bit in his three innings of work. Mopping up in the ninth was Frankhouse, just the 10th pitcher ever to appear in an All-Star game, and he acquitted himself well, giving up just a walk to Charlie Gehringer. Frankhouse finished the season 17-9, then won 11 games for the '35 Braves, a team that won an NL-record-low 38 contests. Frankhouse finished a respectable 106-97 for his 13-year career and lived to be 85.

• Tyler Green, Phillies, 1995. The rookie righthander took an 8-4 record with a 2.81 ERA, including two complete-game shutouts, into the All-Star break. He pitched a scoreless fifth inning in an eventual 3-2 NL victory. Green's numbers following the break were downright scary: In 44 2/3 innings, he surrendered 53 earned runs, going 0-5 and raising his season's ERA to 5.31. He missed the entire '96 season because of injury, then struggled to a 10-16 record in his final two seasons.

• Lee Grissom, Reds, 1937, and Marv Grissom, Giants, 1954. The Grissoms probably were the most unlikely brothers to be All-Stars. Lee, who made baseball lore by rowing a boat over the Crosley Field wall during a flood, finished 12-17 the year he got the call; for what it's worth, the first two batters he faced in the '37 All-Star Game were Lou Gehrig and Earl Averill, and Grissom struck them both out. His record for his career, which ended with a putrid Phillies team in '41, was 29-48. Brother Marv was a 36-year-old relief pitcher when he made the '54 team, retiring all four batters he faced in the game, wrapping things up by whiffing none other than Ted Williams. The Grissoms also were among the longest-living major-league brothers: Lee lived to be 90 and Marv, 87.

• Matt Keough, Athletics, 1978. Charlie Finley's penny-pinching had divested Oakland of all its established stars by '78, when the once-mighty A's ended up losing 93 games. Representing the team in the All-Star Game at Jack Murphy Stadium was Keough, whose father and uncle had played in the majors without being accorded that honor. Keough, a 22-year-old rookie, was 6-4 with a stunning 2.16 ERA going into the game. He relieved Jim Palmer in the third inning of an eventual AL loss, giving up a single to Ted Simmons and retiring Rick Monday. Keough then started a year-and-a-half nightmare during which his record was a miserable 4-28. He rebounded in 1980, going 16-13 with a 2.92 ERA and 20 complete games, but was out of the majors by age 30 with a lifetime mark of 58-84.

• Hugh Mulcahy, Phillies, 1940. As might be expected for a man whose nickname was "Losing Pitcher," Mulcahy did not pitch after being selected by Bill McKecnhie for the '40 NL team. As his Philadelphia teammate Kirby Higbe (with Martin Quigley) wrote in "The High Hard One": "They called us the Futile Phillies. ... About the middle of the season, old Hughie Mulcahy had won 10 and lost 9, and the sportswriters were saying he could be the first pitcher for win 20 for the Phils since Grover Cleveland Alexander. He pitched great ball but ended up something like 11-22." (Actually, it was 13-22.) Mulcahy was the first major-leaguer to be drafted for World War II and missed the entire 1941-44 seasons; by the time he returned in late '45, he won only a handful more games to finish his career at 45-89. "Losing Pitcher," indeed. He lived to be 88.

• Wayne Twitchell, Phillis, 1973. Steve Carlton turned in the most remarkable season ever for a pitcher in '72, winning 27 games - the last National Leaguer to do so - for a team that won a grand total of 59. Needless to say, he was the toast of Philadelphia going into '73, and he responded with a 4-2 record and 2.47 ERA in April. Then he started getting banged around, giving up six or more earned runs in six of his next 13 starts. By that time, Sparky Anderson was scouting for All-Stars, and Carlton's struggles steered the Redss manager in another direction when picking the Phils' representative. He settled on Twitchell, a 6-foot-6 hurler whose ERA had dipped below 2 by July 4. Twitchell pitched an inning at the beautiful new Royals Stadium, with the fountains wowing the TV audience, and he struck out Reggie Jackson. Twitchell finished third in the NL in ERA in '73, but never again was a very effective pitcher.

Hear, hear!

Were all of them stars?

We're familiar with the fixtures of the All-Star Game, players like Stan Musial, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, each of whom participated in 24 of the contests. Or Babe Ruth, who was getting up there in years (and pounds) when the game came into being, but still managed to belt the first All-Star home run.

But what about the players who aren't quite as well-known but managed to make All-Star squads?

I started jotting down names and came across many that were surprising, some I didn't recognize, and others who have interesting stories to be told. Here's a sampling:

• Eddie Brinkman, Tigers SS, 1973. Brinkman stuck in the majors for a long time as a slick fielder when shortstops weren't necessarily expected to hit a ton. (Think Mark Belanger.) But Brinkman took that kind of to something an extreme, posting three sub-.190 seasons out of four in the '60s on his way to a .224 lifetime average. In his 13th season, he managed to make the All-Star team when he managed to keep his average above .250 at the break. He finished the season at .237, but did play in all 162 of Detroit's games.

• Dick Dietz, Giants C, 1970. Power-hitting always have been a highly sought commodity, and San Francisco came up with one in the late '60s. Dietz certainly deserved his All-Star accolades in '70, not quite posting the numbers of fellow catcher Johnny Bench, but finishing the season at .300 with 22 home runs, 107 RBI and 109 walks. Dietz put up respectable numbers (.252-19-72) as his team won the NL West. But he also served as the Giants' player representative during the strike that delayed the start of the '72 season, and San Francisco management decided to cut him loose. The Dodgers claimed him off waivers, but he played sparingly and was gone from the majors after '73.

• Bert Haas, Reds OF-1B, 1947. Haas apparently opened some eyes when he returned from World War II to steal 22 bases, a relatively high total for the time, in 1946. Perhaps that stuck in Cardinal manager Eddie Dyer's mind when he selected the '47 All-Star team; otherwise, Haas' totals for that season look rather pedestrian at .286-3-67 and just nine steals. Haas was 33 when he played in his only All-Star game and hung on just three more years as a part-timer.

• Ray Lamanno, Reds C, 1946. The National League squad set a record in the '46 game by losing 12-0, and having players like Lamanno on the team didn't help. The returning war veteran had posted a decent season in 1942, but in '46 was platooning at catcher with Ray Mueller. Nevertheless, he made the trip to Fenway Park for the Midsummer Classic and grounded out as a pinch-hitter in the eighth; in the bottom of the inning, he got to watch Ted Williams belt Rip Sewell's eephus pitch into the stratosphere. For his career of four full seasons, Lamanno had a total of 355 hits, which just might be an all-time low for an All-Star.

• Felix Mantilla, Red Sox 2B, 1965. Mantilla is best known as the starting third baseman for the historically inept '62 Mets, and the Big Apple baseball writers loved to write about the team's foibles, including Mantilla's often-adventurous attempts at fielding. Thus ridiculed by undeterred, Mantilla escaped from New York and went on top post good numbers in Boston, including a 30-homer season in 1964. The following year, his fellow players voted him into the All-Star game as a starter when he went int the break hitting .316. The Sox, though, traded him to Houston just before the start of the '66 season, and he couldn't hit in the Astrodome, ending his major-league career at the end of the year.

• Richie Scheinblum, Royals OF, 1972. Scheinblum was one of those players who hit very well in the minors but couldn't find his stroke in The Show. He began in the Cleveland organization, but the Indians gave up on him after they tried to make him a starter in '69 and he responded by hitting .186. He spent a lackluster year in the Washington Senators' system before Kansas City purchased his contract. The Royals might have questioned their wisdom when Scheinblum's average dropped to .214 following two consecutive 0-for-5 games against Oakland in late May. Richie then started an 11-game hitting streak to bump up his average a full 100 points, and he kept up the pace into July, his .324 average leading the AL at the break. He finished the season at .300, one of only five regulars to hit that mark in the American League's final pre-DH season. Nevertheless, the Royals decided to trade him to the Reds in a swap that involved future Kansas City star and manager Hal McRae. Scheinblum stiffed in Cincinnati and bounced around to four more teams before his major-league swan song in '74.

• Don Wert, Tigers 3B, 1968. In the Year of the Pitcher, a player who finished the season at .200 participated in the All-Star Game (which, incidentally, the National League won 1-0). Wert was hitting only .220 at the break, but Detroit was well on its way to winning the AL pennant, so his fellow players must have figured he had something going for him. A look around the league that year doesn't show a whole lot of viable alternatives at the hot corner; besides Brooks Robinson, the All-Star starter, and Sal Bando, in his first full year with the A's, the field included such luminaries as Max Alvis, Joe Foy, Bobby Cox, Aurelio Rodriguez and Pete Ward, all of whom were struggling mightily. As for Wert, he lasted two more years (.225 and .218) as a Tiger starter after his All-Star appearance, before finishing his career on a 2-for-40 skid for the '71 Senators.

I'll focus the attention on All-Star pitchers in the next installment.

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Trivia question 48: A pitcher was credited with the victory in an All-Star Game without actually throwing a pitch. Who was he?

The amazing Mr. Gibson

The last act of Gen. William D. Eckert before he was ousted as baseball commissioner in late 1968 was to approve a few measures to give batters a better shot at actually hitting the ball.

The powers that be were concerned because of the paucity of runners crossing the plate in what has come down in history as the Year of the Pitcher. Fans who like plenty of offense must have been put off by some of these occurrences in '68:

• The earned run average was a hair under 3. That's for the major leagues as a whole. Any pitcher not in the 1's or 2's wasn't earning his paycheck.

• The National League's cumulative batting average was .243, which looks good next to the pre-DH American League's mark of a robust .230.

• Carl Yastrzemski led the AL with a .301 average. As late as Sept. 13, he was in the top spot at sub-.300.

• The Yankees - yes, the 20-time (to that point) World Champions - hit .214 as a team. Mickey Mantle, at .237 in his final season, was one of the team's better hitters.

• The Tigers managed to win the World Series despite a regular third baseman, Don Wert, who hit .200 in 536 at bats, and a regular-enough shortstop, Ray Oyler, at .135. One of the reasons the Tigers won the Series was that manager Mayo Smith had inspiration to stick slick-fielding outfielder Mickey Stanley at shortstop for the seven games to get some semblance of a bat in there.

• The Mets brought pitcher Jim McAndrew up from the minors and failed to score a single run in any of his first four starts. (See previous mini-research project.)

The list of terrible batting feats could go on for a while, but one hitter still is in the record books for his accomplishments in '68. Frank Howard, the massive first baseman for the Washington Senators, went on a tear starting May 12 that is unparalleled in baseball history. He hit two home runs off the Tigers at D.C. Stadium (Robert F. Kennedy still was alive for a few more weeks) and followed that up two days later with a pair more in Fenway Park. He added another on May 15 in Boston before the Senators traveled to Cleveland, where Howard hit two out of Municipal Stadium on May 16. For some reason, the Senators played the next night in Detroit, and Howard homered again. Two more dingers on May 18 gave Frank a total of 10 in six games, in four different cities.

But if baseball fans talk about 1968, three names come to the forefront:

• Don Drysdale, who between May 14 and June 4 threw six consecutive complete-game shutouts on his way to a then-record streak of 58 2/3 straight scoreless innings. As a side note, the late Mr. Drysdale (who lent his name to the corresponding character on "The Beverly Hillbillies") won only 12 more games for his career after the streak was broken.

• Denny McLain, who at age 24 became the only pitcher since the '30s to win 30 for a season (and pitched his way out of the majors just four years later).

• Bob Gibson, whose 1.12 ERA was a phenomenal accomplishment even by Year of the Pitcher standards.

I remember watching Gibson pitch toward the end of his career, and even then he still could bring it. But he was as close to untouchable in '68 as any pitcher ever seems to have been.

Somehow, the Cardinals' offense managed to sputter its way to losing nine games while Gibson was on the mound. But some of the rest of his statistics defy belief, especially compared with the current standards of so-called pitching "excellence": 28 complete games in 34 starts, 13 of which were shutouts, and 304 2/3 innings for an average of - get this! - 8.97 innings per start. The category of "Quality Start" (3 or fewer earned runs allowed in six or more innings) hadn't been invented yet, but retroactively Gibson logged 32 of 'em, missing only on Aug. 4 while hurling 11 innings in an eventual loss to the Cubs and Sept. 11, when he beat the Dodgers for his 21st victory.

Then there was his performance in the World Series. He struck out a record 17 Tigers in his 4-0 opening win over McLain, then followed up with 10 K's in a 10-1 rout in Game Four, which marked his seventh consecutive complete-game victory in Series competition (yet another mark that will stand for the ages). Some shoddy fielding helped cost him the decisive seventh game, but he finished the Series with 35 strikeouts and just four walks in 27 innings.

Perhaps Gibson's most remarkable accomplishment of 1968 took place during the games he pitched in June and July.

On June 2, he gave up a home run to the Mets' Ed Charles to lead off the seventh inning in a game the Cardinals won, 6-3. In that Aug. 4 game, the Cubs touched Gibson up for a pair of runs in the fifth inning.

In between, he hurled 106 innings. During that span, he surrendered a grand total of three runs, all earned, for an ERA of 0.25. He won 12 straight, all complete games, and eight of those were shutouts. If it hadn't been for the Dodgers' Len Gabrielson scoring on a wild pitch on July 1, Gibson would have broken Drysdale's recently established mark for consecutive shutouts; by coincidence, Drysdale was Gibson's mound opponent that day.

After Charles' blast, Gibson didn't surrender another home run until Aug. 4, when future Hall of Famer Billy Williams took him deep.

Following his 7-1 win at Shea Stadium on July 30, Gibson had an ERA of 0.96. It dipped under 1 again as late as Sept. 2, when he pitched a 10-inning, 1-0 shutout vs. baseball's best-hitting team of '68, the Reds.

His overall performance that season earned him not only the Cy Young Award, but he also was named Most Valuable Player. He remains the last National League starting pitcher to capture the honor.

And that's another feat that is likely not to occur again.

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Trivia question 47 (courtesy of SABR's Bruce Brown): Who is the only catcher to lead the American League in triples?