Clarion Content

Baseball geeks, do not despair, the Clarion's baseball preview is coming. Non-baseball fans, what's wrong with you? Just kidding. We promise to try to keep a balance of the sports and non-sports articles here at the Clarion. Of course, it would help if some of our invited guest columnists were ready to share. Either way, we will keep it real and not become the sports section of your local paper. The Clarion has long viewed sport as an important cultural metaphor and societal mirror, but we know some folks still don't give a hoot.

This is for the ones who do.

Baseball fans delight in the small details, the statistics and the lore, for not only is each baseball season its own narrative, unfolding over months with subplots and intrigues, varied casts of characters and at least thirty settings, so is each game and each day of the baseball season ripe with its own stories.

With that in mind...

Sunday night, the Toronto Blue Jays' Frank Thomas broke a record long held by the legendary, Hall of Famer, Harmon Killebrew. This was not one of Killebrew's more renowned marks. Killebrew is much more famous for the 573 dingers he hit in a steroid free era. Thomas quite a power hitter in his own right, has smacked 516 homers in his career and is still a .300 lifetime hitter. This Sunday, Thomas passed Killebrew in a little known, power hitters only club, when he broke Harmon's record for the most plate appearances (9,832) without a sacrifice bunt. (If there are any non-fans still with us, a sacrifice bunt is an attempt by the batter to deliberately give himself up, make an out via bunting, while advancing a teammate who is on base from one station to the next. It is often, though not always, ordered by the manager.) This means for 10,000 plate appearances or so, approximately 15 years, Frank Thomas and Harmon Killebrew's managers thought it was more advantageous to let them take a rip. They let them swing away with the chance of making an out for nada, zero, zilch because perhaps they might lash a hit, drive in a run with a liner to the gap or pound a home-run. In a sport where the best make an out 2 out of 3 at-bats, never once were they told to deliberately give themselves up to advance a runner. They were sluggers par excellence.

Labels: baseball, sports