let’s play: Immaculate Grid!

I felt dumb taking a full minute to arrive at that answer.

8/9, I missed on what I thought was a mulligan, but it turns out that Alex Rodriguez did not win ROY, he finished a close second.

For ROY/100RBI, I forgot the rules and thought it had to have happened in the same season, still got it right though (clem can probably guess who I picked).

6/9 - only 1 obvious one on the Marlin line I forgot Ichiro ended up in that cesspool and a wild guess at Sox ROY

NoTime: I thought it had to be in the same season too, went with the very safe Albert Pujols. For yours, since I'm '70s guy, I'll guess Fred Lynn.

I knew you'd get it!

My brain immediately crashed and burned on the bottom left pick, oh well! 8/9.


https://i.postimg.cc/fRQHR6q4/IMG-5004.jpg
-Eduardo Escobar: every time he appeared on a Mets Instagram story I’d look at his BR page. Have used him recently I think.
- BUSTER POSEY IS 0.9%?????
- Michael Morse is the scorer of the third most clutch hr in the 2014 Giants postseason and had his career ended by knuckle dragging pos Hunter Strickland instigating a pointless brawl. I still appreciate you, king!
- Mat Latos spent 2010-2012 complaining about the Giants, you’d better believe I’m familiar with his BR page

So your Rarity Score entirely depends upon when you do this. When I did today's a few minutes after midnight, Jeff Conine as the Marlins 100-RBI guy was 100%. "Seriously? Ahead of Miggy and Stanton?" Of course he's down to 2% now.

9/9, rarity score 201. Had the toughest time with the chisox ROY for some reason but dug deep. Immaculate Grid 101 9/9:
Rarity: 201
IMMACULATE!
🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩
Play at:
https://immaculategrid.com
@immaculategrid x @baseball_ref

Whoops...oh well

got Ron kittle for the lower left, Alvin Davis for Seattle ROY. Had trouble remembering big unit too!

Ron Kittle is everything I love about this game (Immaculate Grid, not baseball in general)--that name hasn't crossed my mind in 30 years. I was initially going to say he was a terrible ROY choice, but he wasn't that bad. It should have been Boddicker, but 35 HR, 100 RBI, and a .500 SLG are something. He was 25 and clearly going nowhere with all the strikeouts and terrible OBP, but there have been worse ROYs, I'm sure.

When I was nine I went to this game and definitely distinctly remember Kittle hitting that late game fly out to center in the eighth inning, he sent Omar Moreno to the warning track for it. Remembered the game bc it was against the Yankees, and Greg Walker hit two HR. And Mattingly also sent one, maybe two deep flys out to the CF wall. Great game to see some stars, in retrospect. Four HOfers, a couple of guys in Mattingly and Randolph who have good arguments for enshrinement, some legit hall of very good guys like Luzinski, Righetti, and Baylor. Plus a folk hero like Kittle.

Both managers in the HOF too.

Yep, definitely in retrospect a real treat to see Yogi in (managerial) action.

I love this game...I hate this game...Do I really want to sit here for 40 minutes every night trying to shake loose names that might not even be there? My dumbest mistake tonight was naming Hank Greenberg as the Tigers' 500 HR guy so I could avoid Miggy. Greenberg wasn't even close. Tino Martinez hit more HR.

i always have so much trouble with the rockies. they hold onto players for so long!

I have started to have repeat guys on this, usually because if I get a guess wrong I’ll go and look at their page. 8/9 btw.

For example, could I have got Ian Kinsler if I hadn’t misused him in a square a couple of weeks back and found myself on his page? No. The chances of me using Brooks Conrad in the centre square were nil - except that Traitor Hand doubted my knowledge of niche Giants postseason run characters. I wouldn’t have looked on his BR page again (short career) to make a point otherwise!

https://i.postimg.cc/4d8CHTyx/IMG-5092.jpg

(Though I did know he’d been a Padre cos he features in On Jeff Ears).

Scutaro was also a hero of the 2012 Giants postseason.

Could have done Bonds for the homers but obviously there was at least one other Giant I knew of who’d have a better rarity value (lol).

I figured out how to master this game. 30 teams, so 435 combinations: half of (30 x (30-1)). Find the fewest number of players--35 or 40 would be my guess--who cover all 435. Memorize the players, memorize the combinations. Study up on awards, benchmarks, and the HOF. That's it--you'll never miss an answer again.

Much easier! If a guy has played for 10 teams, that's 45 combinations. So you could probably cover all 435 with 15-20 players, accounting for duplications. Okay, wish me luck.

i only got 7/9 (fucking rockies) - but was finally able to successfully deploy Edwin Jackson

Me every time the Rockies come up on this

Bryce Harper to the Rockies: "You're a loser fucking organization. Every single one of you" https://t.co/x7EKvXjY8i pic.twitter.com/TJT39HEP2v

— Nick Piccone (@_piccone) May 14, 2023

What I know about the Rockies:

1) They had one HOF'er and two future HOF'ers.
2) A bunch of guys had park-aided (and sometimes gift-wrapped) career years there: Dante Bichette, Vinny Castilla, Andrés Galarraga, Ellis Burks.
3) They sent Toronto my least favourite Blue Jay ever, Troy Tulowitzki (sitting in a bar somewhere today, still complaining about the trade).
4) Ubaldo Jiménez once had an incredible half-season for them.
5) Other people have pitched for them.

The Rockies+tigers thing was awful but made a wild guess with mark Redman of all dudes and secured the 9/9

Dante Bichette had such a weird career. Some absolutely genuinely monster counting stat seasons, on the face of them without digging beneath the surface just totally an MVP type, and then he had a career wins above replacement that Ohtani probably just accomplished in the last three weeks of June. So many of the other 90s Rockies were legitimately valuable: Walker obv, Helton of course, Galarraga, Burks, Castilla...they had enhanced stats, some more than others, but they had plus value.

I'd better clarify something before someone jumps all over me: when I say "least favourite Blue Jay ever," I'm thinking (for all of two seconds) purely in terms of baseball. Obviously, the Jays have had a rogue's gallery of players--I can think of five immediately--who've done and said awful things.

I don't know what they were overall, but the splits for Bichette's greatest season ('95) are pretty stark: .378/.398/.755 at home, .300/.329/.473 on the road. He walked 22 times that year in total. The was I see those four: Burks and Galarraga were good players who had fine seasons elsewhere, Castilla I don't know, Bichette was almost wholly a creation of his park.

"The way I see..."

Def true, also it's funny how his bWAR his last two forgotten years in Cincy and Boston was 1.3, whereas his "peak" 95-99 run produced 0.8

Going by bWAR, at least, a lot of his negative value resided in defense.

He of course has my eternal gratitude anyway.

My first 9/9! Having a jays column helped a lot for me, and managed to land a 170 rarity.

Nice. Should have been a gimme for me, but I fluffed the Pirates/Braves: I thought Russell Martin played for every perennial playoff team ever. (Wish I'd answered Casey Stengel.) I had five at 1% or under, so a rarity of 127. (How do they calculate rarity for incorrect answers?) My favourite answer today was Dave Collins for Jays/Reds.

8/9. Didn’t even attempt the middle square lol
https://i.postimg.cc/yNrcpCLp/IMG-5206.jpg

I went for rarity as best I could

Bream/McGriff/Lonnie Smith
Parker/Encarnacion/Hal Morris
Kiner/Molitor/Ortiz

Sid Bream did cross my mind for the box I missed--he was mentioned on the biggest-disappointment thread the other day. I knew he'd been a Brave because of that play, was less sure about the Pirates...which is sheer forgetfulness, because he's probably better know for the Pirates.

I was thinking that arguably the three greatest lead-off men ever, and inarguably the greatest, cover a lot of real estate for this game: Henderson, Raines, and Lofton. They played for a total of 26 teams, 21 after subtracting duplications--70% of existing franchises.

8/9, struck out on the Blue Jays/Reds crossover

Wish there was a variation on this that was just stats, I find those squares more fun than player movement.

The thing I most dislike about the player-movement boxes--well, I'll be honest: the thing I most dislike is I'm not very good at them. The second thing I most dislike is what Thermo called their randomness; they can be filled in with someone who might have spent a nothing half-season with one of the teams. Who remembers that? It's definitely a game for someone who's been paying attention to rosters of the past two or three seasons. I don't know what the experience of other older posters is, but for me, my attention is forever narrowing to the team I follow and to stars. Everything else vanishes on contact.

On the other hand, if the game were just statistics and awards, it wouldn't be nearly as challenging for me, and I probably would have lost interest by now. Other than the silly Hank Greenberg guess, I don't think I've missed one of those yet. So I like the challenge, even though it ends up making me feel stupid and old.

Won't accept Roger Clemens in the 300+ wins column.

Last I checked*, Rog had 354 wins. This game is garbage.

*https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/clemero02.shtml

Wins are a stupid stat (2/3 of the names I put down were at 251 for their careers)

(xpost) But he didn't play for any of those three teams down the left side.

8/9--drew a blank on KC/Cleveland, tried Hoyt Wilhelm. Got the easy Carlos Beltran answer for Mets/Royals, but thought of Saberhagen and Amos Otis after, which would have been better. Best answer: Nelson Briles for KC/St. Louis, 0.02%.

"For team and career stat: The player who reached the career stat simply had to play for the team at any point. For example, Randy Johnson would match for 3,000 strikeouts even though he had 2,162 for Seattle and 2,077 for Arizona."

They're a little inconsistent on this, I know. "For two stat/awards cells: The player did not necessarily need to accomplish the stats/awards in the same season. For example, Willie McCovey would qualify for 40+ HR and Rookie of the Year."

xps: oh shit, i didn't realize the team component was in play for that row... lol. will try again.

9/9, for some reason I was dying with KC/Cleveland and STL/Baltimore, my memory didn't fail me though bc I correctly guessed Jason Grimsley for the first and finally remembered that Will Clark played for both of the latter pair.

I was pretty impressed with my Kevin Seitzer guess for KC/Cle

Another guy I haven't thought about in two or three decades, Seitzer. I feel like this game is a metaphor for (or an analogy to) the way the brain works, all those neurons combining and recombining into synapses that make memories and knowledge. (If I've got that right...) My Kevin Seitzer and Ron Kittle synapses have been dead for years and they're being reawakened.

(Oops--forgot to hide text, sorry.)

One dumb mistake, one wrong guess. Dumb: Dave Henderson for Angels/Red Sox, linked in my mind because of one game. I thought of Fred Lynn immediately, but I wanted something less obvious. Wrong guess: Milt Pappas for Cubs/Tigers. Best answers: Rico Petrocelli, Brian Downing, Chet Lemon.

Pretty easy one today--I was able to use some Expos, and none of the four most recent franchises are on there. I gave in on the top left and bottom right corners and went with the two most obvious answers, both between 50-60%. Rarity score of 155, with five answers 5% or less: Rusty Staub, Mike Scott, Charlie Hough, Mike Marshall, Don Drysdale.

I don't remember I-Rod spending a season with the Astros at all.

If you want to avoid really obvious answers, 200+ K is actually pretty tricky. There are so many pitchers from the '70s and '80s that you probably thought of as hard throwers at the time, or at least guys with a lot of stuff, but they might have struck out 150 or 180 at most. Case in point: Andy Messersmith, whose career 6.9 H/9 was great at the time, and comports with my memory of him as being really hard to hit. (Lifetime ERA under 3.00, too.) He did strike out 200, three times, but just barely, with a high of 221. I wasn't sure, so I used someone else.

7/9

https://i.postimg.cc/0yb8DZhv/IMG-5528.jpg

Only reason I got Gary Carter was thinking about Expos, and the only reason I know about Expos is my better half recently got an Expos cap and we were looking up non-Pedro Expos.

I thought Ian Kinsler would work for Texas/Gold Glove but possibly they changed it? Cos now you have to have won the award there and I’m sure that wasn’t the case for my picks in the past. I wasn’t going to get that Nationals/Astros one anyway

my complete indifference to the gold glove award comes back to bite me!

8/9, with one of those gold glove guesses wrong