I am a trivia junkie. There is no two ways about it. I have been studying sports facts as long as I can remember. That later expanded to Broadcast TV, Big Screen, Music, Geography, Retail, Pop Culture and really anything I could dig into and learn weird shit about. I met my wife at bar trivia and am without a doubt the guy, for better or worse, that always has a “did you know” fact in the holster.
During quarantine, I was lucky enough to write some questions for Barstool Radio’s Sirius XM show The Dozen. I would put together 25-30 questions a week and a handful would get used on the air. They didn’t need to use them, but when they began asking some on radio, it validated my thought that some of this useless info I had stored up was actually interesting. Unfortunately, Barstool ended their relationship with Sirius a few weeks back and I now need a new venue to share the garbage that occupies such a large portion of my brain. This will be that venue.
So here is the first release of some of this random knowledge.
Home Run King (This is just statistics. Not an opinion on who is better. Purely math)
Hank Aaron died this past week. He was the Major League Baseball Home Run King for 33 years. In 1974 he hit his 715th career homerun, passing Babe Ruth, and held onto the title with 755 until Barry Bonds surpassed him in 2007. Although he was the most prolific Home Run hitter in the MLB after surpassing the Babe, he did not hold the world record for very long. In September 1977, Sadaharu Oh, of the Yomuiri Giants hit his 756th dinger and he wasn’t done by a long shot.
Oh would play for 3 ½ more seasons hitting an additional 113 long balls, ending his career at 868. Sadaharu played 2 less seasons than Aaron and with the MLB season being 32 games longer than the Nippon season, Aaron would end up playing 467 more games than his Japanese counterpart. In 162 game seasons, Oh would have averaged 49.6 HR/season.
If you are wondering how Oh stacked up against other Japanese sluggers, you are going will have to look in another stratosphere. The closest competition to the 868 mark is Katsuya Nomura who retired the same year as Oh in 1980. Nomura had a prolific career unto himself but still came up 211 bombs short of the all-time record with 657. To put that into perspective, there are only 6 players in MLB who have hit more than 657 in their careers(Bonds, Aaron, Ruth, Rodrigues, Pujols and Mays).
Oh ended his career with the most Home Runs, RBI, Walks and highest OBP and Slugging. The only true controversy that came in his career was after he retired and became a manager. Oh held the single season Nippon record for HR with 55. There were several occasions when players approaching the record came up against Oh managed teams. Oh refused to let his pitchers throw strikes to these players. The most egregious example was when Randy Bass of the Hanshin Tigers came into the final game of the Nippon season with 54 HR and faced the Oh managed Giants in the final game. Bass was intentionally walked 4 times and got a single on a ball thrown out of the strike zone that would have been ball 4 on a 5th walk. It was later found out that any pitcher that threw strikes to Bass would be fined $1,000.
OK. So that was some easy baseball trivia. I plan to get into some weirder stuff so I hope you enjoyed this.