Tell Me a Bunch of Crap

[Edgy MD]

To be fair, Jos� y Roberto haven't exactly been setting the charts on fire either.

[MFS62]

Edgy MD wrote: "Happy birthday, Cooby-Coo!"

Its Cooby's Birthday?
For real?
Nobody started a thread?
Happy Birthday, Cooby. You're on a roll in this thread.

Later

[Guest cooby]

Edgy MD wrote: To be fair, Jos� y Roberto haven't exactly been setting the charts on fire either.

No, but "Ustedes son Buttheads" nearly made me spill my coffee.

Not my birthday today MFS62, but it was when Mike Phillips hit for the cycle. Thanks anyway

[Guest Swan Swan H]

Al Luplow didn't have much of a major league career, but he did last for parts of seven seasons in the majors. Baseball, however, was not his passion. What Al lived for was cooking, and when he retired he worked in several diners and coffee shops in his home town of Saginaw, MI, always bringing a little extra to the usual stacks of pancakes and greasy burgers.

When Camden Yards opened Al read a story about former O's star Boog Powell opening Boog's Barbecue at the stadium, and a light went on. Realizing that he didn't have name recognition of a Boog Powell, he set his sights a bit lower - Batavia, NY, where he broke in with the Batavia Indians, then in Class D, in 1959. In May of 1995 Luplow's Links opened just inside the main gate of the Clippers' stadium, featuring the Polish Sausage that Al loved as a child, served with the despicable Genesee beer so prominent in the region. The stand remains to this day, dishing out kielbasa, pierogi and some of the heartiest goulash this side of of Warsaw.

Jim Bethke?

[Frayed Knot]

Having played his entire major league career (all 25 games and 40 innings of it) before he turned 19 y/o and out of the game entirely by age 24, Bethke used the prospect of having his whole life ahead of him to leave his native Nebraska behind and head for the oil rigs of the Gulf Coast. He found the paychecks rewarding and the work dangerous enough to feed the adrenaline rush of his shortened athletic life, but took that attitude a bit too far and before long had lost the gig due to too many incidents during his off-time spent in the bars of Mobile, Biloxi, and New Orleans. Still not yet thirty and looking to start again, Bethke drifted into commercial real estate sales where he finally found his niche. His success was boosted by his talents as a story-teller based mainly on tales from his previous two careers. His favorite for closing a deal was the one where he claimed to have met the songwriter Bob Crewe on a particularly wild night down in old New Orleans and was in fact the guy who had a fling with a hooker named Creole Lady Marmalade and therefore the was the real-life subject of the song.


So what ever became of Brent Gaff?

[Edgy MD]

Called Buzz Aldrin a liar and a fraud and got his face punched in, did poor misguided Brent Gaff. What was he thinking?

Hey, Bartolome Fortunato, surely you did better than Gaff did?

[dinosaur jesus]

Early in his pro career, Brent Gaff, a veteran of the thriving Minneapolis punk scene of the late 1970s, moonlighted for a few years as Greg Norton of H�sker D�. After day games in Wausau, he would drive the three hours to the Twin Cities and thrash the night away. Promoted to Double A Jackson in 1980, he found himself at a crossroads, having to decide between his two lifelong dreams. A conversation with Mets general manager Frank Cashen helped him break the deadlock. "Brent," said Cashen, "you may never make much money playing for the Mets, but you'll get more pussy than Matt Sinatro." Fortunately, the band was able to move on without him, recruiting newly promoted Twin Frank Viola to be their new Greg Norton.

Is it true what they say about Hawk Taylor?

OE: Oh crap, I worked on this damn thing for twenty minutes. I tried to get Greg Norton the baseball player in there, and it just wasn't working. So all right, what about Bartolome Fortunato?

[Edgy MD]

Go figure. I had Norton pegged for gay. Just goes to show you. You never, never know.

[dinosaur jesus]

Well, it's possible that what Cashen said wasn't "pussy."

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

Against the advice of Spanish authorities, Bartolome took it upon himself to investigate his uncle's Carnival disappearance in Andalusia. Nobody's quite sure what happened to Bart himself after he discovered that hidden chapel in the network of catacombs below Cordoba, but legend has it that whatever happened to him, it did not smell very nice.


Speaking of which, did you catch a whiff of what happened to that bastard Blaine Beatty? Can you believe how things wound up there?

[MFS62]

Blaine Beatty was a soft tossing lefty pitcher who had some success in the minors. The success never followed him up to higher levels. He became a pitching coach, but could not gain respect when the other pitchers saw how weak his arm was. He decided to strengthen his arm and enrolled in a series of body building programs to build up his arm strength. But he became so muscle bound that he could no longer throw a baseball.
But Blaine is still pitching. For the last five years he has worked as a bouncer, throwing drunks out of a dockside strip club in Bayonne New Jersey.

Tell us about Sherman "Roadblock" Jones.

Later

[Guest cooby]

Sherman "Roadblock" Jones had a better life after he left the Mets, including a stint in the Kansas City Police Department, Senate, and House of Representatives.

He didn�t bring up the fact that his ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, probably because he did not know it. I, however, discovered it while doing research for this thread.
His family tree also shows ties to Cary Grant, Princess Diana, Andrew Jackson, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and Geronimo.

After his career in politics had ended, he started a small tree farm and Chinese herb store in Kansas. The motto of his company was �We put the Road in your Block�. There was a local contest trying to figure out the meaning to this slogan, but unfortunately the meaning died with him, as his death occurred before the entries were read.

Howzabout Don Zimmer?

[Edgy MD]

There's little that one might conceive as unknown about the Zim. He's got a metal plate or two in his head. He simultaneously did endorsements for a diet program and a fried chicken chain. He quit the Yankees in a principled protest over their treatment of Joe Torre, but (1) Joe did not, and (2) when he quit, he stayed quit, unlike Yogi.

What you don't know: Zim is a sucker for doomsday theories. He has been known to stay up half the night looking for Internet reports of signs in the sky, and has twice given his belongings away to prepare for The End. Rocco Baldelli privately recalled visiting Tampa one offseason and seeing a poorly kempt man on the street with a "Prepare --- The End Is NYE" poster. He said he wouldn't have even looked twice, but the strange spelling intrigued him, and then he suddenly recognized the elderly baseball legend!

He wrestled the old Gerbil into a cab (which would have been even harder if he wasn't weakened by his Doomsday Diet), and got him to the ballpark, where he and an assistant trainer who happened to be at Tropicana Field that day started filling the old guy up with chicken and SlimFast until he started to make sense. His family began a gradual intervention, disallowed unsupervised Internet use, and gradually he got his shit back together, and everybody breathed a sigh of relief when Popeye let the reputed date of the Mayan Apocalypse pass without going back off the deep end. Score one for Dr. Phil!

Zim's a cat who has always landed on his feet, as he did again this time, with his Doomsday Diet Cookbook currently at #3 on the New York Times Bestseller List.

The great Pedro Martinez, we know, recently joined the Red Sox front office. But damned if I know what's happened to the not-so-great Pedro Martinez. Could anybody fill me in?

[Guest cooby]

It took a while for Pedro to get back to my email, but finally he answered and said "I'm okay cooby, just a little waterlogged...".
It seems he has started a waterpark in Erie PA, affiliated with the Holiday Inn there. Pedro, God love his heart, did not realize just how poor an investment of a waterpark in Erie, Pa would be, and has moved his family there. At least it's indoors.
Though I am proud to say that Pedro is a fellow PA'ian, I think I might have to *coff* politely and abstain from commenting on his newfound career when he asks my opinion.

http://www.splashlagoon.com/


Tell me what Ed Kranepool has been up to!

[Edgy MD]

A native New Yorker, Ed has long entertained a fascination with the Seneca people, willing to bend an ear on the subject with any willing or occasionally not-so-willing listener. Even during his career, his interviews were peppered with curious non-sequiters like, "You think John Montefusco was tough today? Let me take you up to Schuyler County and introduce you to a people who will make you re-think the meaning of the word tough."

Given the freer time of his post-baseball career, and the healthy returns of his wise investments, Ed's post-baseball career has allowed him to indulge his passion more zealously, and he's published scholarly papers and presented at learned symposia of esteemed anthropologists. Fiercely devoted to the truth of a people he called The Bane of the Huron, Ed would even lock horns with actual Seneca researchers, making his interest something of a mixed blessing to surviving tribesmen and women. The nation nonetheless saw the virtue in having a modestly high profile ex-ballplayers telling their story, and Ed became in 1998 the first man claiming no Seneca blood to be honored with admission into the Order of Red Jacket.

Tom Grieve has had a long and industrious career with the Rangers as a player, executive, and broadcaster, with that affiliation only briefly interrupted by a relatively brief association with the 1978 Mets. But I know next to nothing about his non-baseball life. Why is that?

[Edgy MD]

A native New Yorker, Ed has long entertained a fascination with the Seneca people, willing to bend an ear on the subject with any willing or occasionally not-so-willing listener. Even during his career, his interviews were peppered with curious non-sequiters like, "You think John Montefusco was tough today? Let me take you up to Schuyler County and introduce you to a people who will make you re-think the meaning of the word tough."

Given the freer time of his post-baseball career, and the healthy returns of his wise investments, Ed's "retirement" has allowed him to indulge his passion more zealously, and he's published scholarly papers and presented at learned symposia of esteemed anthropologists. Fiercely devoted to the truth about a people he calls The Bane of the Huron, Ed would even lock horns with actual native Seneca researchers, making his interest something of a mixed blessing to surviving tribesmen and women. The nation nonetheless saw the virtue in having a (modestly) high-profile ex-ballplayer telling its story, and Ed became in 1998 the first man claiming no Seneca blood to be honored with admission into the Order of Red Jacket.

Tom Grieve has had a long and industrious career with the Rangers as a player, executive, and broadcaster, with that affiliation only briefly interrupted by a relatively brief association with the 1978 Mets. But I know next to nothing about his non-baseball life. Why is that?

[Guest Kong76]

Scrabble

[Lefty Specialist]

Tom Grieve was pretty much running on fumes when he got to the 1978 Mets. After his career, he returned to Texas to take up a job installing cattle horns on the hoods of El Dorados and Chrysler Imperials. It was there that he was discovered by a casting director for Dallas, where he spent four years as Shale McRigg, J.R. Ewing's nemesis. After the producers killed him off in a bizarre backflow valve 'accident' orchestrated by J.R., Grieve wandered the Hollywood studios looking for someone to give him an acting gig. But the typecasting was too strong; to make ends meet, he was forced to sell maps to the stars' homes and make balloon animals dressed as a clown for childrens' birthday parties.

Finally Dallas was renewed and Grieve thought his prayers might be answered, since dead people reappear on soap operas all the time. But alas, all he could get was the part of 'Clown who scares little kids at J.R.'s great-grandson's birthday party'.

So what's the 411 on Chin-lung Hu?