If Your Birthday is October 1st....

...you share it with Xander Bogaerts. While his Red Sox slipped from their 2018 pace, their shortstop enjoyed his most prolific season yet, batting over .300 with 33 homers, 117 RBI and a .939 OPS. He'll remain a Boston fixture through 2025, having recently signed a long term contract extension.

Also getting cake and candles on this first of October:

Hall of Famer Rod Carew, one of the greatest "pure hitters" of all time. A .328 lifetime hitter with the Twins and Angels, he was 1967's Rookie of the Year and the AL MVP ten years later. And his career stats show mark him as a throwback to the heyday of Ty Cobb and Wee Willie Keeler: he had more triples (112) than home runs (92), something you almost never see today -- especially someone with as long as prolific career as the Panama native who spent his teenage years in New York.

Mark McGwire, whose 583 homers, tainted by PED use, will not be enough to get him into the Hall of Fame. He and Sammy Sosa helped bring baseball attention in the first seasons after the disastrous 1994 strike, but in the big picture, caused more harm than good.

Brandon Knight is in that select circle of roughly 120 players to have appeared for both the Yankees and Mets. But his accomplishments don't quite rate alongside such dual-NY favorites as David Cone, Yogi Berra, Doc Gooden or Darryl Strawberry. A pitcher who made 11 Yankee appearances and four more for the 2008 Mets, the Californian's greatest success came while pitching in Korea.

We remember Jimmie Reese, who joked that during his Yankee years, he "roomed with Babe Ruth's suitcase." A backup infielder on legendary Yankee and Cardinal teams of the early 1930s, he became a coach with several minor league organizations, and managed the Pacific Coast League Padres for a time. But his most famous stint in the game came as a beloved coach and fungo hitter for the Angels from the 1970s until his death in 1994 at age 92.

Of course, there's one other standout name associated with October 1st:

Roger Maris belted his 61st home run in the season's 162nd game. Surpassing Babe Ruth's longstanding record in the first year of the extended season earned him an unfair asterisk (since removed) from Commissioner Ford Frick.

More enduringly, it made this shy media-averse Midwesterner a hero to Yankee fans of a certain age.

Roger, who came up through the Indians system, played his 1955 season for Reading of the Eastern League, when it was a Cleveland farm club. He's one of several whose path to the majors passed through Baseballtown US commemorated on murals throughout the city's terrific ballpark.

Comments

Marty Appel said…
Roger STILL HOLDS the American League record with his 61. It survived the whole steroid era.
October 1, 2019 at 3:09 PM
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