December 06, 2005
Lip Fur
There's a bet going on at Sports Blogger Live concerning Will Clark, Don Mattingly, Hall of Fame voting and mustaches. All I have to say is that Jamie should be a man and grow it for the month! I guess he's not too confident in his man winning.
Jamie has no... marbles! (yes I stole that from Major League II) No man grows a respectable 'stache in 1 week.
Pretty much my favorite two ballplayers as a kid.
Not sure how I ended up with Mattingly as my favorite, given I'm from Boston... but he was a great ballplayer and seemed to be a great guy. You could certainly say the same about Will Clark.
Looks like Clark was a bit better at taking the walk than Mattingly was... though you've got to remember, in those days you didn't get paid to walk - you got paid to hit.
I always wonder how well Mattingly could have done if his career wasn't stopped nearly dead in its tracks by his back problems.
Still, he played 10 full seasons and won the gold glove in 9 of them. Often goes unnoticed.
Compare Mattingly to Kirby Puckett sometime though. Both nearly identical stats, except for Mattingly's Gold Gloves.
Mattingly was my favorite player, too. Used to love going to County Stadium and getting his autograph once or twice a summer... good memories of begging my mom to take me to the game 2 hours early so I wouldn't miss a second of BP... she'd sit in our sits reading a romance while I ran around yelling Mr. Mattingly.
