Game 45: Brewers at Twins

Larry Yount’s brother and a Radio Guy. (Photo by Ron Vesely/MLB Photos via Getty Images) | Getty Images

Time: 6:10 Central

Weather: Sunny and mellow, 83°

Opponent’s SB site: Brew Crew Ball

TV: Twins TV. Radio: Bob Uecker’s still one of the best, RIP

The Brewers starting pitcher will be Coleman Crow, no relation to Aloha director Cameron Crowe. I know bubkis about Crow, who will be making his second MLB start (his first was in April). BrewerFanatic (a pretty good indie site) has Crow ranked as the team’s 16th-highest prospect; MLB.com has him as 25th. Both agree than Crow has a wicked curveball with a really high spin rate; and that the kid’s a gamer, who “‘seems to find ways to get outs even when he doesn’t have his “A” stuff that night’” (from BF). So take that for what it’s worth.

Today we’ll go into The Baseball Project’s catalog, for the odd story of Larry Yount, the older brother of Brewers legend Robin Yount.

Larry was drafted in 1968 at age 18 by the Astros, and despite some control issues in the minors, had put up fairly decent numbers when he was called up to the bigs in September of 1971. (Per Kurt Blumenau of SABR, Larry was one of the Astros’ top five pitching prospects at the time.)

On September 15th, with the Astros trailing Atlanta 4-1 in the ninth, Larry was announced as the next relief pitcher. But he felt something bad in his elbow while he was performing his warmup tosses on the mound. He couldn’t go on, and it turned out he would never pitch in the bigs.

Multiple pitchers have gone down in the record books as appearing in one game without recording a single out; Yount is the only one to have an official appearance without facing an actual batter or throwing a single in-game pitch.

Larry would go on to pitch in the minors for three more seasons over 112 games; those control problems never improved, and his strikeouts decreased badly. He was out of organized baseball by the time he was 26. It happens.

The Baseball Project heard about Larry’s story when they were visiting the Hall of Fame. A curator started telling them about Larry Yount, and said “do you know what? This would make a great song.”

As band co-leader Steve Wynn tell it, “we hear that all the time.” That’s from this very good post about Larry Yount (and about the song) by mlb.com’s Brian McTaggart.

The more Wynn thought about it, the more he agreed it could be a good song. And it ended up on the band’s 3rd album (called, creatively, 3rd). The first time Larry Yount heard it, he cried.

But over time, he grew to find it amusing; so did the rest of the family. “There’s not many guys, I don’t think, that have not even an inning in the Major Leagues and have a song written about them,” Robin Yount said. “So he must have done something right in baseball.” Even though the song imagines a sibling jealousy that actually isn’t there — Larry made it quite rich in real estate, and Robin thanked him in his Hall of Fame induction speech.

Later on, Larry and his wife would have dinner with Steve Wynn; and he’s on their Christmas card list. So that story has a happy ending.

The Twins had their “Bark at the Park” night this Tuesday; the Saints will have their first of the season (they do several) next Saturday. Alas, the current Saints one is for dogs only. In the past, they’ve had ones where “anything wearing a collar and a leash” would get in for free (so, presumably, including cats).

I was always sorely tempted to head over to an Adult Store that sells DIFFERENT kinds of collars/leashes and see how far that “anything with a collar and a leash gets in free” policy goes… alas, looks like I’ve missed my chance.

Finally, speaking of Animal Friends, here’s what a Wisconsin man is willing to do for Science. From The Guardian:

For nearly 20 years, Tim Friede, 58, allowed some of the most lethal snakes in the world to bite him so he could build up an immunity that could one day be developed into a universal antivenom.

This extraordinary and painful quest, undertaken by a window cleaner with no formal scientific training in the basement of his Wisconsin home, nearly killed Friede, almost cost him his leg and his fingers and at one point put him into a coma.

“People said I was crazy, of course. Some people tried to stop me,” he told the Guardian. “I understood it was dangerous but people are dying from snakebites and I was pissed at that. I couldn’t get that out of my head. I put my ass on the line and I’m glad I did.”

Friede’s sacrifices are now poised to help deliver a new, broad antivenom that may avert some of the 138,000 deaths and 400,000 disfigurements and disabilities currently caused each year by snakebites worldwide, most of them poorer people in developing countries across Asia and Africa. In total, as many as 5.5 million people globally are bitten by snakes a year.

Read the whole story for more Fun Animal Encounters! Like: “Further brushes with severe injury and death occurred in the following years. Friede passed out with anaphylactic shock several times, one of his fingers turned black and was nearly amputated after being bitten by a rattlesnake before, most seriously, the venom of a monocled cobra caused muscles in his leg to start to disintegrate.”

Well, Gods bless the guy. At least it seems his heart is in the right place. He’s lucky it still is!

So if you see a Brewers fan at the game tonight with some strange marks on his hands/arms, just be grateful it wasn’t “bring ANY pet to the game night” at Target Field…