Howdy! It’s Joey, back with more Fun Fact Friyay. Today’s fact might turn you from an acquaintance into a best spud.
In what would be his final professional baseball game, catcher Dave Bresnahan threw a potato to confuse a runner before tagging him out with the actual baseball.
The very first recorded baseball game dates back to June 19, 1846. In an all-New York matchup (played at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, NJ), the New York Nine beat the New York Knickerbockers. The final score was 23-1 and the game lasted four innings. How competitive!
From that very first game to the playoffs of today, teams have always looked for ways to win. Sometimes, those ways bend the legality of rules.
There’s an excellent book called Intentional Balk: Baseball’s Thin Line Between Innovation and Cheating that dissects some of the more creative ways teams and players have sought to gain advantages over the years.
We’re talking things like elaborate underground wiring systems that drew from the ol’ “two tin cans and a string” foundation or intentionally kicking dirt onto the plate to make it harder for pitchers to see during twilight games.
One of the most clever moments, however, comes from an August night in 1987. Dave Bresnahan was a catcher on the Double-A Williamsport Bills. The season had been a disappointing one, and heading into the final weekend, Bresnahan put an idea into motion that he and his teammates had been talking about for weeks.
"I was the backup catcher, and when you're sitting in the bullpen, you have to do something to break the boredom," he said. "So we had a lot of discussions from baseball to politics. We talked about all kinds of tricks people had done, whether they were in college or high school. We talked about bringing a potato or a roll of tape onto the field.
"And my teammates challenged me. They said why don't you do it. It took me about two weeks to get the nerve, but I finally decided to do it. I'm not really a class clown type but I have a great sense of humor, and I was just trying to break the monotony of a poor season for me and the team."
With his teammates supportive of the prank, Bresnahan brought several potatoes to the ballpark for the final weekend of the season, which included a doubleheader against Reading.
Still, he needed the right scenario to make this potato caper happen. And in the fifth inning, the perfect setup unfolded.
Reading’s Rick Lundblade got onto third base with two outs. Bresnahan told the home plate umpire, Scott Potter, that there was an issue with his glove and he needed to replace it.
The second glove had a potato in it, peeled and shaped to look similar to a baseball, that quite literally would change Bresnahan’s life.
Bresnahan returned to his place behind home plate and called for a pitch low and away. As the ball was coming to him, Bresnahan transferred the potato to his throwing hand, then leapt up and chucked the potato well over third baseman Rob Swain’s head.
Lundblade, the runner on third, saw what he thought was the ball rolling around in the outfield, so he sprinted for home. He found Bresnahan standing there with the ball and was tagged out.
It’s straight out of the Little Big League playbook!
“I started to run to the dugout and I hear the third-base umpire yelling that it’s a ‘bleeping’ potato,” Bresnahan said. “My roommate had a close friend who had an umpire for a close friend and we had called him about a week before to see how he would rule. He said he felt they’d just send the runner back to third and kick me out of the game.”
Bresnahan was fine with that outcome, only it didn’t happen. Potter, the home plate umpire, was being graded by his supervisor, who was sitting in the stands. And suddenly, he had to make a decision on something that is not in any baseball rulebook. Potter allowed the run to count.
Williamsport manager Orlando Gomez, like Potter, was not pleased by the antics. Gomez pulled Bresnahan from the game and later fined him $50. The following day, Bresnahan was released from the team.
That wound up being his final professional baseball game. He had offers from other clubs, but they all wanted him to start at High-A ball, which was a step down from the league he had just been playing in. It became clear that any team that wanted his services was more interested in the stunt side of things, so Bresnahan retired.
Within the next year, he met his wife and eventually had three children before moving into a successful real estate career. None of that would have happened if not for one fateful potato.
As for that potato? It got thrown into a trash can during the game. However, thanks to some collector sleuthing, it now sits in a specimen jar at the Baseball Reilquary in Southern California, preserved by denatured alcohol. Now that’s a tasty piece of baseball history.