Philip Humber started it, and by the time the trend he started was finished he was out of a job.
When the 2012 season was only 17 days old, Humber pitched a perfect game. It was the first of an unprecedented three perfect games and the first of seven no-hitters that would be pitched last season.
Never before had the major leagues had three perfect games in the same season. Only twice since 1900 had major league pitchers produced seven no-hitters in a single season.
One and done.
I placed an X next to Jack Morris on my Hall of Fame ballot, and I was finished voting. If Morris is elected, I will most likely be finished voting period. If Morris is not elected this time, I will vote for him next year in his final year of eligibility and then be done.
Barring a change in my thinking, which I don’t expect, I believe the time has come to relinquish my right as a 10-year (actually 50-year) member of the Baseball Writers Association of America to vote in the Hall of Fame election.
I offer two reasons for my decision.
Frank Russo is a baseball collector who doesn’t collect bats, balls, uniforms or autographs.
A 53-year-old resident of East Brunswick, N.J., Russo collects obituaries and death certificates of major league baseball players. He keeps track of their causes of death, and when he can find them, he takes pictures of their gravesites.
And if all of that is not unusual enough, he is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR for short) who does not consider himself a sabermetrician and has no use for sabermetrics or whatever the new-age metrics are called, you know, the ones I have no use for (the SABR guys despise me, Russo said, which is ok with me).
Russo has written a book, “Bury My Heart at Cooperstown,” subtitled “Salacious, Sad and Surreal Deaths in the History of Baseball,” and he maintains a Web site, TheDeadBallEra.com, “where every player is safe at home” and which he dedicates to “deceased major league ball players.”
