The Can, Mickey, and Bone

Immaculate Grid #310, February 6th, 2024

9/9 for a tidy 100 score this morning.

Only one team usually has me thinking about a player that played a real long time with that team. My default is to thinking about an all-time great, like Roberto Clemente with the Pirates or Lou Gehrig with the Yankees.

But any player will do no matter if it’s for 1,000 games or one game. So, I started with Evan Carter for the Rangers, who still somehow qualifies for rookie status headed into 2024 despite setting the world on fire after his call-up late last year and continuing his stellar play into the playoffs as his Rangers won the whole thing. He has the patience at the plate of a buddhist monk and can hit for power. He’s going to be special.

Nationals are the Expos and being of a certain age I start thinking about players that played for the Expos before I think of the Nationals. Oil Can Boyd had a bit of a renaissance in Montreal before finishing his career with the Rangers on a down note in 1991. Can, as you may know, claims to have pitched while high on weed for every game he played from “Little League all the way through college,” and smoked crack every day of the 1986 season.

But my favorite Oil Can Boyd anecdote is how he was detained by the cops in 1987 during spring training because he faced several late charges on some VHS tapes. When the titles of the tapes were leaked to the press and included several pornos, they called it “The Can’s Film Festival.”

Jay Buhner had a great career in Seattle as their rightfielder throughout the 1990s. And if we’re talking about Jay Buhner, I’m obliged to post one reference where he crossed over into pop-culture stardom:

George’s dad was correct, Buhner DID have a great arm, an absolute cannon:

Finally, here’s 15 minutes of Jay Buhner highlights where you can see his first homer for the Yankees:

He was great and he was fun. On a team with Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson and Alex Rodriguez, he seemed perfectly happy to be behind those guys.

Mickey Tettleton was a lucky guess, but I did seem to remember him in the outfield and if you’re going to put a C/1B/DH in the outfield, it’s probably going to be in right field.

Tettleton played for my Orioles for a few minutes but he was a big part of the legendary 1989 team that went into the final weekend of the season gunning for a division title after losing over 100 games in 1988. He was an all-star in 1989 and he hit 20 homers in the first half:

He went on to have some big power years in Detroit and Texas and was kind of a “true three outcome guy” who didn’t hit for a high average, but struck out a lot, hit a lot of homers and walked a lot (leading the league in 1992). Tettleton was a switch hitting catcher with power to all fields. And a lot of people remember him for his batting stance which he’d let his bat fall parallel to the ground as the pitcher would make his delivery and then snapping it up and lashing it through the zone. Here it is in action while he was with the Rangers:

If you were a certain age growing up in the 80s and 90s, you tried to swing like Mickey Tettleton.