This Is Quite Literally The Single Most Absurd Stat I've Ever Seen In My Entire Life
During these times of no sports we, collectively, have done a lot of going backwards in time and reliving some of the great moments sports have given us over the years. Classic games, ESPN running the Ocho, deep dives on individual careers lost in the great sea of the thousands of players who have touched our lives in one way or another. And it's still early, who knows what we'll be doing with ourselves to pass the time a month from now. Heroin? Who's to say. But in all my years of watching sports, reading its history, playing them poorly, I've never crossed a single more absurd stat than this one. None of Gretzky's. None of Tony Gwynn's. None of Pedro's, Jordan's, Wilt's. Nothing touches this. How is this even remotely possible. Something so random, so specific, grains of sand aren't as small and refined as the specifics to this stat. So random and specific that is feels wildly fake. And yet it's real as hell.
"Who is first?" you're probably asking yourself, as I did, perplexed that one of the great baseball players of my lifetime somehow wasn't even the best lefty to be born on a specific day in some random town with a population of less than 5,000 people.
Stan Musial has nearly 1,000 more hits than Ken Griffey, Jr. And you can certainly point to Griffey's injuries as one of the reasons he didn't rack up 3,000 hits. Well, World War II didn't get in Musial's way so I can't even give The Kid that, Musial already had one of the more absurd stats going. Musial's 3,630 career hits can be split exactly down the middle for home and road games: 1815 at home, 1815 on the road. That is now, at best, the second most absurd statistic I can attribute to Stan The Man's career. A distant second, at that. The best November 21st lefty slugging outfielder in Donora history.