WHY TIES NEED TO BE BROKEN

FIRST BASE

If there’s one thing that baseball fans hate, it’s a tie. A baseball game can never end until one team has safely touched home plate more than the other. In every play, you’re safe or you’re out. Every pitch is a strike or a ball. Quite simply, you win or you lose… you NEVER tie.

However, on the extremely rare—almost never—occasion when a tie occurs, baseball magic happens.

Most recently, the Minnesota Twins and Detroit Tigers finished tied with the same record in 2009. Remember that classic back and forth one game playoff? If you saw it, you’ll never forget it.

How about in 1951? The New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers season ending tie was finally “resolved” with Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard ‘Round the World.

And of course, 1978. The Yankee and the Red Sox classic one game playoff when Bucky Dent hit the ball over the big green wall and effectively ended the Red Sox season and sent them spiraling downward for almost a decade.

#3. That’s how close it is between the #3 of my First basemen countdown. Yankee first basemen, Bill “Moose” Skowron and Tino Martinez are so close in so many categories, except 1. Follow me through:

These are the actual career Yankee numbers for both players:Both won 4 World Series with the Yankees. And their World Series numbers are just as close. (I only compared World Series numbers because when Moose played, there were no playoffs unless two teams tied at the end of the regular season.)

Both batted 5th in the batting order. Now Tino did bat clean up sometimes, but was probably more comfortable where he hit most, batting fifth. Moose batted fifth for his Yankee career.

Both played most of their games with the Yanks, but did play a substantial amount of games for other teams. However, both made their name with the Yankees.

So, based on everything I just showed you, and if I had to choose just 1, I would officially give it to Tino Martinez for this reason: He replaced Don Mattingly AND became a fan favorite himself.

When Mattingly played, Yankee fans loved him. They still do. So replacing him was not going to be easy. No one was going to just come in and take Donnie Baseball’s position without some hazing. Especially if they came from the same Seattle Mariners team that knocked Donnie out of the 1995 playoffs.
On top of that, Tino had a horrible start to his first season in the Bronx. Yet Tino persevered, took the hazing, never became bitter, and not only won over the fans in the Bronx, but became a fan favorite. I'm NOT claiming that in his day Moose wasn't as loved by the Yankee faithful. Just that Tino had to do a little more to earn his Yankee love.


--Moonlight Graham BYB Staff Writer

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