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Bo Knows Baseball -- SSI on G-Money's Bo-vs-Halman comp

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Another great James quote about Bo:  "He does do spectacular things very regularly.  But baseball is fundamentally not about doing spectacular things."

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I was at the Dome when Bo caught a ball in the very LF corner and sailed it on the fly to home plate to nail a fast runner.  The ball did not bounce.  It had a low arc.  It traveled at least one football field in distance.  The shock when the catcher tagged the runner out -- comfortably -- was palpable, not least in the Royals' dugout.  The feel in the stadium was as though a zebra had run onto the field.  Nobody knew what to do.

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My fave Bo highlight:  the one where he runs down a ball in the gap and then, elephant-like, runs up and down the wall in a semi-circle, simply trotting in from there back to the dugout.   The great thing about it was that he improvised the Sk8r Boy move casually.  And then it warn't no thang.

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Bo, as far as I know, started the modern practice of snapping a bat with your arms after a strikeout.  Bo snapped his before they were quite as whippy as they are these days.

IIRC the first time he did it, he fanned badly and then wistfully stared back into the dugout as if confused.  He had his bat on top of his helmet, then offhandedly just pulled both ends down over his head and the bat exploded. 

They played it like crazy on ESPN for a week, of course.

Nowadays, everybody sands the handle down to a micron's width and the shortstops break the bats over their knees.  But back in the day, with the more old-fashioned bats, it was quite a sight.   I wonder who the second guy was, who risked the bat-over-the-knee trick during a game?

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I can't find any Bo videos from the Royals, it being 15-20 years ago and a tadbit before the onset of the YouTube era.  But the guy was from another planet :- )

Cheers,

Dr D