The Pecan Park Eagle

Happy New Years Day
from
Houston 2018

HAPPY NEW YEAR

(With Apologies Again to the Late Franklin Pierce Adams)

These are the gladdest of linked-words this morn:

“Happy to New to Year.”

Trio of ne’er cubs, with fleet lips may say ‘em,

John Happenny to John Newell to Al Yeargin,

That’s who.

Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

Making us speak with minds thinking double,

In giant search-prey for words of no trouble:

“HAPPennY to NEWell to YEARgin,”

To you. Will do.

Sometimes, like when you go searching Baseball Almanac for former MLB players whose full and complete surnames spell out “Happy New Year” you have to settle for players whose names contain those words as part of their legal last name identities.

Such was the case here.

We had to settle for three guys whose ancient MLB time was only slightly beyond the reach of Moonlight Graham, but they got the job done – and what do you know? Three nobody baseball names from the distant past proved on New Year’s Day 2018 that they were certainly big enough to get the job done today and be qualified as a “trio of ne’er cubs” by their universal absences from the roster of that NL club that holds down the north side of Chicago’s hopes for more years like 2008 and 2016.

In our minds, we are designating Happenny at shortstop and Newell at 2^nd base in our imaginary double play pair. Happenny had some MLB experience at shortstop; Newell was a 3^rd baseman that we moved to 2^nd for this effort. We had to convert Yeargin from a pure pitching background to take over 1^st base in our theater of the mind. We didn’t think he could do any worse there in fantasy than he had done in reality from the mound via his overall record.

If you care to check out the boys’ reality records first hand, here are each’s links to the Baseball Almanac material:

J. Happenny

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/player.php?p=happejo01

J. Newell

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/player.php?p=neweljo01

A. Yeargin

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/player.php?p=yeargal01

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Happy New Year Again, Folks! And thanks too for all those wonderful public and private wishes you sent me yesterday on my 8oth birthday. They will all be remembered and appreciated. So far, turning 80 feels no better or worse than it did being 79. I’m just glad to be here.

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Tags: Happy New Year Double Word Play

This entry was posted on January 1, 2018 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.