That's Perfect

Yesterday was Day 1 for the summer camp at Dillon Gym, unless you're Little Miss TigerBlog, in which case today is Day 1, since school didn't end until yesterday. As for TigerBlog Jr., Day 1 of his final year at the camp will have to wait until tomorrow, as a fantasy football draft got in the way today.

The Dillon camp, run by the people over at Campus Rec, is a great place for kids in the summer.

When TigerBlog was a kid, he spent six summers at sleepaway camp, first at a place called Camp Toledo and then another called Camp Echo. While TB has great memories of his time there, he wouldn't want to send his own kids away for eight weeks at a time; the Dillon camp has been a perfect alternative.

This will be the third summer that the head counselor at the camp will be Craig Schwartz, who is a middle school phys ed teacher in South Brunswick. Craig has the perfect personality to run a camp for 6-13 year olds, since he rarely appears to get frazzled and can usually be found playing whatever game happens to be going on at the time.

This is the second incarnation between Craig and TigerBlog. Back a long, long time ago, in what TB thinks may actually be a previous life, TB coached Schwartz in baseball in high school and American Legion in West Windsor. Schwartz was a power-hitting catcher who went on to have a very successful baseball career at the College of New Jersey.

TB coached in the Mercer County American Legion League for eight summers, with some pretty good teams and some pretty bad ones. He had the opportunity to coach some great players, as well as some pretty interesting characters during his tenure. Would he do it again if he had it to do all over again? Uh, well, er, maybe.

TB noticed in the paper the other day that a kid named James Pugliese pitched a perfect game for Hamilton Post 31, getting all 21 batters he faced in a 1-0 win. Along the way, he had 12 strikeouts.

The story noted that it was the first perfect game in the MCALL since 1981, when Greg Meszaros threw one for Broad Street Park.

That note made TB chuckle. Greg Meszaros works here at Princeton in the Office of Information Technology, and his wife Kim is the administrative assistant to Director of Athletics Gary Walters. Greg Meszaros went from Hamilton High and Broad Street Park to pitch at Rider; he and his family are regulars at basically all Princeton athletic contests and are as likely to be tailgating at a soccer game as a football game.

Kim mentioned yesterday that Greg will be presenting Pugliese with a plaque commemorating his accomplishment.

The follow up story in today's paper mentioned something that also struck close to home for TB, the fact that it was only probable that there hadn't been another MCALL perfect game between the one that Meszaros pitched 29 years ago and the one from this past weekend. In other words, the records aren't complete.

Now, as far as the perfect game goes, had there been one since Meszaros', someone would have come forward by now to remind everyone. TB saw many no-hitters in the MCALL, including four by a player he coached, Tim Rumer, who went from Princeton High to Duke to Major League spring training appearances with the Yankees and Rangers. Rumer once pitched a no-hitter while going 6 for 6 and hitting for the cycle, but he never pitched a perfect game.

Another TB player, Mark McKenzie, once had the official scorer make a bad decision on a ground ball in the first inning, calling a sure error a hit. That would be the only baserunner McKenzie allowed in the game.

Anyway, the point is that there are so many possible records that are unable to be looked up because the historical information just isn't there. That is something that we see here at Princeton all the time.

For instance, recently named men's lacrosse tri-captain John Cunningham scored five goals last season as a longstick. Is that the most ever by a longstick at Princeton? Maybe. Probably, actually.

TB has season-by-season stats going back into the 1980s and then stats for about a third of the years going back to the 1940s. Before that, there's nothing. TB knows who the longsticks were going back to the 1980s, but not before. So is Cunningham's accomplishment a record? There's no way to find out.

Records like points in a season or yards in a game or goals in a career are all there. It's the Cunningham type records that are hard to find out. And the "last time it happened" types.

When was the last time Princeton beat the No. 1 team in the country in whatever sport? Or when was the last time someone had a goal in 10 straight games in whatever sport? Or

TigerBlog knows the answer to some of those, simply because he's been around so long.

One way around the problem is to credit the player with the record and see if someone offers a correction, but that's not exactly the right way to do things.

And so, some accomplishments are lost to time, forever.

As for Princeton baseball, Ross Ohlendorf was once one out away from a perfect game, only to lose that - and then the game on a steal of home two batters later.

Has there ever been a perfect game in Princeton baseball history. Nope.

At least, we don't think so.