Monday, May 3, 2021

Old Friends

TigerBlog saw this the other day on Twitter. 

It's a short feature on Princeton baseball coach Scott Bradley. It's very good stuff:

There aren't many people TB has met at Princeton who can tell stories the way Scott Bradley can. Or has the kinds of stories, what with all of his years as a Major Leaguer. 

TB mentioned Bradley's Twitter debut back in February.

At the time, TB said that he wasn't sure why it took Bradley so long to get involved on Twitter but that nonetheless he was already one of the best accounts to follow. Nothing that Bradley has done since has made TB think any differently.

Far from it. In fact, Bradley keeps getting better and better. 

He mixes his experiences as a Major League Baseball player with the relationships he built there with his work as the Princeton head baseball coach to his general thoughts on the game of baseball and so much more. The result is very, very entertaining.

Bradley tweeted this earlier this weekend:

There's a lot in that picture. 

Chris Young is the general manager of the Texas Rangers. Will Venable is the bench coach for the Boston Red Sox.

Between them, they scored 1,811 points as Princeton men's basketball players. That's a figure that would have approached, oh, 2,700 or more had Young not lost his final two years of eligibility when he become a professional baseball player. 

Had he played those last two seasons of 2000-01 and 2001-02, he would almost certainly have finished his career second all-time at Princeton in points and rebounds and first by a very long margin in blocked shots. 

As it is, he's still second in career blocked shots, with 145. The career record is 159. Today's trivia question - who holds that record? TB will give you the answer later.

Chris Young and Will Venable are two of the most extraordinary Princeton athletes TB has ever seen. They were two-sport athletes, both having been basketball players and baseball players. 

To tell you everything you need to know about them as college athletes, they both went on to long careers in Major League Baseball and yet you can make the case that they were better college basketball players than college baseball players. 

TB has written this a lot here through the years. Venable was at his best in the biggest moments as a Princeton basketball player. Young would have had just as long an NBA career as he did a Major League Baseball career.

It's great to see how well they're doing in professional baseball, an arena in which Princeton is very well represented. Venable, by the way, will be a Major League manager one day not too far away.

Young, for instance, is one of three Princeton baseball alums who is currently a Major League general manager. In addition to Young, you have Mike Hazen with the Diamondbacks and Mike Chernoff with the Cleveland Indians. 

Princeton also has Mike Ford on the Yankees and David Hale on the Phillies.

By the way, the answer to the trivia question is Rick Hielscher, the two-time first-team All-Ivy League selection and member of the Class of 1995. 

Also, it got TB to thinking about the women's record for blocked shots in a career. He knew it belonged to WNBA player Bella Alarie, but he wasn't sure how many she had. He figured it was more than Hielscher, and as it turns out, it was.

In fact, Alarie had 249 career blocks, and she is the only player to have more than Hielscher's total. Alarie also had the four best single-season totals in school history. 

Anyway, back at the picture of Young and Venable, it was taken earlier this weekend in Arlington, where the Rangers took three of four from the Red Sox.

It's great to see both of them doing so well.

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