Content Creator Tony is back with TonySPN, a recurring series covering the weird wide world of sports!

Last week we ran a question about Luis Arraez and his chase for a .400 batting average. For you non-Sports folks, that’s a player who gets a hit in four of every 10 at-bats for the season, and it’s a feat that is virtually impossible in today’s MLB. How hard is it? Just eight players have done it since 1900, and no one since 1941.

We can get deep into the nitty-gritty of why this doesn’t happen, but it basically boils down to this: You have to be really good and extremely lucky for a very long time. It’s difficult, but possible, to go on a hot streak and hit .400 for a month or two at a time. But playing 162 games gives a lot of time for hot streaks to even themselves out.

Look at Arraez himself, and you’ll see just how difficult it is to hit .400. On June 24, in Arraez’s 72nd game of the season (and 78th game for his Miami Marlins), his average rose to .401. That was the last day he finished hitting above .400. What happened? Did he hit a slump?

In a sense, yes, as he’s hit just .313 from June 25 to today. The only complication with calling it a “slump” is that his slump is a hot streak for almost any other player. There are 209 hitters who’ve racked up 100-plus plate appearances since their team’s 79th game of the 2023 season. Arraez is tied with Bryce Harper for the 27th-best batting average in baseball.

Entering Wednesday, Arraez is rocking a .370 batting average. He almost certainly won’t hit .400 this year, but he’s still got a chance to have one of the 10-highest batting averages in my lifetime. It’s a big deal, which is exactly half of the reason why I wanted to write a question about it.

The other half of my pull to write a question about Arraez was to share an Easter egg hidden on Baseball Reference (part of the Sports Reference family), the source I used to pull all these stats.

Baseball/Sports Reference is a collection of massive databases that hold all the information you could ever want about baseball and more. Did you forget whether Luis Arraez hit left- or right-handed, or where he was born? They’re right there to tell you that he bats left-handed and was born in San Felipe, Venezuela.

It’s so much more powerful than that. Would you like to know who leads MLB in strikeouts this season? It’s child’s play. Have you ever wondered something ridiculous and useless, like “Who has hit the most home runs on their birthdays throughout their career?” They can tell you it was Alex Rodriguez and Mark Reynolds with six apiece.

The sheer amount of data these sites contain is almost overwhelming, but it comes with some whimsy to those with a careful eye. There are curiosities and in-jokes hidden within the hard data, waiting to be uncovered. Like the one from the page of the last player to hit .400 in a season: Ted Williams.

Williams is regarded by many baseball historians as one of the all-time greatest hitters, and perhaps even No. 1 on the list. That’s wrong, mostly because Barry Bonds exists, but it’s hard to fault them too much for thinking that. Despite missing essentially five years of his prime (and losing a highly coveted Quaker Oats sponsorship) to serve as a Marine Pilot (alongside John Glenn in the ’50s!!!), he amassed 521 home runs while hitting for a .344 lifetime average.

He was also notoriously a crank, which likely played a part in him having a burial site that’s unique among all of baseball, and maybe all of sports: Frozen.

If you want to read about the controversial, bizarre, and kinda morbid saga of Williams’ remains, you can do so. But the short of it is: Williams’ remains are cryogenically frozen, allegedly in faint hopes of being able to be revived in the future. It’s an odd detour in a Hall of Famer’s journey, presented in such a dry, matter-of-fact way as to be amusing if you know what’s up.

That’s far from the only Easter egg you’ll find on Sports Reference, and I had my own first encounter with them long ago. As a young, high school-aged investigative journalist, I posed a question to myself that needed answers: Were there any baseball players with dirty words in their name?

(Gonna take a brief detour to say: Sure, it can catch you off guard to see R.A. Dickey on a list of Cy Young Award winners, but laughing at people's names generally is pretty rotten to do! Names often carry cultural and familial significance that requires much more care than a throwaway joke can handle.)

In an effort to find the good shit, I typed “shit” into Baseball Reference. There is no player with that name, but it does have a landing page reminding you to clean up your act.

Lesson learned, and I never did anything immature again, thanks to Sports Reference.

Years later, I found that bit about Williams’ burial site, and wanted to know: What else is hidden in the depths of Sports-Reference? Here’s everything I could find:

Jim Abbott carved out a 10-year career in the major leagues, finished as a Cy Young Award finalist one year, and even threw a no-hitter. He did all of this one-handed, as he was born without a right hand. Because fielding is a big part of being a pitcher (especially for Abbott, whom hitters would bunt against to force him to field), Abbott had to learn how to do what is generally a two-handed task with one.

It’s a central part of Abbott’s story, and Baseball-Reference nods to it in their typically understated way. Typically, they note which hand a player bats and throws with. On Abbott’s page, this section goes:

Bats: Left

Throws: Left

Fields: Left as well

It’s hard to stand out as a singular icon in a sport with such rich history, but Keith Hernandez does. The long-time Cardinals and Mets first baseman hit .296 with 162 homers and a ton of doubles over his career, but it’s not his playing career that has Hernandez deified. It’s his facial hair.

The New York Times cites Hernandez as having won surveys conducted by the American Mustache Institute as the best sports mustache of all time. No mean feat in a sport that includes such legends as Rollie Fingers, Dennis Eckersley, and Kenny Powers. But it’s Hernandez’s lip sweater “Little Mex,” which has its own page on Baseball Reference. It’s listed as 0’5” and 0.05 pounds.

You can find oddities referring to multi-sport athletes. There’s Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders, of course, who have full pages on both Baseball and Pro-Football Reference. But did you ever want to know how many 300 games Mookie Betts bowled? They’ve got you. They also know that Madison Bumgarner’s career earnings ($128.51 million) isn’t quite complete if you haven’t factored in the $27,100 he won in rodeo competitions.

Their documentation goes beyond the world of real sports. In 2022, then-Reds outfielder Tommy Pham dished a pre-game slap to Giants outfielder Joc Pederson. What insult could’ve possibly prompted this violent outburst?

A months-old fantasy football beef. In a league of MLB players run by Mike Trout, Pham accused Pederson of abusing his league’s injured reserve rules. Whether it’s perfectly acceptable or a lack of etiquette, we’ll leave up to you, Dedicated Morning Rounds Readers. Justified or not, it came to blows, and raised more questions, like “Who won?” Mike Trout told a national television audience that Astros third baseman Alex Bregman took the 12-team league. Bregman’s career awards page now reads as such:

2018 AL All-Star MVP

2019 All-MLB Team (2nd)

Won Mike Trout’s Fantasy Football League

It’s not just winnings they’ll cover. Baseball Reference also tracks expenses in some cases. Deadspin (2005-19, may it rest in peace) found out that Broward County, Florida’s utilities records were more-or-less public record. This enabled them to track the bills they issued to speedy former Rangers outfielder Oddibe McDowell. Baseball Reference has preserved these for posterity in their “Utility Bills” table.

They also run the following disclaimer: “Utilities may not be complete (especially for players not named Oddibe McDowell) and does not include cable, telephone, electricity, gas or trash pickup.”

There are more Easter eggs scattered among the other Sports-Reference sites. Editor Ira stumbled onto one on Basketball Reference while writing NBA Trivia. He typed “technical fouls” into the search bar, and it took him directly to Rasheed Wallace’s page, as he holds the record for both single-season (41) and career (317) techs. Maybe someday someone will hit a .400 batting average, but the NBA changed the rules to ensure no one can touch ‘Sheed’s techs.

We’d get into more of those other Easter eggs, but wow, just doing baseball took up all this time. We’ll return to this well. For now, we’ll say: And that’s all you need to know!