A fine piece of Michigan baseball history popped up on eBay recently, check out this gem: The auction description noted the sweater was size 42, in good condition and noted that the name of the letter winner could be found inside (but didn’t mention who it was). You have to be careful with these items that are being presented at Michigan memorabilia just because there’s a maize or blue ‘M’ somewhere on the item. But this looked pretty authentic & the seller told me the name inside the sweater was a gent named Berger Larson. Larson was a team captain and a fine pitcher for the Wolverine baseballers in the mid-1930s. He was named conference MVP for Ray Fisher’s league championship squad of 1935-36. Here’s a look at him: Larson finished the year 7-2 with 83 strikeouts in his 72 innings of work including a five-hitter against Iowa in the season finale, enough to clinch the league title. After Michigan, Larson tried a shot at the bigs, starting out with the Class A Davenport Blue Sox in the Brooklyn Dodgers system. He got off to a nice start, going 6-5 with a 2.94 ERA but never got much going after that. The auction for the sweater closed recently, going for $52–a pretty good value for the buyer.
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Dufek’s Homer – The Call (audio)
Love this photo – mgoblue.com Certainly by now you’ve heard of Michigan’s epic comeback from down 14 runs to Northwestern this weekend on Senior Day. The story made it to SportsCenter and prompted ESPN to ask, ‘Are you Serious?’ WTKA’s Ira Weintraub called the game on the radio and was kind enough to forward over a clip of his call the Dufek’s bomb. Per Ira, “Not a great call, but not bad for a guy who has now called 8 baseball games in the last 10 years!!” Not to bad indeed, and note Weintraub using the Harwell technique of letting the crowd and band paint the scene after the blast: [display_podcast] . For more, check out frequent mgoblog diarist FormerlyAnonymous who gave his account of the game. (HT: Ace @ TWB) And speaking of WKTA 1050AM, Rich Maloney’s call into Sam and Ira this morning is worth a listen. Maloney effectively acknowledged the was over at 13-0, telling his players that no team of his has ever quit during a game, and it wouldn’t be happening today. That said, he did tell the guys that the wind was blowing out and their pitching was a bit depleted. Who knew? Unfortunately I don’t see the podcast up there yet; it is comes up I’ll toss up a link.
