I still dabble in the Immaculate Grid.

I don't put nearly as much pressure on myself to fill it out perfectly as I did when the game was new.

If you’re unfamiliar, every day a new blank grid is issued - 3 x 3, with 6 categories - 3 across the top, 3 across the bottom. Your job is to find a baseball player who fits the 2 criteria under which the box falls.

Along with a score out of 9 for how many boxes you can get correct, you get a ‘Rarity Score’, the total of the percentages in each box. (The percentages represent how many people in a given day have picked the same guy as you.)

A rarity score under 100 is good. Some people are working with rarity scores under 10 and I would have been very good at that maybe 20 years ago but my brain no longer has that information in it.

These days I am good for an 8/9 most days and I’m very happy with a score under 100. (If you miss a box you get 100 tacked onto your score.) If I can make Gary Carter fit into the grid, or David Wright, I’m happy.

Which brings us to this grid from mid-January - a tough one for me. Rookie of the Year and 1st Round Draft Picks are not my area of expertise. (Certain teams present problems for me too. Turns out I am not as big an expert on San Diego Padres or Kansas City Royals history as I might think I am.)

But I managed to do OK on this one until I saw ‘Threw A No-Hitter’ and ‘Played Outfield.’ That doesn’t mean the player has to be an outfielder - it just means he had to make an appearance there.

So I thought long and hard before I realized maybe Babe Ruth threw a no-hitter. He did. (But I feel like it’s not talked about a whole heck of a lot. I feel like I should have known that for sure.)

I almost put Randy Johnson there. When I checked the results it turns out 70 pitchers who threw a no-hitter also played a game in the outfield…including Randy Johnson. (A lot of them were guys I’d never heard of. Others you may know - Roy Oswalt, Don Larsen, Dave Stieb, and Fernando Valenzuela.)

As you can see, my score would have been much improved with a correct guess of Randy Johnson. (He probably would have been in the 1%-5% area as opposed to the very popular Ruth that day.) But I was curious about the circumstances under which Johnson made an outfield appearance.

It’s always fun to have a reason to look up a stat like a random OF appearance for a pitcher.

I looked it up and found that he played the bottom of the 8th inning of the last game of the 1993 season in left field. The Mariners were out of contention, so I wondered if there was some kind of contract incentive for appearances - I thought it was weird the team didn’t do it to negotiate a pitching situation. (In 1986 or 1987 the Mets did something like this - Davey Johnson alternated Roger McDowell and Jesse Orosco between pitcher and outfield for lefty-righty matchups - because there was a brawl earlier in the game with ejections that left the Mets short-handed.)

It might have been as simple as getting Johnson the opportunity to play the field and become - at the time - the tallest person to play in the field. I found this site which has the article from the News Tribune from that day. Lou Piniella seems to have been messing around at the end of the season - the article says Ken Griffey, Jr. played first base the day before. It also says Johnson wanted to play first, but Piniella hadn’t wanted to take an at-bat away from Dave Magadan.

One last fun fact - and this is why I am going to make more of an effort this year to look stuff up when I’m curious instead of leaving it be (and I promise it won’t all be baseball-related): The left fielder Johnson replaced was Brian Turang.

He’s the father of current Milwaukee Brewers middle infielder Brice Turang.

For what it’s worth - I did look up Oswalt, Stieb, and Valenzuela - they all played the outfield in unusual circumstances during long extra innings games. Don Larsen seems to have been a good-hitting pitcher and he played 2 games in the outfield - one where he played the last three innings and another where he started and played a full game in left field.

As Mel Allen might say…How about that.