What excitement!!!

 

Hey, how often do even your New York Yankees get the chance to break a 117-year-old record???

They can tonight. All they need is one more shutout, and they will shatter the old club mark for consecutive scoreless innings, with 38.

The record was set by the 1908 Yankees (still better known, then, as the Highlanders), who played up in Hilltop Park, on the site of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. (That building in the background is still standing.)

The 1908 club was one of only two Yankees' teams to lose 100 games or more. They went 51-103-1, just .002 percentage points better than the 50-102-1, 1912 team.

The squad got off to a decent start, with a record of 23-20, but fell into its very own June swoon, going 1-12. Manager Clark Griffith was pushed out by the Highlanders' thoroughly corrupt management, and would go on to eventually make the Washington Senators the joke of the American League. 

He was replaced by "The Tabasco Kid," one Norman Elberfeld, seen here, and called "the dirtiest, scrappiest, most pestiferous, most rantankerous, most rambunctious ballplayer that ever stood on spikes."

The Kid was something else, all right. The Yanks' first real shortstop, he was known for having great range and a "cyclonic arm," and was also considered one of the best hitting shortstops of his time—which meant hitting .271 with 10 HRs in 14 seasons. He stole 535 bases, at a 72-percent clip, and was known for his ability to get hit by a pitch, in which category he is still 13th all-time.

Perhaps because of this, the Tabasco Kid was constantly getting injured. Not Giancarlo Stanton/Jazz Chisholm constantly, but a lot. He also got a lot of suspensions for arguing vociferously—and at least once, even brawling—with umpires.

There may have been something deeper wrong with the Kid—in spring training, he was known to smash plates at the team hotel—but he was generally admired for his "ginger." The Yanks brought him in to replace Clark Griffith, and as their second manager ever...the team went 27-71 for the rest of the season.

It was the nadir of the original, deadball era, too, so the Highlanders—or "Kilties" as they were sometimes called—were also shutout 20 times on the season, even though they were far from the worst hitting team in the league.

The next season, Elberfeld was back at shortstop for the Highlanders, but not in the manager's office. He stuck around baseball as coach and minor-league skipper for some time, but eventually went back to the apple orchard and the chicken farm that he and the Mrs. kept outside of Chattanooga.

Five of their six children were girls, and they all became very good athletes. The Kid seemed to mellow a good deal, and at one point he had them touring locally as "the Elberfeld Girls" baseball team.  

CAN we—dare we—break his team's record for consecutive scoreless innings? 

Is the pope a White Sox fan?