Super Bowler

What do you do when you wake up on a lazy Sunday morning and all you have to look forward to is Super Bowl commercials? Yeah, if you have no emotional investment in the two teams that are playing and a halftime show of Beyonce throwing her boobs and butt around, inspiration is hard to come by. And there is little sense writing some epic piece on baseball when half the world is waiting for a football game. So what is an uninspired writer to do on a Super Bowl Sunday like that? Find a baseball connection.

Let's drift back to 1952 and a pitcher named, Joseph Super. Super was born in 1932 according to his Baseball-reference.com page and only pitched one year in the minors for  D-League teams in Georgia. One of them was an affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates, which leads me to believe that it might be this guy. The part in his obituary about him playing in an old timers' league and being inducted into its Hall of Fame is fairly strong but still speculative evidence.

Anyway, old Joe Super wasn't that super in his one year of minor league play. It looks like he did pretty well for the Fitzgerald Pioneers but struggled for Brunswick Pirates. He had 176 professional baseball innings pitched and then disappeared from B-R's view.

Now we need a "Bowl." Well, the closest we could come there is to Grant Bowler. Grant at least made it to the majors.

Grant Tierney Bowler was born on October 24, 1907 in Denver, Colorado. He also died there in 1964 and is buried here. He pitched for the Chicago White Sox in 1931 and 1932. He did not do very well. He never won a game, though he did have one complete game in his three big league starts. He had one hit in ten MLB at bats.

Bowler also played four years in the minors and was not very good there either with a 15-27 record that included a 4.94 ERA. His minor league career followed a brief pitching experience at DePaul University where he did not pitch very effectively either. How he ever made it to the majors is a mystery.

There you have it. Here is my Super Bowler post about two nondescript players you'll probably never hear about again. I hope the commercials are funny at least.