Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Until Phillies pitcher Roy Halladay's no-hit outing vs. the Reds last week, the only other playoff no-no came with the perfect game Yankees pitcher Don Larsen threw against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956. Mitchell's son, Dale E. Mitchell, lives in D.C., as does Lew Paper, attorney and author of "Perfect," the definitive tome on Larsen's perfect game.

I was fascinated by almost everything about the Dale Mitchell story. For starters, Mitchell only struck out 120 times in 11 years, and had a career batting average of .312. But all he's remembered for is taking one third strike. Opening graf of his L.A. Times obituary: “The most infamous Lookie Lou in baseball history went down for good this week, dead of a heart attack at age 65. Dale Mitchell.”

Dang!

Also, I got to read scads of old newspaper clippings, and it was wonderful to be reminded that baseball absolutely owned America back then, especially come October. Shirley Povich's front page story in the Washington Post, one of two large stories on the Post's front page, also made vintage sportswriting seem like tons of fun.

Povich's lede:

"The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larsen today pitched a no-hit, no run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series."

I'd read that story!

Also, there's the part of the tale where Mitchell, if given his druthers, wouldn't have been in the batter's box or even in a Brooklyn uniform on that day in October. Mitchell had been sent to the Dodgers by the Cleveland Indians just months before the World Series. Neither Father nor son liked the deal that set Dad up for eternal ignominy. All in all, they'd have preferred Cleveland over N.Y.

Dale E. was 13 at the time of the trade, and had spent every summer of his youth in Cleveland, going to Municipal Stadium with his dad every day the team was in town, putting on an Indians uniform in the same locker room as Bob Feller and all the grownup Indians and shagging flies with other players' kids while the dads took batting practice.

After the trade, Dale E. took off a few days from junior high to travel with Dad to Pittsburgh, where the Pirates were hosting the Dodgers, to meet the new teammates.

"We walked into the clubhouse," Dale E. recalled for me, "and I'm looking around, and, well, there were 'Boys of Summer' everywhere — Furillo, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Sal Maglie, all these guys were famous."

How cool is that?

As things turned out, pretty cool for everybody but the elder Dale Mitchell.

Now, as outlined in my story, folks are starting to feel sorry for Mitchell. They're saying he got screwed by the home plate umpire, who was retiring and wanted to go out with a bang. George Will, everybody's favorite fascist baseball fan, told a national TV audience earlier this year that the pitch that struck Mitchell out "was a foot and half probably high and outside.”

After the bum strike call, as Yankees catcher Yogi Berra wrapped his legs around Don Larsen in celebration, Mitchell walked away from the plate murmuring about getting screwed. According to the son, he never mentioned the pitch to his family, but was bitter about it "until the day he died."

But perhaps even the elder Mitchell would have enjoyed some of the coverage of Halladay's late-model no-no last week. During the postgame show on TBS, host Matt Winer compared Halladay's feat with Larsen's, then told the audience that the 1956 game ended when Larsen struck out "Dal Maxvill." Nobody on the TBS panel, which included Cal Ripken and Dennis Eckersley, mentioned "Dale Mitchell."

(In the original version of my Dale Mitchell story, I called the bewitching GOP senatorial candidate "Christine MacDonald." The correct name is "Christine O'Donnell." In the real world, Christine MacDonald is a Washington City Paper contributor. I think she was a proofreader at this paper until recently, also. But I might be merely searching for irony amid the tragedy.)

Burke tells Redskins fans that they should love Snyder, because, you know, he just wants to win. To prove it, he quotes Snyder saying he just wants to win.

Snyder, Burke says, just needs the same amount of time and compassion fans of other teams gave their owners. 

"Has it worked yet? No," Burke writes of Snyder's methodology. Had he stopped there, Burke would have saved himself from Stoogedom. 

Alas, he didn't stop there: "But it took Jerry Jones of the Cowboys, Robert Kraft of the Patriots and even George Steinbrenner of the Yankees years to figure it out."

Monte, Monte, Monte! Who writes your material?

Yeah, it took "years," alright. In Kraft's case: Two years. The Patriots, who had never won more than 11 games in their history before Kraft got 'em, were in the Super Bowl two years after he took over the team; he's got three Lombardi Trophies. If I'm reading Wikipedia right, Jones won a Super Bowl less than four years after buying the team. He got his three Lombardi Trophies within eight seasons. Steinbrenner got the Yankees in 1973. He had his team in the World Series by 1976, and won two of his seven championships by 1978.

Of course, the biggest flaw in Burke's post is that it assumes winning and losing is the key reason Snyder is so reviled around here. Actually, he's so reviled because Redskins fans, unlike Burke, have paid attention to how Snyder's acted since buying the team about 12 seasons ago.

The Forbes aggregation software apparently deciphers what its writer can't: In a section located just beneath the Snyder blog post called "Related Stories," there's a link to a story titled "Female Employee Yvonne Hiller Kills Two In Kraft Shooting." Just a hunch: I bet readers can come closer to answering Burke's original question from that other piece.

In the sales pitch on his personal Web site, Canseco points out that "Only two players have been able to accomplish this since, Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds."

Quite a club. Canseco, Rodriguez and Bonds will someday be viewed as the Murderers Row of the Dead Balls Era™. (Get used to it!)

Perhaps these items have been on sale for some time, or Canseco's not a student of the game: Ex-Nat Alfonso Soriano pledged the 40/40 frat in 2006.

BTW: The asking price for Canseco's detritus is $9,995.00.

As luck would have it, the W.T. Woodson grad and Auburn University star signed a contract with the Texas Rangers and left the Cape to mere hours before game time to start his pro career.

But while I was at the game and talking with locals about the Kettleers' history, more than one fan mentioned that Bill Richardson, the current New Mexico governor and burgeoning scandal magnet, was on the team in the 1960s.

Richardson, I was told, was so good that he'd been drafted by the Kansas City Athletics.

I'm no scout, and had never seen Richardson, who I was told still hangs out in Cotuit in the summer and catches Kettleers games, perform in anything other than street clothes. But I can't say the guy ever struck me as pro athlete material.

But I Googled him when I got home and found references to Richardson's being picked by the A's and being headed for the Majors before injuries derailed his baseball dreams and sent him into a political career.

In one profile about his days playing with Cotuit, Richardson uses the old "boast-disguised-as-self-deprecation" tool that all good politicians have at the ready, treating the interviewer for a small New England publication to a remembrance of the time that future New York Yankees great Thurman Munson jacked a monster home run off him during a Cape Cod League game.

Well, Richardson's been in the headlines lately for an investigation into allegedly peddling his influence for campaign contributions.

And if nothing else comes out of the inquiry, my lack of faith in the politico's athletic potential has already been confirmed: Richardson, amid the blood-in-the-water convergence of media types since he withdrew his name from consideration for a cabinet post in the Obama administration, has been forced to admit that the baseball draft portion of his bio is phony.

An investigation into Richardson's baseball claims by the Albuquerque Journal uncovered that the only source for all the A's stories was the governor himself.

When confronted with the fact that no evidence to confirm his oft-told tale exists, Richardson gave as pathetic a confession as possible: "After being notified of the situation and after researching the matter," he said, "I came to the conclusion that I was not drafted by the A's."

(Munson died in a plane crash in 1979, so he isn't around to say Richardson never really served him a gopher ball all those years ago on the Cape. Pity.)

Briefly back to Cotuit guys who really were drafted by Major League teams: After leaving the Kettleers in July, Bianucci hit .316 in 31 games with a Rangers rookie league affiliate in Spokane, Wash.

He keeps that up, and he'll never be a governor.

Monday night, he tried on his provocateur hat, telling his Monday Night Football audience that the Dallas Cowboys had surpassed the New York Yankees in world domination/sports tradition.

Absurd.

One great thing about sports is that there are such things as records. Numbers. Stats. And they all point to the Yanks on this one, Tony. Good thing I never bothered to buy cable.