by Scott S. Parker is the author of six baseball history and trivia books, including Baseball’s Unlikely: A Constant GAME 2; Baseball’s Unlikely: A Constant GAME 1; All The Angels Stories From Baseball’s Unlikely: All The giants Stories From Baseball’s Unlikely; All The Yankees Stories From Baseball’s Unlikely; and All The Red Sox Stories From Baseball’s Unlikely.
Parker is a fan’s fan. He became a baseball fanatic at age nine when he went to his first Angels games in 1973. Since then, he has attended games at 37 different Major League venues, including some no longer in operation today. Some of the thousands of photographs that he has shot at baseball games have found their way into his books. His dedicated memorabilia room includes a massive collection of nearly 9,000 unique Angels baseball cards.
Q: What is your book about?
A: My book is named “Baseball’s Unlikely: A Constant,” which pretty much should tell the reader that unlikely things are about to unfold during a reading of it. It’s really a bunch of crazy stories that I couldn’t believe actually happened in baseball. Eventually I started saving the stories in hopes of writing such a book from this vast collection of more than 600 such clippings. Honestly, I thought I would’ve come across it by another author before I could ever pull it all together, but here we are. The first book, GAME 1, has about 400 stories with GAME 2 having another 200.
Q: What inspired you to write it?
A: The inspiration to write this book stemmed from the fact that I had never seen the concept done anywhere else. When I would read a small blurb above a box score giving a glimpse into the game, I might read something that absolutely shocked me that it happened. Thankfully, with the internet, I can dive so much deeper to truly blow the story up the way it should’ve been done. The internet also taught me that many facts I collected along the way were wrong! Due to space limitations and deadlines in newspapers, I think I got lucky to be the one who got to pull this off at this level even if the first book was 35 years in the making!
Q: Why did you choose to write about the odd, rare, and unusual aspects of baseball, mainly from the past three decades?
A: The past three-plus decades of clipping, screenshotting and bookmarking story ideas happened over that stretch, so yes, a bulk of the material was current within that time frame. However, I have gathered amazing stories that go back pre-1900! There’s probably 150 years’ worth of stories from the earliest one through 2024 which is where “Baseball’s Unlikely: A Constant GAME 1” ended. GAME 2 pushed the time frame out to include 2025. I am planning on turning this into a “live” book. It will continue with annual addendums that will be much smaller than the first two releases to get this baseball party started.
Q: How did you decide what gets included – what makes the cut – into the book?
A: It took 600 clippings to make the pair of books and I probably started with about 700-800 in total. What sounded like a slam dunk that I clipped 30 years ago, maybe doesn’t sound so eye-popping now. I aborted several such stories. There were also a few rare moments that have since been repeated several times and don’t need to be written about. There were some cases where the first time it happened was such a worthy moment in time that it can be backed up with some additional information about others to have repeated that crazy thing that happened. Bottom line, a story needs to make me say, “Wow!” to make the cut. When I proofed the first book before publication, I had a repeated story and both of them were, sadly, very time-consuming efforts. I combined the two into a single story using my favorite moments in each of the two.
Q: Baseball is a game of statistics. Tell us some interesting statistical oddities.
A: Just to tease one of the 600 stories I have written so far, there was a game from 1971 that was won as a walk-off with a home run by Reggie Jackson to make the final score 2-1. The first hit of the game was a leadoff home run for the A’s and the second and final hit for the A’s was the walk-off blast by Reggie. Just two hits for a victory, one home run to start the game and the other was another home run to finish the game. That’s crazy, right? There was a game in 1922 where the Cubs were whipping the Phillies 25-6 after 4 innings. The Phillies scored 17 runs between the 8th and 9th innings and lost the game 26-23 whilst leaving the bases loaded. The 49 runs are still the most to ever be recorded in a single game!
Q: What type of strange things did you happen to witness, either in person or while watching on TV?
A: Rusty and I were at a Dodgers game where Jered Weaver of the Angels pitched a no-hitter and lost. The story captures the details that include a closing quote from Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully. Weaver burned himself in the 5th inning when his errant throw to first base allowed Matt Kemp to reach base. In his attempt to steal second base, the catcher’s terrible throw allowed Kemp to reach third base instead of his targeted race for second. Kemp would score the only run of the game with a sacrifice fly for an unearned run. Documented in the books are some historical moments of games I have attended that include Rod Carew’s 3,000th hit, Reggie Jackson’s 537th home run to pass Mickey Mantle, Don Sutton’s 300th win, Nolan Ryan’s 300th win, Paul Molitor’s 3,000th hit and I stayed at the game long enough to see Kirk Gibson hit his walk-off home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series. That was quite the moment and I wasn’t even a Dodgers fan!
