Clemson's Hennessy uncovers a gem of Tiger baseball information

Clemson grad Brian Hennessy
plays a valuable role in publicizing
Tigers baseball. (Clemson photo)

God bless sports publicists.

I learned early in my days as a sportswriter that good sports information directors (as the college ones used to be called) are worth their weight in gold, even adjusting for today's high prices for precious metals.

The state of South Carolina has had perhaps more than its rightful share of great ones. 

Bob Bradley at Clemson and Tom Price at South Carolina were two of the best in the business for decades, and they were at the top of their game for most of my career.  Ditto Bill Hamilton at S.C. State.  Tim Bourret at Clemson, Hunter Reid at Furman and countless others at much smaller schools have made work easier for writers, broadcasters and other media.

They're usually the ones who dig up the information that you hear broadcasters drop in as nuggets to make it sound like they're intimately familiar with what's going on in a program.

What instigated this, you ask.

I had the Clemson-Virginia games on TV while I was updating scores for the Website. When Alex Urban came up to to bat in one game, the announcer referenced Urban's walk-off pinch-hit homer against Georgia Southern in North Augusta March 23. He said it was the first walk-off pinch-hit homer in Clemson history.

At the time, I thought What? How can that be? Clemson's been playing baseball for more than a  century (since 1896). But I got busy and forgot about it until tonight. I e-mailed Brian Hennessy, Clemson's outstanding baseball media relations director, to ask if I had, indeed, heard what I thought I had heard heard.

Hennessy quickly responded in the affirmative, writing "I looked up every walk-off home runs in CU history."

I don't know everything that entailed, but there was likely a lot of staring at blurry microfilm and old baseball scorebooks involved.

The small print in newspapers (scores, etc.) is called agate, and I've always loved agate. Give me a baseball encyclopedia or baseball or football media guide and I'll be entertained for hours. Compiling and listing baseball scores was one of the major reasons I started this Website in 2009. I like playing with numbers.

During my working years I spent many an hour looking up past high school football scores for Greenville County schools and other Upstate teams so we could have a comprehensive database of past scores. It was tiring, but a labor of love that provide scads of information in addition to the raw numbers.

For instance, I learned in the 1920s Parker High School in Greenville had a Native  American running back named Goingback Chiltoskey. Parker trained a lot of tradesmen, and Chiltoskey attended to learn about working with wood. He went on to become one of the most renowned Cherokee wood carvers.

It's not quite on the level of a first-ever pinch-hit walk-off homer, but it's still something nice to know. 

Now, excuse me while I go find some agate to pore over.