Baseball’s great potato caper

Dave Bresnahan barely played baseball in 1987. He’d barely played at any point — 89 games was the high-water mark for his career — but things had somehow got worse. He was the backup catcher for the Williamsport Bills, Cleveland’s AA affiliate. He was 25 years old. And he wasn’t very good.

If nothing changed, Bresnahan was going to wash out of the sport entirely. He needed to up his game, or to try something new. Most hitters in his shoes might fiddle with their stance, or try to fix their timing. Bresnahan turned to the humble potato.

What was the plan? It was actually pretty straightforward. First, he had to make a potato look like a baseball. It didn’t have to be perfect, or even particularly close. Spherical-ish. Pale-ish. Baseball-ish. Then, while holding the actual baseball, he’d lob the fraudulent one into the outfield. Bresnahan needed to do this in a way that looks natural, like he’d made a garden-variety throwing error. Then, when the runners take off, fooled by his decoy, he’d tag them out at home with the real baseball. Simple.

Bresnahan spent weeks preparing. His teammates egged him on the whole way. He carved his potato, painted on stitching, and played catch with his roommate to ensure it was at least reasonably convincing. Then he practiced the throw in question during real games, attempting to pick a Reading player off at third when he made it into a game against them a few days before Potato Day itself.

All that was left for Bresnahan to do was to sneak the potato into the game, which was more difficult than it sounds, since a) the catcher is right next to the home plate umpire pretty much all the time and b) getting a runner to third base requires a fair amount of baseball to be played. Grabbing the potato in the dugout and trying to hide it for the better part of an inning wasn’t going to fly.

He solved this problem by good-old-fashioned lying. Bresnahan stashed his decoy in his backup glove, then, when a Phillie reached third, told the ump that a string on his catcher’s mitt had snapped and received permission to go to the dugout and grab a new one. Now armed with the potato, he put his plan into action.

The pitch came in and Bresnahan unleashed a snap throw towards third. The potato, as intended, sailed over the third baseman and into left field. The runner, Rick Lundblade, took the bait, broke home, and was promptly tagged out by Bresnahan. Trick accomplished. Sort of.

After some bemused discussion, the umpires awarded Lundblade home on a throwing error. Then Bresnahan’s manager pulled him from the game in disgust. The great potato caper* had … failed?

*Discarded by an indignant umpire, the potato was retrieved from a trash can after the game and bestowed upon the Baseball Reliquary, where it remains one of their most treasured items.

Except it hadn’t, really. Unlike most rule-breaking, this particular stunt wasn’t intended to succeed. Bresnahan knew full well that umpires possess enough discretionary power to prevent a rogue tuber from impacting the score. He threw his disguised potato into the outfield for the sheer mad joy of it.

This isn’t a story about cheating. It’s a story about what the mind-numbing tedium of just barely missing out on your dreams can do to a person. By any reasonable measure, Bresnahan was one of the best baseball players on the planet. You have to be, to get to the high minors, even if you never manage to break out to the big time.

Being almost good enough meant Bresnahan suffered through what was essentially years of purgatory. He barely played, struggling even when he got his chances. His job was to sit on the bench in case better players needed a rest, bored out of his mind. The potato escapade was Bresnahan’s release. Literally, as it turns out: Cleveland couldn’t take a joke, and he was let go the next day, never to return to the professional game.

That particular outcome wasn’t a surprise. Bresnahan had been expecting to be purged from the team sooner than later. But getting cut over the potato? That, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer, was a bit of a shock. “Not because they released me. That I expected. But I was amazed at why they released me. It was a joke.”

So the potato trick wasn’t some elaborate resignation letter. As funny as potato-as-rebellion might have been, what Bresnahan actually achieved with his stunt was something purer — he managed to turn years of failure and years of boredom into a moment where the sport that had beaten him down bent to his will, and not the other way around.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame doesn’t have a tuber wing, surprisingly. But if it did I’d have Bresnahan (and his trusty sidekick) on the first ballot.