The boys try to look so hard ...

Well, thanks to a few of the computer genius who read this site -- along with an Internet miracle called the Wayback Machine -- I was able to go back five years and take a look at my old ListedNumbers Web site. It brought tears to my eyes. Who was that young idealist who got his friends to make lists of their ten best breakfast cereals (by Dinn Mann, now the president of MLB.com), their ten best Hitchcock moves (by Tommy Tomlinson, a Charlotte columnist who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), the ten best Dr. Evil lines from Austin Powers (OK, I did that one) and the ten best Norm lines from Cheers (OK, yeah, I did that one too)?

We wanted to change the world. Sort of.

Anyway, I somehow got author Michael MacCambridge (America's Game) to give me his ten best Springsteen songs (he insisted on 15). They were:

1. Backstreets (unabridged live version)
2. Darkness on the edge of town
3. Born to run
4. Incident/Rosalita/New York City Serenade (as one entry)
5. Don't Look Back
6. Land of Hope and Dreams
7. Dancing in the Dark
8. Ramrod
9. Streets of Philadelphia
10. Thunder Road
11. Stolen Car
12. County Fair
13. State Trooper
14. Walk Like a Man
15. The E Street Shuffle

Now, this was a few years ago -- this was before "The Rising" and "Devils and Dust" and the Pete Seeger thing Bruce just did. My list would look more like this:

1. Born to Run
2. Rosalita
3. Thunder Road
4. The Promise (should be a double entry with Thunder Road)
5. My City of Ruins
6. It's Hard to be a Saint in the City
7. The Promised Land
8. Jungleland
9. Streets of Philadelphia
10. Nothing Man
Followed in no particular order by: Darkness, Atlantic City, She's the One, Land of Hope and Dreams, Youngstown, Waitin' on a Sunny Day, Incident/New York City Serenade, Badlands, Secret Garden and Streets of Fire. And there are about 50 other great ones.

Back to baseball. The challenge was thrown out after the last entry to come up with the LEAST intimidating pitchers in baseball history. So I did. And it just so happens that Bill James, while coming up with his most intimidating pitchers, also came up with his least intimidating. So this time I'm going to combine our lists. And after that, I came up with a quick Top 10 list of the least intimidating pitchers of the last 25 years (because, as you will see, almost all of the least intimidating pitchers on our list pitched quite a while ago.

Honorable mention: Peaches Davis.
He pitched for the Reds from 1936-39 -- he wasn't terrible, but he didn't strike out anybody. And his name was Peaches.

15. Frank Gabler (pitched 1935-38)
They called him "The Great Gabbo" because of his talent for yapping. Bill says he was a staple on the New York after-dinner circuiit ... I love this story: I guess in 1936, Gabler guaranteed he would win 10 games. To me, the story could end there and be a classic, I mean -- TEN stinking games? That's a guarantee? But anyway, the Giants secretary Eddie Brannick was so sure that Frank was full of gabbo that he offered a $100 suit if Gabbo won EIGHT games. The Great Gabbo won nine, got his suit, but frankly he should have been humiliated. ... He was a remarkably unintimidating pitcher, at least by the numbers, but the Baseball Library offers this little nugget: He was known for "fistfights on the mound with Tex Carleton." That's fistfights -- plural. How many times could he have fought Tex Carleton?

14. Ross Grimsley (pitched from 1971-82).
He probably doesn't quite belong on this list, but I will admit pushing him up a couple of spots because he's the first pitcher I ever saw at any level (including Little League) who I honestly thought I could hit. ... To be fair, Grimsley had some very good years when he was young, even though he didn't throw hard. He even won two World Series games. But by the time I saw him in Cleveland, his fastball was school-zone slow. You could start a "Let's Go Tribe" chant as he released the ball and say it about 10 times before the ball hit the catcher's mitt.

13. Monte Weaver (pitched from 1931-39).
They called him the Professor. He hit just five batters in a fairly lengthy career. ... One thing that drives Bill to distraction is that people have started spelling Weaver's name "Montie" in the various baseball encyclopedias. This was apparently a decision made by the the SABR Committee in charge of deciding how names should be spelled or whatever.

From Bill: "How in the bloody hell they decided this, I have no idea. I found in my library, with a few minutes checking, 20 or 30 places where he had signed his name -- Monte. (His first name was Montgomery). ... Further, since Monte Weaver had a master's degree in some kind of engineering from the University of Virginia, we can hardly assume that he was some semi-literate goon whose spelling of his own name was haphazard. For some reason, this just irritates the living hell out of me."

12. Ernie Wingard
Bill says Wingard was the first pitcher to go right from college and win 10-plus games in a season (later Jim Abbott would do it). ... Wingard was a pretty big guy, but he didn't strike out anybody. I mean ANYBODY. His first year, that straight-from-college season, he struck out 23 batters in 218 innings. In his career he has a 3-1 walk-to-strikeout ratio -- three times as many walks as strikeouts. Considering that handicap, he really wasn't too bad.

11. Johnny Couch (pitched from 1917-1925)
They called him lucky after he won 16 games as a 31-year-old rookie in 1922. But he would go on to show everybody by ... no, wait, sorry, he was lucky. The guy gave up 11 hits per nine innings in his career, and he was another guy who didn't strike out anybody. He did go to Stanford. Many of the least intimidating pitchers had fine academic careers.

10. Bud Thomas (pitched from 1932-1941)
Thomas gave up Ted Williams first homer (he later got an autographed photo from Williams). ... He averaged 2.3 strikeouts per nine innings and hit only four batters in his career.

9. Ted Lyons (pitched from 1923-1946)
He probably does not belong on the list, being a Hall of Famer and all. But when I ran the numbers, his name came up -- he didn't strike out people, he gave up homers and he refused to hit batters. ... I still probably would have left him off except Bill offered this nugget: He has to be the only Hall of Famer ever to go to college (Baylor) on a TROMBONE scholarship. And the fact he lost that scholarship because he hit an A&M fan on the head with it at halftime doesn't ruin the story. ... Lyons was an awful manager for three years. The reason? He was too soft.

8. George Blaeholder (pitched from 1925-36).
He was a well-rounded unintimidator -- for years, batters crowded the plate, banged hits off of him, homers too, hardly every struck out. Blaeholder is known for his connection with the slider (which was more of a nickel curve then). There are those who suggest he actually invented the pitch, but Bill says that ain't so. He did call it the "slide ball" though, so he named the pitch.

7. Erv Brame (pitched from 1928-32).
One of the great mismanaged careers in baseball history. Erv Brame could really hit. I mean, he could REALLY hit. He hit .300 for his career -- hit .353 in 1930 and struck out two times in 116 at-bats -- and at one point had the record for pinch-hits. But Pittsburgh saw him as a pitcher -- he did win 17 and 16 games in two seasons. Trouble is, he was doing it with mirrors. He's another guy who couldn't strike out anybody, gave up bunches of hits, wouldn't pitch inside, etc. The Pirates didn't seem to care. They used him up (he had 30 complete games in 1930) and Brame was finished when he was 30.

6. Ted Wingfield (pitched from 1923-27)
He is on this list for one reason and one reason only: He didn't strike out people. More than any pitcher I've come across, he didn't strike out people. He averaged 1.11 strikeouts per nine innings in his career. His 1927 season is one for the ages. He pitched for the Boston Red Sox that year, and he went 1-7 with a 5.06 ERA, which ain't too good. He threw 74 2/3 innings and gave up 105 hits, which ain't too good either. He gave up 18 unearned runs, which is quite an achievement. But that's not what makes it special. That year Ted Wingfield struck out -- wait for it, wait for it -- ONE BATTER. That's one (1) batter.

5. Chubby Dean (pitched from 1937-1943)
First off, he apparently wasn't too chubby -- it was a childhood nickname. So you have a reasonably svelte guy everybody calls Chubby, well, that's just not going to intimidate too many people. ... Chubby went right from Duke to the big leagues, and he was actually a pretty good young hitter. At 19, he hit .287 in the big leagues (though with no power). Connie Mack made him a pitcher and he was pretty nondescript except for one thing: In 685 innings, he hit one batter. And it wasn't like Chubby had razor-sharp control -- he didn't. He simply did not hit batters. In fact, going into his last season, the Chubster had never hit a batter in his Major League career. I don't know when he hit that batter in '43, but I have this dream that it was the very last batter he faced -- as if Chubby, realizing his career was about to come to a close, said to himself: "OK, I've got to hit ONE guy before I go off to war."

4. Benny Frey (pitched from 1929-36)
A tragic tale. Frey was a very mediocre pitcher -- like everyone else on this list, he didn't strike out people, gave up lots of hits and homers, etc. In 1937, the year after Frey had the only winning record of his career (10-8), the Reds said they were sending him down. Frey refused to go. He didn't play baseball again. That November, he killed himself. He was 31.

3. John Coleman (pitched from 1883-1890)
I wasn't going to put any pre-1900 pitchers on here for obvious reasons, but Bill had Coleman on his list, and I can't pass it up. In 1883, Coleman went 12-48. I just love that. I realize the rules were different then, but at what point does a manager say: "OK, you know what? Can any of you other guys pitch?" The managers of that team (Bob Ferguson and Blondie Purcell) were sort of 19th century Buddy Bells, no? ... To be fair, that team was awful. Coleman did have 12 of the team's 17 victories.

2. Ivy Andrews (pitched from 1931-1938)
He wasn't at the top Bill's list or mine, but Poison Ivy was high on both of our lists. He could do it all. He gave up hits (about 10 per nine innings), didn't strike out people (2.22 per nine), gave up the bingos (Top 10 in homers allowed in 1936) and hit just four batters in his career. It should be said, though, that even though he didn't have a fastball, he did scrape along, win 50 games in his big league career and twice finished in the Top 10 in ERA. Bill seems to recall that he briefly had a run a Yankee killer too.

1. Joe Ostrowski (pitched from 1948-52).
Had the two least intimidating nicknames in baseball history -- Professor (because he taught math during the off-season) and Specs (for obvious reasons). He gave up 11 hits per nine. He gave up lots of homers. He hit two batters his whole career.

So there you go, the 15 least intimidating pitchers ever. Now, quickly, the least intimidating since 1980 (min. 500 IP)

1. Darrell May
-- It warms my heart to see him pop up on top of my formula. I covered Darrell. This is 100 percent accurate. There are many story to indicate how unintimidating Darrell May was, but my favorite came during a slump, when he whined (no kidding): "Things are going so badly I can't even get a no-decision."
2. Kevin Jarvis
3. Brad Havens
-- Showed promise first two seasons, then went 5-8 with an 8.18 ERA in 1983. Re-emerged for a while as a reliever
4. Rob Bell
5. Josh Towers
-- He was good in 2005. Since then he's 3-13 with an ERA about 8.
6. Ron Romanick
-- Weird career. Won 12 games as a rookie. Won 14 his second year. Then went 5-8 with a 5.50 ERA and was done.
7. Brian Meadows
-- Yes! Another Royals pitcher. Meadows was so utterly hittable with Kansas City (in 2001, the league hit .351 against him and slugged .587) that it made the seemingly irrelevant Meadows-for-Witasick trade seem like Pappas for Robinson.
8. Jeff Ballard
-- Pitching is such an odd science or art or whatever. Jeff Ballard had nothing. He couldn't strike out anybody, he gave up hits and homers, etc. But in 1989, he went 18-8 with a 3.43 ERA. He couldn't get people out before or after, but for one season he finished sixth in the Cy Young balloting. Crazy.
9. Dennis Springer
-- From 1995-2001, started every season for a team with a different name: Philadelphia Phillies. California Angels, Anaheim Angels, Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Florida Marlins, New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers. Then in 2002, he had a repeat year with the Dodgers, which naturally ended his career.
10. Mike Sirotka

What do you think should be next: Most intimidating hitters ever?