Yes, I actually looked this up

And yes, I actually watched The Bronx is Burning. What can I say? The Ramones soundtrack sucked me in. Ok, so I didn't actually watch the show so much as caught few-minute blips during commercials of tonight's Seinfeld rerun. (It was the one where Kramer sets up George with the bald woman after George starts wearing a toupee, and Jerry fails the polygraph test and admits to watching Melrose Place.)

But I did pick up this much from the episode. Billy Martin started a big hubub by deciding to bench Reggie Jackson for the deciding Game 5 of the '77 ALCS in favor of Paul Blair. As the episode portrayed it, Martin chose to bench Reggie because he'd been producing poorly in the series (1 for 14) and, according to some player's sketchy anecdotal recollection, Jackson had never hit Royals starter Paul Splittorff.

After some quick research (I know; I'm that hypothetical fact-checking nerd that Conan O'Brien always immitates), I suspect that Billy Martin was just a stubborn dope.

Up to that point in his career, Jackson was 19-72 (.251) with 2 dingers against Splittorff. Not great, but not terrible. Blair was actually quite awesome against this Splittorff fellow up that point--16-36 (.441) with one dinger lifetime, but still, he was at the tail end of an ok career whereas Reggie was in the prime of a pretty kickass one. And of course, the 1-14 rationale wasn't just bogus at the time, but even more comical after the fact when he went 10 for his next 22, including those famous 5 World Series longballs.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that was my last and only time watching the show. 'Twas lame, and I have CDs and records for listening to the Ramones.

(Wow, it just dawned on me how utterly useless and unnecessary this post was. Shit.)