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| "Uncle Robbie" Robinson ( above upper left ) |
RED SOX : SPRING TRAINING 2014
March 15,2014.
c/o Dakota Gardner
Cut4
Thursday happened to be the 99th anniversary of the only grapefruit-related Grapefruit League injury.
Back in the heady days of 1915, catcher-turned-manager-turned-Hall of Famer Wilbert "Uncle Robbie" Robinson (pictured above, upper left) decided he was going to do something no one had done before:
He was going to catch a baseball dropped from a passing airplane.
Robinson was the manager for the Brooklyn Dodgers at the time, and his club was down in their Spring Training home near Daytona Beach, Florida preparing for the upcoming season.
Around the same time, famed aviator Ruth Law had been dropping golf balls out of her plane to advertise for a local golf course.
Eventually, the idea sprang forth to try catching a baseball tossed from Law's plane. The 52-year-old Robinson volunteered.
As Law was passing 525 feet overhead -- so the story goes -- she realized she accidentally left her baseball on the ground. Ever the resourceful pilot, she quickly grabbed a grapefruit that happened to be on the plane and tossed it outside.
Back at ground level, Uncle Robbie went to make the play, only to have the grapefruit hit his mitt and explode all over his face, showering him with freshly squeezed grapefruit juice.
Unfortunately, the highly acidic juice stung Robinson's eyes, leaving him in so much pain that he thought he'd lost an eyeball.
Of course, he hadn't -- he was just covered in a combination of liquefied grapefruit and overmatched hubris.
So, there has been a grapefruit-related Grapefruit League injury, and it's even better than you imagined.
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