A Random Plate Appearance: Joe Niekro

To this point of their existence, the Houston Astros have played in a total of 9,660 regular season and postseason contests.

The regular season record of the Astros is currently 4748-4776, just 28 games below .500. With a little luck, they’ll approach that mark this season. Although that’s not what this particular series is about, today’s “random” plate appearance does have a win attached to it.

As always, I used random.org to generate some random numbers, giving me a year, a game number, and a plate appearance number. Today’s draw gave me 1979, game 30, and plate appearance five (of 133). This gives me a contest between the St. Louis Cardinals and Houston on May 9, 1979, and a plate…