I know this post is going to be really scattershot, because this story excites me greatly.
The year was either 2003 or 2004. Probably 2004. I was leaving Fenway Park ( I think it must have been a day game ) and on the corner of Lansdowne I saw a nondescript fellow standing there, waiting for something. Just for one second. And as I looked away a light went on upstairs.
I turned to my stepmother and said, "Was that Squiggy?"
She thought it was, I thought it was, and it is not completely out of the realm of possibility that an actor of that "caliber" would go to a Red Sox game and just be hanging around by himself on a nearby corner. Without all the mobbing and the autograph requests.
But later in the evening, my brain went into "Naaaah" mode. And I didn't think anything more of it.
Until!
It was late one night a couple of months later. I was in bed reading Moneyball for the first time. And the part where Bill James is talking about the figurative origin of the species and the very early Baseball Abstract readership he mentions that one of its first raving fans was "the guy who played Squiggy on Laverne and Shirley".
I was so excited about finding this out that I started calling people who were less than interested. Like the time I met the town historian. Anyway. As it turns out, Squiggy is a baseball scout and henceforth and heretoafter I'll call him David Lander.
But how is this guy qualified to work for a MLB franchise and get paid for it? Apparantly, he's a hardcore baseball guy and dedicated records keeper and has a magnetic hard drive for a brain. Isn't that enough?
Or is being on a long-running hit sitcom an "in"?
PS: Loved that show.
