Here are todays Daily Conlon cards numbered 289 through 297, and it features the butt of all jokes, Shanty Hogan- center row, far right. Click on any pic to embiggen.As Bill James once noted, he is probably the subject of more anecdotes than any other balllpayer, save Babe Herman.
"All of these anecdotes center on how much he ate, or how much he liked to eat, or how fat he was, or some closely related topic. Pick up any old Baseball book at random, and you will probably find an anecdote about Hogan eating something."Needless to say, Shanty was a big man with an appetite to match. One often told story had to do with his dealings with his coach John McGraw. McGraw, always in need of controlling his players habits, tried to slim down his slugging catcher by checking his nightly hotel dinner checks. He wanted to make sure that Shanty was sticking to his diet. Shanty, being as sly as he was hungry, developed a system with the help of the hotel kitchen to substitute any dietary item with something more to his liking. As teammate Andy Cohen said,
"He'd write down spinach, but that meant potatoes. He had a whole code of his own."
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