Glenn Braggs available for team building exercises, heavy lifting, fashion advice, Tommy Lasorda’s gaze
Mayhap your team needs to lighten up down the stretch, have fun as a team, grow trust. Glenn Braggs & Co. can help with that. Allow him to provide a list of services.
Mayhap your team needs someone to move very, very heavy things. Glenn Braggs himself can do that. For fifty bucks!
Tommy Lasorda bids you: Look at that specimen.
You say your team’s players desire to know exactly who among them is able to get away with wearing a half-T while bobbing around the locker room in their respective jocks? For a reasonable fee, a consulting team comprised of select members of the 1991 Cincinnati Reds — including Glenn Braggs — will be able to advise on said.
To this day, when Tommy Lasorda needs to present a “specimen” of human strength, he refers to this video, and to its inadvertent star, Glenn “That Specimen” Braggs:
For a moment, many young men in that locker room, and everyone who watches that video, believes that Glenn Braggs can do anything. Contemporarily, for a price, Glenn Braggs will do anything — and some of us may feel compelled to pay that price (ahem-tommylasorda-ahem).
And yet, when one does a Google image search for “glenn braggs muscles,” one is fully disappointed that neither Glenn Braggs’s muscles nor Tommy Lasorda are anywhere in sight:
Whither the specimen?
Thanks to reader Eric B. for sharing this merry prank with us.
At RedsFest back in the 90′s I got Braggs’ autograph and shook his hand. It still hurts.
As a 13-year old growing up in the scrub brush of eastern Washington, I confessed my love and baseball aspirations to Eric Davis in a hand-written letter. ED44 replied in short order by making me a member of his fan club. I received an Eric Davis Fan Club t-shirt, autographed 8×10 glossy, handwritten note of encouragement, and a detailed workout regimen.
It was the first time I had heard of long toss and, boy, I practically long-tossed my arm off after that. I also wore that t-shirt under my jersey every game from junior high through college until it was little more than a translucent dickey, nearly identical to the minuscule Eric Davis Fan Club t-shirt Eric Davis is wearing in that video. Thank you Eric Davis! You were a tremendous ballplayer in every way possible.
“That Specimen” is a truly beautiful nickname.
High Top Fades of the 1980s would be a just wonderful NotGraphs category. It’s too bad that the players of that era had to wear caps and helmets over them.
Agreed. When you get right down to it, the high top fade was sort of the black man’s answer to the mullet. Proportionally, a fade couldn’t be more anti-mullet despite residing on the same baseball time parallel. Same thing happened a decade later when cornrows and dreds emerged during a period when most of the league’s white players were sporting corporate hair styles.