Baseball Player Name of the Week (Bonus Edition)

Okay, so I use the word "week" loosely, but this one was just too good to sit on:

Cletus Elwood Poffenberger, also known as "Boots."

Mr. Poffenberger had a brief and rather unstoried pitching career with the Tigers and Dodgers in the late 1930s, though he does, according to Wikipedia, bear the distinction of once having been tagged out by Frank Crosetti using the hidden ball trick. He was suspended after only three games in Brooklyn for the vague "violating team training rules."

One fan recalls him as a "nonconformist," given to "holdouts and disappearing acts." "There are many Poffenberger stories," he adds, "with most related to his affinity for strong drink." Poffenberger played for the minor-league Nashville Vols in 1941, where he was suspended 90 days for throwing the ball at an umpire.

(This is the grave of a different Poffenberger -- our Boots lived til 1999 -- but all I could find via Google Image search. There's more of them out there than you think.)

As a postscript, I can't help noticing that the baseball-reference.com page for Bris Lord, mentioned in the last Name of the Week post, is sponsored by one "Lord Peaches Von Wolfenstein."

I love the internet.