SGCBL

Tuesday, December 3rd , 2052
BYWATER —Ferdinand “Apple Pip” Puttifoot, the switch-hitting infielder who arrived in 2030 as a strikeout-prone rookie on a 73-89 club and left as the most productive hitter Tolkien Baseball has ever seen, announced his retirement today. He is 42. He never wore another uniform.

The numbers don’t need much help. In 3,427 games, all of them for Bywater, Puttifoot hit .322 with a .434 on-base mark and a .604 slugging percentage. His 988 home runs, 2,538 RBI and 3,959 hits are all Tolkien Baseball career records. He is second all-time in runs (2,484), walks (2,399) and WAR (190.8), trailing only Forerunner Baggins in each — which is the story of the last two decades in this league, and we’ll get to it.

He won ten Aragorn Awards as league MVP and nine Sam Gamgee Awards as Batter of the Year. He took home 19 Gimli’s Axe awards as the best bat at his position — at second base, at third, and once at shortstop. He was a 23-time All-Star. He led the league in home runs three times (2042, 2043, 2048) and in RBI four times.

From second base to the record book

It did not start like this. Puttifoot’s rookie year was 34 homers, 93 walks and 174 strikeouts, split between second and short, on a team that finished 16 games under. He was a Rookie of the Month in August and that was about it for hardware.

By 2031 he was hitting .315 with 100 RBI and a third-place MVP finish. By 2034 he was an 8-WAR player. Then came the run that defined the franchise: from 2036 through 2046, eleven straight seasons of 40-plus home runs, never fewer than 7.9 WAR, and Bywater in the postseason eight times.

The 2038 season was the first true monster — .330, 56 homers, 132 RBI, 48 steals and 12.1 WAR. Six years later he outdid it as a pure hitter: .375, 204 hits, 51 homers, 146 RBI, 138 walks and a 1.213 OPS in 2044, all franchise records.

And then, at 38, after an injury-shortened 2047 that held him to 96 games, he put up the best power season in Bounders history: .340, 64 home runs, 150 RBI, 12.2 WAR. The 64 is tied for third on the league’s all-time single-season list.

Two rings, seven October trophies, one that got away

Bywater won it all in 2040 and 2049. Puttifoot collected seven playoff series MVP awards along the way, starting with the Shire Conference Championship Series in that first title run. The 2049 title came with no series MVP for him — he called that the one he enjoyed most, “because somebody else had to do the interviews.”

The one that stings is 2048. Puttifoot was named MVP of the Wild Card round, the Division Series *and* the Conference Championship — three trophies in three weeks — and the Bounders lost the final to the Dead Marshes Uruk-hai anyway. “You can carry a team to the door,” he said. “You can’t carry it through.”

The Baggins question

Puttifoot and Forerunner Baggins debuted the same year, 2030, and played their last games the same year, 2052. For 23 seasons the two of them traded the top of every leaderboard in the league. Baggins finishes with more runs, more walks and more WAR. Puttifoot finishes with more homers, more RBI, more hits, more games, and the two Bounders titles.

Baggins retired first. Puttifoot, asked whether that mattered, said: “He got out of the way. Somebody had to hold the door.”

The last lap

He moved from second to third base full-time in 2048 and stayed there. The bat aged gracefully — .309 with 24 homers in 124 games this season for a Bywater club that slid to 74-88 and third in the Hobbit Division. The glove did not. He said the decision was easy: “The pitchers still couldn’t get me out. The ground balls could.”

The Bounders have not yet announced plans for No. 40. Nobody in Bywater expects anyone else to wear it.