My Little Baseball Investigation
So, someone mentioned this name, David Mendez, in a baseball context the other day, and it kinda stuck with me. You know how it is, a name pops up and you think, “Huh, wonder what his story is?” It wasn’t like he was a major leaguer everyone knows. This felt more like one of those local legends, or maybe just a guy who played, you know?
Anyway, I decided to do a bit of digging. My own little project, you could say. First, I just did the usual stuff, you know, typed the name into the good old internet search. Lots of David Mendezes out there, as you can imagine. Some in business, some artists, a few in sports but not the one I was picturing. I added “baseball” and then started trying to narrow it down by region, thinking maybe he was a local guy from somewhere specific I’d heard about.
This whole thing actually started because I was clearing out my garage. Found a box of old baseball cards, not valuable ones, just stuff from when I was a kid. And there was this one card, a minor leaguer, not David Mendez, but it got me thinking about all those players who are out there, grinding it out, that you never hear about on the big stage. My back was killing me from moving boxes, and I needed a distraction, something to do sitting down for a bit. So, this David Mendez thing became my little research task.
I started looking through some older forums, you know, the kind where fans talk about prospects from way back. Used different search terms. “David Mendez pitcher”, “David Mendez high school stats”, that sort of thing. It’s like panning for gold, mostly dirt, but you hope for a little nugget. I spent a good few evenings on this, probably should have been fixing that leaky faucet in the bathroom, but this felt more interesting, less like actual work.
Then I remembered a guy I know who’s a real baseball encyclopedia, especially for college and high school stuff from the 90s and early 2000s. I gave him a call.
- He was like, “David Mendez? Hmm, rings a bell, but a faint one.”
- He suggested I check some specific old college baseball yearbooks if I could find them online, or even some local newspaper archives from areas known for producing talent.
So, I tried that. Some university digital archives are pretty good, others are a nightmare to navigate. I found a few mentions of a David Mendez playing shortstop for a community college team out west around 2003. Another one, a pitcher, for a DII school in the south a bit earlier. Were they the “one” I was vaguely trying to pin down? Who knows. It’s tough when you don’t have a solid starting point, just a name.
It’s funny, this whole thing reminded me of when I was trying to track down an old friend from school years ago. No social media back then, not like now. You had to really work at it, call people, ask around. This felt similar. A bit of a wild goose chase, maybe.
In the end, I didn’t find any earth-shattering information about a definitive, legendary David Mendez in baseball. Just a few guys with that name who played the game. Maybe the original mention was just a mix-up, or a very, very local hero. But, you know, the process itself was kinda fun. A nice little trip down the rabbit hole of baseball obscurities. It’s a good reminder that for every star, there are thousands of David Mendezes who just loved to play. And that’s pretty cool in itself.
