Welcome to another episode of The History Of Charging The Mound, a documentary series about the history of charging the mound.
In collecting this arbitrary sample of baseball players who had taken a mound or been indicted, I was confident in the likelihood of coming across some murderous stories involving guys I was barely familiar with. Bruce Kison is Exhibit A of this phenomenon. This is a guy who played most of his career before I was born, never appeared in an All-Star Game and never came close to winning a Cy Young Award. But if you’ve poked around in the mound loading database, you’ll have noticed that Kison’s name appears more than almost anyone else’s.
I knew virtually nothing about Kishon beyond his name, so I knew I had to do some research. What I found was the story of a snake-bitten but relentlessly tough pitcher who played with as much grit and determination as any player I can remember. Kison’s adventures in particular have fallen into such obscurity that I couldn’t even find footage of most of them, which made this episode a little more difficult to produce than most. However, in the end I fell in love with the boy’s story and I hope you are too.
