Tungsten Arm O'Doyle may be totally fictional, but he's building quite the following ever since first being introduced to the world. The now-viral tweet first was published in May 2021 and has become a recurring joke among baseball fans across the world.
every time I see an Angels highlight it's like "Mike Trout hit three homes runs and raised his average to .528 while Shohei Ohtani did something that hasn't been done since 'Tungsten Arm' O'Doyle of the 1921 Akron Groomsmen, as the Tigers defeated the Angels 8-3"
— ℳatt (@matttomic) May 18, 2021
Now the folks at Baseball Reference have joined in on the fun.
Head over to baseball-reference.com and simply type in Tungsten Arm O'Doyle into the player search bar atop the page. The results, of course, are where the fun is as Shohei Ohtani's page loads. It's only fitting.
Baseball Reference wins today. pic.twitter.com/Y7X6a0cpDk https://t.co/oq35O3pxEx
— Shawn Spradling (@Shawn_Spradling) March 31, 2023
Ohtani has been dominant on both sides of the ball since joining the Angels. On the mound he's posted a 2.91 ERA and 1.085 WHIP in 355.2 innings. At the plate, he's a .267/.354/.531 batter with 127 home runs. Pairing him with the game's best player in Mike Trout seemed like a surefire recipe to build a playoff team, but the Angels have generally disappointed over the last five seasons.
It's hardly the first time that Baseball Reference has had a little fun adding Easter eggs to their site. Will Ferrell is perhaps among the more notable ones, thanks to his tour around spring training in 2015.
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