Introducing the Hard Hittin’ Mark Whiten Memorial Player of the Week Award

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It was a Tuesday night in early September, 1993. My dad tucked me into bed and turned on my Super Mario Brothers AM radio to 700 WLW on my nightstand and told me to go to sleep. Joe Nuxhall was talking to his audience and we were about to embark upon a historic performance.

On that night, ‘Hard Hittin’ Mark Whiten was born. Just before I drifted off to dreamland he nailed the first of his four homers in the game at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. By the time I awoke to eat my Captain Crunch, he had nailed three more. It was the second game of a doubleheader. The Reds lost 15-2. Whiten had 12 RBI. TWELVE.

A calendar week later, the crazy SOB hit two more. For that one week span, he homered six times. He drove in 17 runs. He hit .393 and OPS’d at a 1.469 clip. If a guy did something like that in today’s world there would be a bounty put out for him. It’s so good it’s almost illegal.

And now we present a new weekly feature here at Diamond Hoggers that will run each Sunday evening or Monday evening. Each week we will take a player who went bat-shit for the week in arrears and crown him the Hard Hittin’ Mark Whiten Memorial Player of the Week. These players will forever live in infamy here at the blog for having a week that kicked everyone else’s ass.