Len Giles, the sponsor of Rollie Fingers' BR page, has used his little area there to claim that Rollie "defined closer back in the day." Why is that a bad call? Because nobody said "closer" back then! Come on, Len, you seem like you're at least as old as I am--don't you remember when we all used to say "fireman"? "Closer" didn't come about until the late 80s. The sponsorship expires in a few days, somebody should snatch it up and call Rollie a fireman!

I saw some of the '74 World Series today, and Vin Scully kept calling him "Roland" Fingers. I'd never heard to him referred to as anything but Rollie, so I did a news search, and while he was sometimes called Roland in the early days, the Rollie nickname can be traced to his prep school days. I saw him mentioned as early as March 1963. (Note to other nerdy researchers: on the Google News search, watch out for articles from the 80s labeled as ones from the 60s, due to 6 kind of looking like 8 in old newspapers.)