Koyie Hill Appreciation Society

This is something I started at my other Cubs blog, Effectively Wild, The Cubs Blog That No One Reads™ (or updates regularly). Koyie Hill saved me from having to watch Paul Bako all season. For that reason alone, he deserves some kind of prize, but he's also been pretty good in the games he's caught this year. Hill did a bang-up job filling in for Geo Soto while Geo was sidelined with a sore shoulder. Hill is currently hitting .306, recording 11 hits in 12 games with a home run and 6 RBIs. Not too shabby for your backup backstop.

Hill deserves special mention beacuse he suffered a horrific injury in October of 2007, severing the fingers on one hand in a table saw accident. Koyie saved the fingers, put them on ice, and drove himself to the ER. After months of therapy he regained motion in the fingers, returned to baseball via the Iowa Cubs and proceeded to mash out 17 homeruns and record a .275 average.

Koyie Hill Fast Facts:

His middle name is Dolan.

He named his daughter Phoenix Rose Hill. It takes real balls to give your daughter a built in porn star name. She'll probably be a senator or something.

Hill's first appreance with the Cubs was on June 1st, 2007. Hill replaced Michael Barrett in the game after El Toro Loco cleaned Michael's clock in the locker room. That skirmish effectively ended the Michael Barrett era in Chicago. So not only did he prevent Paul Bako's second stint as a Cub, in a small way he enabled Jim Hendry to deal away Barrett. I love this guy.

Any way, here's the skinny: for every hit Koyie Hill tallies in 2009, I will remove a square of the picture below. As he has 11 hits, there are already 11 squares removed.