The legend of Bruce Kison

Welcome to another episode of The History Of Charging The Mound, a documentary series about the history of charging the mound.

Upon scooping up this arbitrary sample of baseball players who have either charged a mound or been charged, I was banking on the likelihood that I’d stumble into some killer stories involving guys I was barely familiar with. Bruce Kison is Exhibit A of this phenomenon. This is a dude 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 happened to poke around in the mound-charging database, you might have noticed that Kison’s name appears more than almost anybody else’s.

I knew virtually nothing about Kison beyond his name, so I knew I had some digging to do. What I found was the story of a snakebitten yet relentlessly tough pitcher who played with as much fearlessness and resolve as any other ballplayer I can remember. Kison’s mound-charging 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 challenging to produce than most. By the end of it, though, I was enamored with the guy’s story, and I hope you will be too.