Chris Truby

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Chris Truby (born 1973) is a former major league third baseman for various teams.

"Chris Truby" can also refer to one of the Internet baseball community's longest-lived in-jokes. In fact, it actually refers to two separate running gags -- the Chris Truby Joke, and the Albert Belle Joke.

  1. The Chris Truby Joke is generally an allusion to Truby being a Satan-worshipper, and usually comes up whenever Truby's name is mentioned.
  2. The Albert Belle Joke is a joke of the form: "I'm so sick of people like ________ and Albert Belle who ____________________." Posters fill in the blanks with whatever ballplayer and subject are at hand.

The whole thing originated on April 13, 2001 in the Usenet newsgroup rec.sport.baseball, when poster "Deckard" wrote:

Baseball is losing fans because of players like Sheffield, Belle, and Thomas. And not because of their hitting...
They can no longer relate to assholes who bitch about their $10,000,000 paychecks.

To which r.s.b regular Tom Nawrocki replied:

When did Albert Belle ever complain about how much he was getting paid? Talk about a lightning rod for fans' complaints.
If somebody like Chris Truby was accused of satanic dismemberment, it would take about a week before people started saying, "I'm so sick of all these ballplayers like Chris Truby and Albert Belle with all their satanic rituals and the dismemberment and everything."

Nawrocki later maintained he didn't mean to single out Truby as an example, but rather that he wanted to illustrate his point about Belle by using a "completely random, not very well-known" ballplayer to pair with him. But by then it was too late.

The details of Truby's background (starred at Damien HS in Honolulu), and the progression of "cursed" teams he joined since Nawrocki's post -- 2002 Expos, 2002 Tigers, 2003 Devil Rays, 2004 Pirates, 2005 Royals, 2006 Pirates, 2007 Pirates -- superficially suggest satanic influence, or at least a propensity to descend into successively lower circles of hell. However, there is no evidence to indicate Truby is anything but a generic journeyman ballplayer.

(Almost no evidence, that is. "Chris Truby" is of course an anagram for "Bury Christ." And there is an unrelated Chris Truby who was a bassist for a short time in the Christian rock band Living Sacrifice.)

In 2008, the now-retired Truby accepted a coaching job in the Pirates minor league system. WTM noted that this meant Truby's home games would be played at Falwell Field in Lynchburg, Virginia. (The park is named for Calvin Falwell, Jerry's cousin.)

[edit] References

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