This really isn’t a story about baseball, but it is one of my favorite fun facts. Also, check out the bonus fact especially if you’re near Milwaukee. — Dan

If you’re a baseball fan, there’s also a god chance you’re a bit of a stathead. Go back Baseball fans tend to also be statheads. If you were a fan of the game more than a century ago, there’s a good chance you partook in the tradition of “scoring the game,” a ritual where regular people in the stands would, using special notation, write down each each play on scoresheets like the above. While the picture above uses a special pad to facilitate this, simplified versions exist from as early as 1911. Due in large part to a nonprofit called Retrosheet, today’s fans have access to play-by-play data — and therefore stats — from most games played since before World War I.

That data led to huge databases, as fans and teams alike tried to figure out which stats mattered and, by extension, which players were great and which were merely good. Each player, therefore, needed a unique identifier. And in 2007, that caused a weird problem: accidental bigotry.

If you’re familiar with the 2003 book Moneyball or the 2011 movie of the same name that it is based on, you may have heard the name Kevin Youkilis before. At the time of the book’s writing, Youkilis was a mostly-unheralded prospect in the Boston Red Sox’s minor league system, but he had a penchant for taking a “walk” — that’s when the pitcher throws four bad pitches, and the batter is entitled to go to first base. Because his last name was Greek-sounding (“Youkilis” is pronounced similarly to “Euclis,” as in “Euclid”), Michael Lewis, the author of the book, jokingly called him “the Green God of Walks.” But none of that matters for our purposes today. What does matter is how he spells his name. Oh, and that he’s Jewish.

As noted above, the baseball databases — Baseball Reference being the most prominent one now — developed a format to give a unique ID to each of the nearly 25,000 people to ever play Major League Baseball. The format is the first five letters of the person’s last name, followed by the first two letters of their first name, then two digits, incrementing by one and starting at 01. I’d be “lewisda02,” for example: my last name is “Lewis,” the first two letters of my first name are “Da,” and there was a Darren Lewis who predates me who took the 01. It’s simple and seemingly foolproof.

But not entirely. If you look at Youkilis’s name, the first five letters of his last name are “youki” and the first two letters of his first name are “ke.” Ignore the 01 — that doesn’t matter — and you get “youkike.” Split that up between the U and the first K and you get an anti-Jewish slur being used to identify one of the few Jews to ever play Major League ball. Yikes.

When this accident came to light in 2007, the databases made a one-time exception to their naming format. Youkilis’ ID on Baseball-Reference is now “youklke01” — that’s an L, not an I — to avoid the unintentional slur.

You won’t find business stories like this—especially told like this—anywhere else.

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Today’s Bonus fact: Tomorrow is going to be an expensive day for George Webb, a restaurant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — and baseball is the culprit. In 1948, the company’s founder, per ESPN, “at one point predicted the Brewers, then a minor league team, would win 12 straight and promised free burgers when it happened. But it never did, nor did it when the Milwaukee Braves brought the major leagues to Wisconsin.” And when that finally happened in 1987, Webb honored the promise, distributing more than 160,000 burgers that April. The Braves left Milwaukee but were replaced by a new team, also called the Brewers in 1970, and the Brewers have done that twice since — October of 2018 and again just a few days ago on August 14th. And both times, Webb has delivered. This year, they gave out 100,000 free burger vouchers (sorry, they’re all out!) and are hosting a free burger day from 2p to 6p locally tomorrow.

From the Archives: The Babe's Lost Homers: How many home runs did Babe Ruth really hit? Even our stat sheets can’t be sure.

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And thanks! — Dan