Chris Truby

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Christopher John Truby (born December 9, 1973 in Palm Springs, California) is a third baseman who played some of his career in Major League Baseball, though most of his time was spent in various teams' minor league systems. His most recent MLB appearance came during the 2003 season. He had a career batting average of .231.

Truby came up in 2000 with the Houston Astros. After hitting .260 with 11 home runs in 258 at-bats his rookie season, he never matched his rookie totals. He has since played partial seasons with the Detroit Tigers, Montreal Expos, and Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The Royals signed Truby with the intention of having him play third base until prospect Mark Teahen was ready for full-time duty in the major leagues. However, Truby sustained a wrist injury in spring training and started the 2005 season on the disabled list.

Truby was a replacement player in 1995, before the 1994 Major League Baseball strike was resolved. After replacement players were no longer necessary, Truby spent the next five years playing for various independent leagues before finally breaking through to the Major Leagues with the 2000 Astros.

Truby last played for the Indianapolis Indians, the Triple-A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates. On June 22, 2007, Truby announced his retirement from baseball as a player. In 2008, he accepted a coaching job in the Pirates minor league system.

[edit] Internet joke

A long-standing joke on the Internet refers to Truby as a Satanist; it began in 2001 when a Usenet poster complained that controversial baseball star Albert Belle was being used as a lightning rod for everything bad about the game. "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.'" The poster, Tom 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. Nawrocki later apologized to Truby. [1]