Throughout all the warm obits for baseball great Tug McGraw, only a few (like this one) seem to recall that one of his many ancillary careers was to create and supposedly write a short-lived newspaper strip about a baseball player. It was called Scroogie and I don't know a whole lot about it other than that it started in 1975 and ended not long after, but still managed to get collected into a couple of paperback books. Mike Witte did the artwork, and I think I read somewhere that McGraw collected ideas and gags from other players he knew and then used them in the strip.
The title character, Scroogie, was a softball who (the promotional copy told us) "…threw a screwball and was one." He hurled for a team called the Pets, which seemed to be a cross between the Phillies and the Mets. Like many sports strips, the idea was to sell newspapers something that the editor of the sports section, as opposed to the comic strip page, would purchase. Well, one apparent reason that Scroogie struck out was that a lot of those editors had purchased Tank McNamara the year before and didn't think they needed two comic strips next to the Hockey scores, especially since Tank covered all sports, not just baseball. Too bad…because I just flipped through my paperbacks and recalled that Scroogie was not a bad strip at all. Even if he did sometimes rip off Ed Norton's best joke.