Baseball Card Notes

I have all of my old school collectibles finally with me, and I was trying to make a point to myself the other day. I mentioned to Corrie that I thought if I pulled a random stack of baseball cards from one of my boxes, I could find at least one player that would have some relevance to today.

It was really me thinking that twenty-five old baseball cards could possibly be relevant.

One thing I found interesting was that in my seventy-three card stack, George Bell, Julio Franco, Pascual Perez, and Teddy Higuera were the only Latinos. That was it. And George Bell was ditching "Jorge". Another surprising thing was the number of black players. Lots and lots, many more than today, by percentage, it would seem.

Well, in that stack, there were four that I could say something about, that had some kind of relevance for me today (420!):



The first is a 1988 Topps Jamie Moyer. The 1988 card has the previous year, 1987, as the most up to date year on the reverse's stat sheet, and 1987 was Jamie Moyer's second year. I used to have a roommate who's last name was Moyer, and the soft-tossing Jamie was his favorite player. This pitcher, Jamie Moyer, just won a game two days ago, pitching seven strong innings for the Colorado Rockies, and setting the record for oldest pitcher ever to earn a victory at 49 years. He'll be 50 in November. Moyer's fastest pitch was barely topping 70 mph, meaning that his fastest pitch was almost 10-12 mph slower than all other pitchers slowest pitcher. Awesome.

The next is the 1987 Topps Mike Flanagan. He retired in 1992. He was in the news recently (last August) because authorities found his body on his Baltimore property cradling his shotgun and missing his skull. Ouch.

Goose Gossage from the same year. He just made the Hall of Fame, the only Hall of Famer in my seventy-three card stack. That would have been good enough to count (see later).

The last is the 90-91 Skybox Kevin Johnson. Besides Skybox being the biggest piece of shit trading card designer, Kevin Johnson (my picture is too blurry...) is currently mayor of his hometown, which is also my hometown, Sacramento. He's also trying to blackmail the city to pony up taxpayer money to keep the Kings in Sacramento. That's a different story, but here he is, fresh off some all-star seasons in Phoenix.

So, this was a surprisingly good stack of cards. The next fifty or so stack yielded only a single notable player: Harold Baines. But for every Harold Baines there were plenty of, er, the less memorables like Al Bumbry and Floyd Rayford and Lenn Sakata and John Shelby.