Tony Fossas 1991 Upper Deck

On July 30, 2016, the Baseball Card bandit sent me the above baseball card. I took to Facebook to write this:

“The domestic BCB has been caught and sent to the baseball gulag (Minneapolis) but there seems to be a national copycat in the mix. 

I received this pristine Tony Fossas card in the mail (think El Guapo 1.0) and the only return address is DFW. Dallas Fort Worth? Down For Whatever? (Gross) Don't Forget Willis?

What does it all mean?”

What does it all mean, indeed? The meaning of life is this: throw lefthanded. When Tony Fossas last threw a baseball, he was 41-years-old and his ERA was 36.00 over five games. It was 1999 and he was a member of the New York Yankees. If you remember your baseball history, 1999 was a year that the Yankees won the World Series.

Somewhere in his home, despite not actually pitching a single inning in October, Tony Fossas has a World Series ring. Ted Williams doesn’t have a World Series ring. Ernie Banks doesn’t either. Neither does Ty Cobb or Barry Bonds or Tony Gwynn or Carl Yastrzemski or Rod Carew or Willie McCovey or Robin Yount. All of these guys are Hall of Famers. Despite not being in the Hall of Fame, as a player, Don Mattingly doesn’t have a Yankee World Series ring. That probably has to sting a bit. 

Tony Fossas does. No matter how many games you play in a championship season, if you're on the team; you get a ring. 

Fossas is also a left-handed specialist who looks like everyone's dad and played 12 years in the major leagues without really doing anything excellent. He always got work despite giving up a bunch of hits, walking a bunch of guys and not striking anyone out. He never pitched more than 51.2 innings in one season, made zero starts and accumulated seven saves. For that, he made over $4.1 million in his career.

Again, Tony Fossas is lefthanded. I can not stress the importance of this fact. 

When he was with the Red Sox, I remember him being pretty good and his numbers show that: in 1991 he appeared in 64 games and had a 3.47 ERA. In 1992, he was even better: 60 games, 2.43. But the wheels started coming off in 1993 when Sox manager Butch Hobson began to trust him a little more and brought him into 71 games. Fossas returned that trust with a 5.18 ERA. It seemed like he was a shade better in 1994 with a 4.76 ERA, but not really.

Then the Sox released him and he bounced around the Bigs. First to St. Louis for a few years, then in 1998 he went to Seattle for a third of a season, then to the Cubs for eight games, then back to Texas (before he was in Boston he plied his trade for the Rangers and Brewers) for ten games before finishing his career with the aforementioned five games with the Yankees in 1999.

Fossas was in the minors for ten years before he made his major league debut in 1988 and he was thoroughly mediocre there too. But again, he was a lefty. And when you’re left-handed and don’t strike out a lot of guys, you get stuck with the adjective: “crafty”.

Tony Fossas was a crafty southpaw who wrung every drop of talent from his left arm. He stuck with the game for ten years, desite traveling by bus from one shithole town to the next, playing in front of dozens of uncaring fans. One day he wins the lottery, is brought up to the majors and he holds that ticket for 12 years. Even when it was evident to everyone that Tony Fossas wasn’t a major league pitcher, he stuck with it.

At the end of the day he has $4 million in the bank and a World Series ring. Baseball is a crazy game, a pitcher like former Yankees and Red Sox reliever Ramiro Mendoza can somehow accumulate five World Series champions and Ted Williams can have none, despite being a much better ball player. Every once in awhile you hear someone hold that fact against a guy like Fossas or Mendoza. Don't. Life is not fair, kids. Sometimes it’s not what you can do, but where you can do it.

Speaking of where you can do it, either this card or the Jeff Reardon card was the first card that I got from the second Baseball Card Bandit. This one was sending me cards from around the country. As I alluded to in the Facebook post, this one was postmarked in Anchorage, Alaska. I still don’t know who sends them to me, but I like their style. 

A World for the Winning!

Let me explain why I’m reviewing Super-Villain Team-Up under the Champions blog banner: it’s the beginning of a two-part arc that starts in SVTU, the Champions don’t even arrive until the very last panel.

Here’s the deal: Magneto is in Dr. Doom’s home country of Latveria where he’s pushing through the streets demanding to see their ruler. Everyone ignores him because they’re in the middle of a giant party because Dr. Doom defeated the Red Skull and if they stop reveling, they’ll be in deep doo(m)-doo(m). This is the one thing that I like about Victor Von, he likes partying so much that if you stop, you’re going to die. He’s like one of those 24-Hour Party People that ran around New York City during the 1990s. He even murders like one of them.

This pisses Magneto off and rips down a Dr. Doom statue which freaks everyone out. Magneto finally just makes his way to Doom’s castle where Doom is chilling out with a chess set made up of Marvel Heroes. There’s Captain America, the Beast, Spider-Man’s a rook but Doom is talking to the Mr. Fantastic figure. It’s adorable.

("DOOM WILL PLAY WITH HIS MEGO FIGURES NOW!")

For some reason Magneto has chosen today to ask Dr. Doom if they should team up and take over the world. He’s also surprised, and a little flattered, that Doom knows who he is. Magneto starts rambling on about kicking the X-Men’s ass and Doom is just staring at a statue he made of Valeria, his one true love. Finally Magneto stops talking and Doom is like, I don’t need you to conquer the world I have these neuro-canisters (spelled incorrectly in the book, BTW) that has this gas that will get people to do anything that I tell them to.

Magneto calls bullshit and the next thing you know, the Master of Magnetism is on his knees bowing to doom before trying to kill himself. Doom intercedes then gives him some wine, which is drugged, and Magneto is down for the count. When he wakes up, Doom says that he’ll have his mind back and he can do what he wants.

The first thing he does is breaks into Avengers Mansion and fights the Avengers instead of telling him what Doom has up his sleeve. Magneto pretty quickly kicks their asses—and this is a power-packed line up of Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Wonder Man, the Vision, Scarlet Witch, Beast, Wasp and Yellowjacket—before Earth’s Mightiest Heroes listen to him. Doom shows up, via hologram, and tells the Avengers that what Magneto says is true and makes them bow down to him. And they stay bowed down, though Doom says that Magneto can take an ally in defeating him.

Magneto chooses the Beast ,calling him “the weakest Avenger”, which is kind of shitty, you know?

(That's cold, Maggie. Real cold.) 

The Beast suggest to Magneto that they need more heroes to stop Dr. Doom so they go to the Baxter Building and the Xavier School for Gifted Children and both the Fantastic Four and the X-Men aren’t home. Before deciding to see what the Micronauts or the Defenders are up to, the Beast tells Magneto to hoof it to the West Coast where they can find the Champions.

The Champions have no idea what’s going on and they want to kick the Beast’s ass for brining Magneto to their headquarters. That’s the cliff hanger.

Like the Champions, Super-Villain Team-Up is a book that sounds really cool in theory, but it never really delivers. I bought and read the entire of the SVTU run a few years back in one of the Marvel Essentials trade paperback. I remember being really excited about reading these stories because they were ones that I wanted to read when I was a kid, but they weren’t that great.

They all star Dr. Doom, who is cool, but he mostly teams up with Namor the Sub-Mariner for a lot of the run. When that happens it’s like 15-pages of dick swinging in the third person that would make Rickey Henderson blush: “Von Doom is the best ruler there is!” “No! No King is better than Namor!” “Dr. Doom is the master strategist! Heed Doom’s words!” “Nay, the Avenging Son of Atlantis has no peer when it comes to the mastery of war! We do what Namor says!”

It’s like reading the argument of the two biggest assholes on the planet. When they finally fight whomever they’ve teamed up against, it takes like a half page to wipe him off the planet. Then they bicker again. Which, comes to think about it, is my main complaint with the Champions. For some reason, Marvel thought that 15 pages of bickering was cool.

The idea is actually pretty good, get two villains together and see how they act and how they’d plot, but it kind of runs out of gas every issue. They never fight the good guys, they fight other bad guys; which is lame. I’m sure there was a perception problem in that, you’re never supposed to let the bad guys beat the good guys. And I get that. I also understand that you can’t have the stars of your book get their butts beat every month. But at the same time, it might have been a cool idea to delve behind exactly why villains would team up. Set the paradigm on its ear a little bit.

Have Doom talk about how much he hates Reed Richards and tell the Sub Mariner that he can have the Invisible Girl for a wife if he aids (Dr. Doom needs NO HELP FROM ANYONE) him in destroying the Fantastic Four. Or team up Baron Zemo and the Red Skull to go kick Captain America’s star-spangled butt. They’re both Nazis, they have something in common. Or spend a few issues with Baron Zemo going to different villains and getting them to buy into a new Masters of Evil. Once assembled, they can fight the Avengers in their book or something.

There was a lot of really cool ideas that could have been done with this book that never happened.

Speaking of cool ideas, I never quite figured out why Dr. Doom needed Magneto to light the fuse of his plan. For one thing, how did he know that Magneto was on his way to visit him? How did he know that Magneto would go running to the Avengers? What if Magneto was like, “Meh. Good luck to the world, I’m going back to my asteroid and wait around until the whole shithouse goes up in flames.” There are a lot of variables here that Doom couldn’t have accounted for.

The cover, a John Byrne special, is really terrific. I like how all of the Champions and Avengers are bowing to the good Doctor and Doom is just standing in a B-Boy stance saying, “Yup. This is good.” If I saw that book on a comic spinner at the local drug store, I’d buy that thing in a second.

As far as a Champions story, there are no Disco Angels. Mainly because the Champions aren’t in it at all. But as a Super-Villain Team-Up story, it gets two Doctor Doom pinups. The plot is pretty damn flimsy, even by 1970s writing standards (Champions scribe Bill Mantlo writes it) and the art is pedestrian at best. Also, it was announced as the last issue of Super-Villain Team-Up ever, but there are three after it. They don’t come out until the following three years though (once a year). 

The Demi-God Must Die!

As a Champions story, this wasn’t too bad. As an Avengers story, this wasn’t too good.

We open the action with Iron Man hurtling himself towards the Championcar. As Black Widow said, “He’s diving at (us) at missile speed!” Since I just finished reading Iron Man Annual 4 where the Champs help ol’ Shell Head, to see him attacking his new/old buddies was a bit confusing. Writer Jim Shooter, who was a terrific writer back in the day and has a better handle on the Champions than the team’s regular writer Bill Mantlo, doesn’t give a lot of clues as to why Tony Stark is doing this.

Iron Man starts beating the shit out of Hercules. When Black Widow and Ice Man help their Olympian friend, they get a pretty nasty beat down too. Herc, BW and Ice Man are the only Champions that appear in this book because the others are all off doing something. It literally took Iron Man two pages to take down Ice Man and Natasha. And he did it in a douche-y way too. He crumbled a building on Black Widow, when there were a ton of bystanders around –don’t worry about collateral damage, Tony! And after Bobby encased him in ice, he used his chest beam to drill him in the back.

For the rest of the issue it was a slugfest between Hercules and Iron Man. They took turns trading punches. Hercules would punch Iron Man in the chest, IM would gasp about how he almost just died. Iron Man would punch Hercules in the mouth and Tony would wonder why Hercules wasn’t dead. Every other panel would center around Hercules asking Iron Man if he had lost his mind. Why was he attacking him? WHY?

Turns out Iron Man and the Beast were chilling at the Avengers Mansion—most of the other Avengers were still in the hospital after their recent fight with Ultron—when an Olympian Titan named Typhon came out of nowhere and captured the two Avengers. Seems as if Typhon has a score to settle with the Lion of Olympus and he heard that this was Hercules’ last known address.

Iron Man has to explain to Typhon that Hercules doesn’t live there anymore, but he’d be happy to get him. Typhon tells Stark that he better get Hercules and kill him otherwise he’s going to turn Hank McCoy into a furry blue pancake. In a wonderful moment, the Beast tells Iron Man not to do it, he doesn’t care if Typhon kills him and that he doesn’t want to be a pawn. You know what Iron Man says?

“Shut up, McCoy.”

("Fuck you, dude." That's what I would have said.)

See Tony Stark was always a dick, it wasn’t just the movies.

Typhon tells Iron Man that when Hercules makes it to New York, he has to fight him and if he sees him screwing around, he’s going to kill the Beast. By the way, Typhon is doing all of this because he’s trapped in Hades. Pluto, the ruler of Hades, said if Typhon can kill Hercules, he can leave the underworld. You may remember Pluto from Champions 1, 2 and 3. Typhon is down with that because Hercules clowned him a few years back so he can get revenge AND escape from eternal torment.

That’s win-win, in the bad guy business.

So now Iron Man has to go toe-to-toe with a demigod and his plan of telling the Black Widow is out the door because she’s knocked out thanks to falling debris. Debris, that Iron Man, made fall on her. Bad plan one.

He doesn’t want to tell Hercules what’s going on because “Typhon forced me to set up a monitor for him! He’s watching every move I make.” Okay, I know that people were kind of tech stupid back in the 1970s, but c’mon. Who’s filming this? How is the monitor that Typhon is watching picking up everything that these two guys are doing? I mean, they’re literally fighting over all of Manhattan. It’s a pretty big place. Iron Man couldn’t have whispered to Hercules his problem?

By trying to explain the holes in his story, Shooter just digs more.

Finally, Hercules and Iron Man fight their way to Avengers Mansion. Despite being glued to “his monitor”, Typhon doesn’t realize this. Maybe he’s never been to New York City before and doesn’t know where the Mansion is in relationship to where the fight was.

“Mid-town, I thought that the Mansion was downtown! Oh, fiddlesticks,” Typhon could have said. But he didn’t.

Hercules and Iron Man have pretty much exhausted themselves beating the shit out of each other. But guess who’s awake and followed their teammate to the Avengers Mansion? Ice Man and Black Widow! They try to attack the titan, but are getting the short end of the stick. All of a sudden, the Beast gets free and kicks Typhon.

Then he says, “Rottsa Ruck, Cluck!”

(Kinda concerning? BTW, that image of Typhon is ghastly.)

I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it sounds kind of racist. I may be a little on edge after all of the shit that went down in Charlottesville this past week, but WTF Hank? Seriously? You’re doing a fake Chinese accent. And Typhon’s not even Asian, he’s Greek. You couldn’t have thrown a “Cheebugger, Cheebugger, Cheebugger!” John Belushi thing at him? Your’re better than this, man.

Anyway the Beast kicks Typhon into the air and Ice Man freezes him solid, just like they did in the X-Men days. He breaks out, but Typhon is now facing Ice Man, the Beast, Black Widow, Iron Man and Hercules. Pluto calculates the odds and realizes that Typhon isn’t going to win and brings him back to Hades. Before he goes, Typhon vows vengeance! Vengeance on the Avengers, I like that.

Iron Man apologizes to Hercules. Our Greek buddy is a stand-up dude and tells him not to worry about it. Hercules likes trading fists, so I’m sure that he was not bothered by it at all. The last panel shows the Beast having a crisis of confidence, but we won’t find out about that because that’s an Avengers’ problem, not a Champions’ problem.

A few things:

•  If you’re Ice Man and you find yourself in the Avengers Mansion, do you walk around and check stuff out? I would. How many times has Bobby been invited to the Mansion? Once maybe twice? I’d walk around, go to the bathroom (number two, just to say I did it), nose through the silverware, maybe have Jarvis make me a sandwich. That would be cool (no pun). What’s Iron Man going to do, kick you out? You just saved his ass. I’d probably sprawl out on the couch, let out a big yawn and loudly say, “I could get used to a place like this! I really could!”
•  Jim Shooter really is a hell of a writer. I wish that he wrote a couple of issues of the Champions. I better they’d be really good. BTW, another issue with no petty bickering between teammates. I like the Champions better when they’re in another person’s book. If I was reading this book as an Avengers fan, I don't think I would have loved it. For one thing, there was really only one Avenger: Iron Man. Beast was locked up for 95% of the book and this was a flimsy plot. Plus, it seemed like a fill-in and a favor. Like they could have printed this thing any time they felt like it. And the favor comes from getting some eyeballs on a book (The Champions) that no one is reading. Bleh. 
•   The cover art is great. I love George Perez, he can really draw. In fact, I think that I might like him more than John Byrne. That’s saying something. I also enjoy that the Beast calls Iron Man "Shell Head" when he's in the middle of kicking the shit out of Hercules. George Tuska’s comic art was fine. It wasn’t anything great. He does a workman’s job. Nothing awesome, but nothing terrible either.

This was a pretty good Champions story, I’d give it three disco Angels out of five. However, it was not a very good Avengers story. I’d only give it only one one-legged Wasp pants suit.

 

Or:

I know that it was the 1970s and the Wasp was supposed to be fashion-forward and everything, but what the hell was she thinking? Like WWIII, she's rich. Why is she flying around in a costume that looks like it was designed by a blind guy? Comics. 

Jeff Reardon 1992 Upper Deck

On July 1, 2016, the Baseball Card Bandit sent the above card. I took to Facebook that day to write this:

“The BCB is at it again but this time there's a wrinkle in his (I assume it's a man) game. Look at the postmark! This card, of Terminator Jeff Reardon, was sent from New York City where Reardon spent the last 11 games oh his career sans trademark beard. 

Reardon was needed when he was with the Sox (Boston had potential HoFer Lee Smith) but for some reason GM Lou Gorman picked him up. Maybe that's what led him to real world troubles he had in Florida after he retired. 

Or maybe it was just Florida. Man, that state just sucks.”

I was never a big Jeff Reardon guy. I just didn't think that he fit a need for the Red Sox and wondered why they were spending money on him. It was a needles bauble, as far as I was concerned. Sign a starting pitcher, an outfielder with pop, anything but another lights-out closer. We already had one. And he was good.  

When the Red Sox picked him up as a free agent after the 1989 season, I was a little shocked. Boston still had Lee Smith*, who had a really good previous year. Smith was 6-1 with a 3.57 ERA (which is unfair metric to judge for closers) and had 25 saves and a 12.2 strikeout over nine innings ratio. Reardon had a 5-4 record, a 4.07 ERA, saved 31 games and 5.7 SO/9. Plus, Reardon was two years older and cost more money. 

*The Lee Smith deal was probably Lou Gorman's best deal ever. He traded Calvin Schiraldi and Al Nipper to the Cubs for Smith. Gorman should have been arrested for larceny. It was that good of a deal. 

Why would you sign a closer when you already had a really good one in the back of your bullpen. I wasn’t sure what Red Sox General Manager Lou Gorman was thinking. But I assumed that since Reardon was signed in December 1989, Smith would be gone by Spring Training. Again, not true. When the Sox reported to Winter Haven, Florida both Reardon and Smith were there too. They spent a lot of time talking about who was the closer and they gave similar pat instances about how “these things have a way of working out” and “whoever had the hot hand”. Crap like that.

If there was ever a manager who could make this work, it was Sox skipper Joe Morgan. He said the same thing. When camp broke that April, both Reardon and Smith were on the roster. This lasted about a month before Gorman traded Smith to the St. Louis Cardinals for Reardon’s former Twin teammate Tom Brunansky.

Brunansky was slotted in right field and was the Red Sox only power threat in some very lean years. He did make a pretty awesome catch off of Chicago White Sox shortstop Ozzie Guillen to clinch the 1990 American League East. Other than that, he was completely adequate.

I often wondered why Reardon chose the Red Sox that off season. He knew about Lee Smith and he understood that the Sox really didn’t need a closer. Reardon grew up in Dalton, MA, so maybe he wanted to come home. Gorman gave him a crap-load of money to pitch here. Maybe Gorman told him that the team didn’t like Smith anymore and that he would be traded soon and that there was nothing to worry about.

I’m not sure. But he came in and pitched well. In two plus seasons, he had 88 saves for the Red Sox and made the All-Star team in 1991. That was also the year where he gagged the American League East flag. The Sox were making a pretty hard run late in the season when the Sox were on the verge of beating the New York Yankees to get closer to the league-leading Toronto Blue Jays.

With two outs in the top of the ninth and the Red Sox leading 5-4, Reardon gave up a game tying shot to Roberto Kelly. The next inning, Matt Young and Dan Petry couldn’t get out of their own ways and gave two runs to Bombers who won the game 7-5. From that game forward, the Sox lost 10 of their next 13 and finished in second behind the Blue Jays.

The Sox were never a serious contender until 1995 when another Massachusetts boy, Dan Duquette took the reigns as Boston General Manager and remade the Sox on the fly following the strike-shortened 1994 season. Duquette was Reardon’s catcher at UMass-Amherst.

Late in the 1992 season, Reardon was traded to the Braves for a minor leaguer. From there he bounced to Cincinnati and the Yankees—two teams that had strict rules of facial hair. If Reardon wanted to continue pitching, he had to shave off the beard that made him famous and intimidating. He retired after the abbreviated 1994 season.

Jeff Reardon was an interesting character. He looked like James Brolin from the original “Amityville Horror” movie. He was a Met for a while, but was traded to the Montreal Expos where he began his career as the unstoppable stopper. That’s also where he got his nickname “The Terminator”. He’d come in, throw gas by everyone, save the day and walk off the mound. He never showed a lot of emotion and when you mix his beard plus playing in the “wilds of Canada” he seemed scary as hell.

After the 1986 season, he signed with the Minnesota Twins and was dominant that year. He was probably their Most Valuable Player that year as he brought a ton of stability to the bullpen. The Twins believed that the game was over once Reardon was on the mound. Twins manager Tom Kelly used him brilliantly and was the best weapon in the American League that year riding him all the way to Minnesota’s first world championship in any sport.

The years after his retirement were not kind to Reardon. This is from Wikipedia (and references what I wrote about him in the original Facebook post):

“On December 26, 2005, Reardon was taken into custody and charged by the Palm Beach Gardens, Florida Police Department for allegedly committing armed robbery at a Hamilton Jewelers store at the Gardens Mall. Reardon attributed his actions to the influence of the medications that he had been taking since his son died in 2004. Soon after the episode at the mall and his release from an overnight stay in jail, Reardon returned to a psychiatric facility, and was an inpatient for nearly two months. His doctors drastically reduced his medications and began to administer electroshock treatments. However, Reardon still had to stand trial.

Reardon was eventually found not guilty of the charges by reason of drug-induced insanity. The judge ruled that because Reardon had been taking anti-depressants and mood stabilizers, and was distraught over his son's death, there was no reasonable explanation for the robbery. In addition, Reardon was not required to be committed after the ruling.”

I haven’t read much about Reardon since then, so I assume he’s doing okay. At least that’s what I want to believe. Because even dominant relievers need some relief.