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.