Luis Rivera 1992 Leaf

On August 9, 2016 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

This is what I wrote on Facebook:

"The BCB has a name: B. Beane from Oakland, CA. I knew he'd screw up sometime and let me know who he is!

I bet he's also the Zodiac Killer too. 

Luis Rivera"

2019 Note: at this point in my relationship with the BCB, I was more interested in who the BCB was rather than who was on the baseball card. 

Rivera played 11 seasons in the major leagues and 1991 was his best year as he hit .258 with 11 home runs and an OPS+ of 90, which means he wasn't even league average. Rivera wasn't fast, he didn't hit for average or power, so I would assume that he stayed in baseball for so long is because he could defend. I don't recall him being the second coming of Ozzie Smith, but he was probably called "steady" many times in his career. 

Luis Rivera was probably, at best, a backup infielder but the Sox had no one else to turn to when it came to shortstops. So he got a lot of at bats in his years with the Sox -- over 1500 -- and that shouldn't have happened. Ever. 

After Rick Burleson left the Red Sox, Boston had an unbreakable string of steady shortstops: Glenn Hoffman, Ed Jurak, Spike Owen and Luis Rivera. This ended when John Valentin was named starting shortstop and showed that he could actually hit, hit with power and defend a bit. Then Nomar Garciaparra came to town and redefined what a Boston shortstop should do. Since then we've had our hits (no pun): Xander Bogaerts and Stephen Drew (sometimes) and our misses: Julio Lugo, but even our bad shortstops are better than the dreck we had to endure through out the 1980s. 

At one point Spike Owen was my favorite Red Sox shortstop ever and it wasn't even close. 

Rivera has carved out a nice coaching career for himself since he retired. A couple of times he's been mentioned as a candidate for a manager's role, but he hasn't made the leap yet.