On February 23, 2017 I received these cards from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):
2019 Notes: TWO cards! Unprecedented. Cool action shot of Naehring. Owen looks a lot thicker than I remember.
On Facebook, I wrote: A few days ago, I received TWO more cards from the BCB. The Tim Naehring card is postmarked from Iceland while the Spike Owen card hails from Denver.
If you were a Red Sox fan in the early 90s, all you heard about was the potential of Tim Naehring. He could play anywhere in the infield, he could hit, had a bit of power and could run a little too. Unfortunately Tim Naehring couldn't stay healthy, so he was the ultimate tease.
I remember thinking, "Okay, we have Mo at first, Valentin at short and Cooper at third. All we need is Naehring the play second and our infield is set for the decade." It never happened. Naehring would inevitably go down with an injury sometime in April, return in a June, get hurt in July and that would be it. A lot of ink was spilled over the never-was career of Tim Naehring.
2019: Like I alluded to in the last paragraph, through no fault of his own, Tim Naehring is the worst kind of prospect. He's the one who has a ton of potential but can't reach it because he's always injured. That's worse than simply being not good because if you're not good, things happen and you try your best but you can't just cut the mustard. It happens. But when you're always injured, it's a bit of a tease. You perform well when you're healthy and then the inevitable injury occurs. Then you come back, do well, get everyone's (including yours) hopes up and then you tweak something. You're back on the shelf.
After a while people lose patience with you and you're discarded as an oft-injured has been who can't be counted on. Some people will go even so far as to say you're not "tough enough", which is crap. If you're a professional athlete you put your body through a grinder every day, sometimes it just won't respond. But the nagging little voice in the back of your brain, the one that keeps saying, "You could have been something if you were a little healthier" must be maddening. To be betrayed by your own body and have to think about that for the rest of your life is simply unfair.
Nahering is a respected talent evaluator in the Yankees organization now. I bet that it's easier to deal with his frustrating pro career easier there than if he drove a tow truck or was a CPA after baseball.
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Another Red Sox shortstop, Spike Owen was a part of the late 1986 trade that brought the AL Championship to Boston. Along with Dave Henderson, Owen was acquired for a handful of players who never amounted to much. He settled down the Boston infield that year and was--to a 10-year-old--a pretty decent player.
Owen played in those University of Texas super teams back in the early 80s with Roger Clemens and Greg Swindell. I always wondered whether Clemens and Owen would tell UT stories on bus rides to the park. If so, I bet their teammates wanted to murder them.
Owen was eventually sent to the Expos for a package that brought the Sox John Dopson and Luis "Funky Cold" Riviera. I made up that last nickname.
2019: Spike Owen played 13 seasons in the big leagues. And for an undersized (5'9") guy who didn't hit a ton and played good defense, carved out a nice career for himself. Aside from the 1986 Red Sox, he played on some mediocre teams: Mariners, Expos, Yankees and Angels. Here's something that I didn't know, in 1986 he was named team captain of the Mariners (they were terrible, but they could have been one of my favorite non-Red Sox teams ever -- I should write a blog on that some day) and then was shipped out of town by August.
He also signed a pretty hefty deal with the Yankees in 1993 with the idea that he could provide veteran leadership. He didn't have an awesome year and the Yankees dealt him to the Angels after one season. Sorry Jetes.
His older brother Dave also played in the bigs for two seasons. I wonder how Dave felt about his kid brother Spike being more successful than him? I bet that it eats at him.
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