Joe Hesketh 1992 Fleer

  

Last week, I received this baseball card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB). Included with this card was a note printed on a missed message piece of paper. The note said, “Til we meet again for the first time.” I know that I alluded to this with the Terry Francona card from last week, but it appears to me that the BCB is all done. 

I know that the next question is, why? I think that the reason why is because the identity of the BCB was clumsily revealed to me two years ago at my brother’s wedding. While the name of the person was never verified, I think that he got the message that I know who it is. I’m not trying to be a tease, but I will not reveal the name until he is verified and he wants me to. 

If the game is over, I am legitimately bummed out about this. This has been a fun few years of getting random baseball cards, writing about the players on the front of the cards, exploring how baseball relates to life and how perceptions change over time. How you might look at a player one way in 1988 and then see that person in a completely different light in 2019. 

One of those players is the card that I received today, Joe Hesketh. If you think about Joe Hesketh at all—and aside from a username on SoSH it’s been a while since his name has invaded by cerebral cortex—mostly you might remember him as a fourth starter for some mediocre Red Sox teams. 

And aside from his first full year in Boston, that’s who he was.  

The 1991 season was a bit underrated in terms of interesting Red Sox seasons. They finished in second, behind the division-winning Blue Jays after completely falling apart late in the season. On Sunday, September 22, the Sox had two outs in the ninth against a bad Yankees team. Roberto Kelly was facing Jeff Reardon, who was protecting a one-run lead. Kelly loses the ball over the Wall and the Sox can’t score in the bottom of the ninth. Punching bags Matt Young and Dan Petry come in (there was no one left in the pen, I assume) and gives up two runs to the Bombers. The Sox bat in the 10^th and Mo Vaughn rockets a two-out double, Jack Clark strikes out against Steve Farr and the Sox lose. 

This was the turning point of the season as Boston tailspins into a 3-10 record, which costs Joe Morgan his job. The Red Sox were pretty brutal in the next three seasons, finally bouncing back in the strike-shortened 1995 season. 

In 1991, Hesketh was pretty good swingman for the Sox. He appeared in 39 games, started 17 and went a career-high 12-4, with a 3.29 ERA with 104 strikeouts in 153.1 innings pitched. He also led the entire league in winning percentage (.750) that year, which is god damn amazing, if you ask me. If the Braves thought that he’d be this decent, they never would have released him in 1990. 

Confession time: I used to get Hesketh confused with another mediocre lefty National League reject named Joe from around that time, Joe Price.

This was it for the former Montreal Expo (side note: he was 10-5 for the Expos in 1985, which happened to be his rookie year, good for eighth in the ROY award) in terms of being a serviceable pitcher, as his next three years were pretty poor. The good news for Hesketh is that he had his career year at the best time for the perfect GM in the league, as Sox General Manager Lou Gorman felt that he had to sign him and gave him a three-year, $5.1 million-dollar deal. For that scratch, Hesketh rewarded his team with 19 wins and ERAs of 4.36, 5.06 and 4.26. 

I know that I’ve said this before, but it’s not the money that you give to the superstars that gets you fired, it’s the cash you dole out to the Joe Heskeths of the world. Gorman should have known that you can find a Joe Hesketh on every MLB roster and that he’d cost you nothing to aquire him. Also, Hesketh was 32-years-old in 1991, he wasn’t going to get better as he got older. And it was pretty obvious that he was going to get worse. 

I’m not saying that the Hesketh deal was what Gorman axed at the end of the 1994 season, but this—along with the rising star of Jeff Bagwell in Houston—had to be on the list. Joe Hesketh was a one-man heist movie. 

And while he pretty much stole $5 million from the Red Sox, good for him. The Sox should have known what they had in Hesketh, they shouldn’t have given him anything more than a one-year deal. If they wanted to give him a 1992 contract for $1.7 million in recognition of a good 1991 season, so be it. But there’s no need to get attached to a guy like this for real money. 

That’s all on Gorman. 

I think that’s something that fans need to understand.  A player is going to get as much money as they can. Teams need to have some sort of foresight and intelligence when it comes to deals like this. If they can’t help themselves, that’s their problems. I never understood why fans take the teams’ side when the teams gave out the contract. 

Oh well, I guess that’s as good of a rant as anything to go out on.  

In any event, it’s been a fun couple of years and hopefully I’ll get more cards. But if I don’t, I guess I’ll have to come up with a new project for me to write about and for you to read. Talk to you soon!

Terry Francona 1990 Upper Deck

Before Terry Francona was the most beloved Red Sox manager of all time (he led them to the 2004 and 2007 World Series Championship, if you forgot and was a whisker from going back to the Fall Classic in 2008), he was a major league baseball player. 

I know it’s difficult to think of Francona as anything but the guy who sat at the end of the dugout in a Red Sox sweatshirt, but he was a well-regarded college player. He won the Golden Spikes in 1980 (which is the college version of MVP), won the MVP of the 1980 College World Series (that his University of Arizona team won) and was a first-round pick of the Montreal Expos. Add in that his father Tito (this is where he got that nickname, if you didn’t know) played in the Major Leagues for 15 years, and it appeared that Francona the younger was poised to be a star. 

Terry rocketed through the Montreal minor leagues and made his debut the year after he was drafted. He played in 34 games and started the season in the minors again, before coming up to stay in the second half of 1982.  

Francona didn’t have much of a position, he played a little outfield but in Montreal, they had two young, Hall of Famers in Andre Dawson and Tim Raines along with a bunch of other guys in rightfield. At first base was Al Oliver and in 1984 Francona got the opportunity to start, but he didn’t do much to establish himself as a star. The following year, he moved around a bit more and after the 1986 season, he was granted his release. 

From there he bounced around like a baseball vagabond: with stops in the North Side of Chicago in 1986, Cincinnati the following year, Cleveland the year after before winding up his career in Suds City in 1989. 

One of the things that people often say about baseball is that it’s a humbling game, and they’re right. If, at the beginning of the 1980s, you were to tell Francona that he’d end up bouncing around the Midwest hoping to latch onto a job; he’d have said you were nuts. He had the pedigree and not only that, but at every level he played at, not only was he successful; but he was among the most successful. 

I’m not sure how rapid failure, or in Francona’s case, rapid mediocrity can screw with your brain, but it must make you crazy. How can you hit like Ted Williams at multiple levels, but be stuck behind Warren fucking Cromartie at the ultimate level? Was Warren Cromartie that much better than you? Did he work harder than you? What was his secret?

I once read an interview with an athlete (I can’t recall who, and honestly it doesn’t matter) where the interviewer talked about how great it must be to a professional athlete. “You play a kid’s game and you get showered with money and praise and adulation! It must be wonderful!” And the athlete said that for stars, that kind of life is wonderful; but the majority of professional athletes aren’t stars. They’re constantly stressed out of their minds that someone is going to take their job or that their manager has a bug up their ass about them or that they’re going to lose their athleticism. Not only that but their General Manager is always looking to replace them with someone younger and cheaper. And the media is highlighting their latest screw up and that asshole in the stands is yelling at them. They live in constant fear and doubt.

It sounds like an incredibly stressful situation and I’m kinda shocked that an athlete hasn’t broken and pulled a “Last Boy Scout” yet. 

For Francona he had to live with this paranoia just like everyone else, but he also had to live with the stain of being a disappointment. That’s a lot of baggage to foist on to one person. And I think that’s why he was such a good manager. He understood what it was like to be a star and he understood what it was like to be a scrub. He got that the fear of losing this professional life, this money, this lottery ticket all of this weighed heavily on 99% of his players. He was able to coax greatness out of them because he understood them in a way that few had. 

Ted Williams was an incredible baseball player, but he was a shitty manager. In the late 60s, he managed the Washington Senators and when they moved west to Dallas, he managed the Texas Rangers for a little bit too. The one thing that Williams could never understand is why his players couldn't hit like him.

Ted Williams was probably the greatest pure hitter that ever lived. And while he studied the hell out of hitting, he had a truly unique innate ability to marry the transfer of his weight and otherworldly hand-eye-coordination to smash a spherical object thrown at great speed with another rounded object, hitting that first object very, very far. It's not easy. Every hit is a complex calculation that your brain conducts where it determines the speed of what's being thrown at you with the ability to guess where this thing is going to be in .004 seconds. Even for major league hitters, hitting isn't easy. Shit, in his greatest season ever, Williams failed 59.4% of the time.

But his inability to understand that his charges are doing their best routinely flummoxed him. 

Not so for Francona. He understood that the game of baseball is hard, that hitting a baseball is even harder still. Not only that, but he was able to express this understanding of the game's frustration. And I think that’s also why he was Michael Jordan’s first manager when MJ rode the busses in the mid 90s and called Birmingham home for a summer. Francona sorta understood what it was like to be a star (maybe not a Michael Jordan star) and he grew up in major league locker rooms, so he also wasn’t star struck either. 

Was Terry Francona perfect? No. Probably not. But for a sport like baseball with its litany of imperfect people, he does just fine. 

Tom Brunansky 1990 Score

In mid-September 2019 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

The first year I really started to obsessively follow baseball was 1986. Watching the Red Sox that year was total exhilaration, until it came to the second-to-last and last games of the season. Then it sucked. Hard. But you already know that story and I’m not going to talk about it because it doesn’t matter in the greater context of this blog entry. 

The thing that no one really warns you about, is that once the season ends; baseball pretty much disappears. When you follow the game every single day for eight months, this is god damn jarring. No longer is the sports page abuzz with team notebooks and game summaries and box scores. Maybe once or twice a week, you’ll get a few inches on what the Sox are thinking about and every Sunday Peter Gammons or Larry Whiteside filled a broadsheet of rumors, but that was it. You were supposed to go cold turkey on baseball. 

But eventually, things heat up a little bit at the beginning of December where all 26 teams (there was only 26 teams back then) came together in some hotel in a warm part of the country and they’d sit around and make deals and sign free agents and new uniforms would be announced. It was like a baseball Hanukah, because it happened over a week, and every day there were gifts as players were changing teams at a rapid pace. Anyway, during the Winter Meetings of 1986, it seemed that just about every team—except for the two teams* in the World Series—made moves. When they showed up to Spring Training in 1987, mostly everything was the same. 

* The Mets made one memorable move, sending a bunch of players (including Kevin Mitchell) to San Diego for Kevin McReynolds. The only thing that the Sox did was alienate Roger Clemens and colluded against catcher Rich Gedman.  

Using this first offseason as my template, I thought that was how champions and runners-up behaved. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. Of course, the Sox and Mets stumbled a bit in 1987 and didn’t make the postseason. So, I should have learned a lesson. 

What does this lengthy preamble have to do with Tom Brunansky? In 1987, Tom Brunansky was a key member of the World Champion Minnesota Twins. He was their rightfielder and was a key bat in the middle of their lineup. About a month into the 1988 season, the Twins sent him to the Cardinals (the team that they just beat the previous October!) for second baseman Tommy Herr. 

I had questions.

Tommy Herr? Why would the Twins make that deal? They had veteran Steve Lombardozzi, a Massachusetts native to boot, manning second base. They won a World Series with that guy, why would they trade for someone to replace him? Especially from a team whose ass they just kicked? And why would they trade a power bat like Brunansky? Who was going to play rightfield and hit 30+ home runs?  

Here’s the thing that I didn’t really get about baseball back then. The clichés are usually true. Especially the two that fit here: to get something good, you have to give up something good and the proverbial trade that helps both teams. 

In the late 80s, the Cards needed power, badly. All they had was Jack Clark hitting dingers and he took his bat to San Diego (along with former Sox lefty Bruce Hurst). The only power threat they had was former Brave Bob Horner, who was returning from a year in Japan. He was no Cecil Fielder and was pretty much running on fumes by this point in his career. With this trade, the Cards got their middle-of-the-order bat in Brunansky. However, even with Brunansky and his 22 homers in 1988, St. Louis managed 71 homeruns all year. I know that they were still in the midst of Whitey Ball, but that’s less homers than Barry Bonds hit by himself in 2001. Consequently, they finished behind the Mets for the National League East title. 

The Twins were looking for someone that could play second base and hit. Despite being born in Malden, Massachusetts, and starting for a championship team (I was obsessed with this for some reason, like I thought because you started and your team won, that automatically meant you were really good) Lombardozzi was a terrible batter. That World Series cornerstone slashed 238/298/352 in 1987, and those were some of his better numbers. They needed a second baseman who could hit and run a little. They had power with first baseman Kent Hrbek, third baseman Gary Gaetti and centerfielder Kirby Puckett. Therefore, Brunansky was the odd man out. So Herr, who was a few years away from finishing in the top five in the 1985 NL MVP race behind teammate Willie McGee, was slotted in at second and Lombardozzi roamed around the infield, not hitting but being a pretty good gloveman (I assume, I don’t have his defensive numbers in front of me). 

Even with Herr, the Twins finished second to the budding dynasty that was beginning in Oakland. Herr stuck around for less than a year and joined up with the Phillies in 1989 before ending his career with the Mets and Giants two years later. 

Brunansky was a Cardinal for about two seasons before he was sent to the Red Sox in exchange for Hall of Fame (that’s still really weird to write) reliever Lee Smith in 1990. Brunansky reunited with former Twin Jeff Reardon and made a spectacular catch in the corner of rightfield in Fenway Park off the bat of Chicago White Sox shortstop Ozzie Guillen that clinched the 1990 AL East flag for Boston. It was probably the highlight of his Red Sox run. 

I’ve talked about this before, but I never understood why Boston GM Lou Gorman signed Reardon in the first place when he had Smith in the backend of his bullpen. And I was really angry when they shipped Smith to St. Louis for a fading power hitter in Brunansky. I talked about it here and here. 

For some really awful Red Sox teams in 1991 and 1992, Brunansky was the only one who supplied any sort of power with 16 and 15 round-trippers. That second number led the entire team. Fifteen home runs was the best that a Red Sox player could do in 1992, despite playing half of their games in Fenway Park. It was abysmal. Brunansky played with the Brewers in 1993 before coming back with to the Sox in 1994, where he hit his last 10 dingers. 

For a guy from West Covina, California (I wonder if he knows Josh Chan? Shout out to “Crazy Ex Girlfriend”) with mediocre power and a mustache, Tom Brunansky not only brought a lot of questions, but he also ended up teaching me a lot about baseball – mostly that nothing should stay the same. You have to keep moving, getting better and improving. And if that means trading your fourth-best power hitter.