Joe Price 1990 Fleer

On December 24, 2018 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

On Facebook, I wrote: A new BCB came on Friday and my brother in law John Manasso has the privilege of opening up the envelope. 

Today’s card is Joe Price, who is not to be confused with his name doppelgänger David Price. Joe hasn’t made the amount of money in his whole career as David gets in a quarter of the season, but he also hasn’t has the same success either. 

I don’t recall much about Joe. He was with the Sox for a little more than half the season and he was just there. He wasn’t anything special at all. He wasn’t really good and he wasn’t really bad. He just was. 

He finished his decade-plus career with the Orioles the following year. 

What’s interesting about Joe Price is the philosophical debate he encapsulates. Price was released by the Giants in May 1989. San Francisco went on to the World Series five months later—this is one of my favorite teams BTW. Kevin Mitchell, Will Clark and Matt Williams made up a killer middle of the order. 

I digress. 

When Price settles in to watch the Series, who did he root for? The team that he once belonged to, the one with some of his friends still on the roster? Or did he root against the team that rudely released him on the way to a special season?

We’ve all been fired or dumped or told that you aren’t worth it and it sucks. No matter how much you want to take the high road, there’s a gnawing feeling that you want to see that organization or person fail without you around. And no matter how strong of a relationship you have with the person/people who left you behind, it can be tough to see them succeed without you. 

Did you hold them back? Was it your fault they didn’t reach these heights? Thoughts like that run through your head. 

But these are guys you competed with day after day. You sat in the bullpen with them and swapped stories, learned about their families and spit sunflower seeds at them. They didn’t release you, upper management did. Why should you root against them? They didn’t do anything to you. 

It’s a quandary. 

Joe Price, a really ordinary pitcher but a nice Rorschach Test on how one feels about rejection and putting things behind you. 

Merry Christmas, everyone.

2019 Notes: This is the last card that I received from the BCB. It's been about two months and I'm not sure if I'll ever get another one. But fear not! I found four more cards that I've picked up that I'll write about as if they were sent to me by the Baseball Card Bandit. Just know that they weren't. 

As far as Joe Price goes, every time I think of him (which isn't too much) I think of one of the last Spider-Man stories that Steve Ditko drew. It was called, "Just a Guy Named Joe" and that's kind of how I look at Price. He played for the Reds for a while, the aforementioned Giants and Red Sox before finishing his career as an Oriole. 

He debuted with Cincinnati after the Big Red Machine broke up, yet he played with a lot of the guys that dominated that team, only they were shadows of themselves. Johnny Bench, Dave Concepcion, Pete Rose, Tony Perez, among others were all teammates of Price. I wonder what that was like, playing with men who you expect to be great but because of age, just weren't the same as they used to be. 

And imagine being a pitcher managed by Rose when he was heavily betting? I'm surprised there hasn't been a class-action suit against him. 

Price was as ordinary as his first name, he never led the league in anything, didn't appear in an All-Star Game and got into two games in the 1987 National League Championship series, winning one. It appears that he stuck around long enough to get a pension, which is something pretty cool. But his career was just okay. 

And like I keep saying in these blogs, a mediocre or even poor career in the big leagues is a huge success. To be able to compete with the best of the best at a high level with the scrutiny of your team, the press and the fans; that takes a lot of mental toughness to finish four games below .500 in the win-loss column (Price's career record is 45-49). 

Joe Price was a major league pitcher for ten years. That's a pretty incredible thing to say.