John Dopson 1990 Fleer and Bruce Hurst 1992 Pinnacle

On August 15, 2017 I received these cards from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

On Facebook, I wrote: I've been very behind with my BCB cards. Here are two from a couple of weeks ago. 

I wrote a long piece about BruceHurst recently, this is the second Hurst card I've received from the BCB, which you can find it here.

2019 Notes: There isn't a lot more to say about Bruce Hurst than what I said about him in the last entry. I've never seen Pinnacle cards though. They seem like a nice enough card. 

The second card is John Dopson. He came over from the Expos along with Luis Rivera for Spike Owen and a minor leaguer. Dopson wasn't very good. All he needed to be was a cromulent third or fourth starter but he was unable to do so. That's John Dopson in a nutshell, good enough to be in the majors but not good enough to be counted on.

2019: The above is an unfair portrayal of Dopson. 

I don't recall much about John Dopson and the way he pitched, I only remember the name. There isn't much to go on in terms of information online about Dopson, but judging from his baseball-reference page, he might have been on the road to being a decent major league starter. The year before he was traded to the Sox, he had an ERA+ of 118, which is good. And while his K/9 ratio wasn't great, he looked okay. I'm sure people freaked at his won-loss record of 3-11, but who gives a shit about that. 

After he came over to Boston, a lot of his peripherals dipped a bit (ERA+ and K/9 especially) but his won-loss record improved to 12-8, which again, who gives a shit. However, at age 25, maybe this was the type of pitcher John Dopson was going to become: a nice, middle of the rotation innings eater. Every staff could use one of those. 

In the next two seasons, Dopson pitched a total of five games (four in 1990 and one in 1991) which leads me to believe that he was seriously injured. With what, I'm not sure, it's not on his Wikipedia page but he came back in 1992 and had a bad year. In 1993 he had a worse year and the Sox let him go. He was a California Angel for the 1994 and then retired.  

You try to look at a bunch of numbers and see if you can figure out what kind of person a ballplayer is and it's hard to do so. You try to remember what he was like when you watched him pitch and it's difficult to do so. Dopson seems like one of those players where things were going to start going his way and then he got injured. And the wasted potential of the 1990 and 1991 seasons probably never go away from his mind, even though we've long forgotten about it. 

Yes, I'm sure that there are a lot of advantages to being a pro ballplayer. But for the vast majority many never reach their fullest potential and I bet having to walk around with that notion in rattling around in your brain for the rest of your life has to be maddening.