On December 12, 2017 I received these cards from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):
On Facebook, I wrote: last week the Baseball Card Bandit brought a bit of summer to the Northeast as he warmed my mailbox with these two cards.
Both feature men who would eventually play with the Red Sox.
Pat Mahomes was supposed to be a good prospect when he came up with the Twins. He never reached his potential and settled into a long career as a situational righty in a bunch of bullpens.
2019 Notes: Today you might know Pat Mahomes as the father of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. Pat's son has had a bit more success in his chosen field than his dad, he was named the 2018 NFL MVP and led the Chiefs to the AFC title game. Did they win? They played the Patriots, so of course they did not. But Mahomes was a breath of fresh air in a very stale football league, slinging the ball all over the place and running up a lot of impressive passing stats.
I didn't have a lot to say about the elder Mahomes because he didn't leave much of a mark in Boston, but I just looked at his baseball-reference page and man, he was not good. For a guy that played 11 seasons in the big leagues, Mahomes got hit hard and often. His career ERA is 5.47, his WHIP is 1.59 and he walked a bunch of people and didn't strike out anyone.
The cool thing is that even though he wasn't a great ballplayer, it's obvious that his son thought that he was something special. After one of his big games last season the younger Mahomes stepped to the podium for his post game press conference in his dad's Mets jersey. That's all a father really needs.
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Tony Pena was a marquee free agent signing and was supposed to bring stability to the Sox catching position. Defensively, he did well. Offensively? Well, Tony Pena was offensive. The thing about Pena was that his defensive was so respected, I don’t recall too many people being angry that he couldn’t hit.
2019: Red Sox fans were sold on two things about Tony Pena: his defense (he had a cannon arm -- when he was younger and instead of the normal catcher's squat, Pena sat with his right leg behind him and with his front leg extended) and that he wasn't Rich Gedman or Marc Sullivan or Rick Cerone. The latter was great news to anyone who watched these guys try to catch for three seasons.
While fans in Boston never saw the sit-down style of catching that Pena made popular it Pittsburgh and St. Louis, he still knew how to call a game and was a favorite of many Boston hurlers.
2019: See above for that sit-down style.
After Boston he had a stop in Cleveland where, ironically, his bat is what sunk the Sox. Pena teed off on a Zane Smith extra inning flat “fastball” for a Game One winning homer. The surprise of who beat them submarined the Sox and they meekly bowed out of the 1995 playoffs.
2019: That 1995 Cleveland Indians team was a wagon*, there was no way in hell that the Sox were going to beat them. But to lose to a home run by Tony Pena? Ugh. That was a killer. I remember that game like it was yesterday, I was sitting in my favorite corner on the couch in my on-campus apartment at Merrimack watching the game by myself in the living room. As soon as Pena hit that shot, it seemed like the entire apartment groaned at the same time -- it was that loud and that unexpected. The 1995 ALDS was the only time that the Red Sox or Patriots made the playoffs while I was in school**. It seems like a really long time ago -- because it was.
That’s life in the big city, kids.
* That 1995 Indians team had: Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez, Albert Belle (who got jobbed out of the 1995 MVP), Kenny Lofton, Eddie Murray, Omar Vizquel, Sandy Alomar, Dave Winfield, Carlos Baerga, Brian Giles, Jeromy Burnitz in their lineup. That's three Hall of Famers, three dudes who could be in the HoF and a bunch of All-Stars. They were unbelievable to watch at bat. Their pitching was okay with Orel Hershiser and Dennis Martinez, but they just didn't have that number one pitcher.
** The Celts and Bruins made the playoffs a few times during the early 90s, but they were usually beaten in the first round. I remember the Hornets-Celts first round matchup in 1993 when Alonzo Mourning hit a game -- and series -- winner with no time left. That was a tough one.
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