I haven't written anything about this card on Facebook, because I'm writing about it here first. Pictured in the above card is former Red Sox prospect Jeff Sellers.
Was he a real prospect? I'm not sure if he was really a prospect or just a young pitcher who Boston hoped would be the next big thing. I've discussed this before, but after Roger Clemens came along until Aaron Sele, the Red Sox had a dearth of pitching prospects. All of a sudden they couldn't find a pitching prospect at all, which is weird because there was a pretty good pipeline of Sox hurlers who debuted in the early 80s and went on to have pretty good careers: Clemens, Bruce Hurst, Oil Can Boyd, John Tudor, Bobby Ojeda and Al Nipper. Just look at the starting four of the 86 ALCS team, it was Clemens, Hurst, Boyd and Nipper (with an aging Tom Seaver). That's not a bad rotation at all. All I know is that the Sox front office seemed to pivot from finding pitching to finding hitting sometime in the 1980s -- don't ask me why they couldn't concentrate on both.
Back to Jeff Sellers. Before we get into the tragedy that was Jeff Sellers' career, guess where he was born? Compton, California. I wonder if he knew Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, MC Ren, Eazy-E and Yella? Even if you hated rap, wouldn't you buy "Straight Outta Compton" because of civic pride?
Anyway.
I became obsessed with baseball beginning with the 1986 season, but when I opened packs of 1987 Topps, I had no idea who Jeff Sellers was. I don't recall him pitching for the Red Sox in 1986, but it turns out he pitched in 14 games that season and four in 1985--his first start was a win against the Milwaukee Brewers. Maybe he was some sort of secret rookie, the kind that comes out of nowhere and has a great career, completely flummoxing those whose job it is to know better.
But he wasn't a ninja rookie. He was just a guy with a perfectly square head who get would get said head kicked in most times he started a game. He didn't have a lot of strikeouts--he was a sinker baller--and his career ERA was a whisker away from 5.00 (it was 4.97). He probably should have been a back-of-the-bullpen, swingman type; but at least according to the back of his baseball card, the Red Sox didn't think so. He appeared in 61 games and started 51 of them.
In 1988 he, Todd Benzinger and the always-popular Player to be Named Later were sent to the Cincinnati Reds for Nick Esasky and Rob Murphy. Murphy had a real good year coming out of the pen in 1989, but was awful in 1990. Esasky had a monster year for the Sox in 1989, before signing big deal with the Braves in December 1989 and then contracting vertigo and never playing again. Benzinger played a couple of seasons with his hometown Reds, catching the final out of the 1990 World Series, before bouncing around the league and retiring in 1995.
After the 1988 season, Jeff Sellers never threw another pitch in the major leagues. With his new team, he got injured in Spring Training with Cincinnati and his arm never healed right. Like his trademate Benzinger, Sellers spent the next few years trying to hook on with the Yankees, Rangers and Rockies before calling it quits in 1994. Unlike Benzinger, Sellers banged around the bushes and played in the minor leagues for those organizations.
What really must make Sellers angry is that his last game was by far his best. On October 1, 1988, Jeff Sellers had ten strikeouts and a no-hitter through 7 2/3 innings before Cleveland Indian outfielder Luis Medina launched a homer. That was the only run Sellers gave up, but he lost 1-0, former Red Sox manager John Farrell got the victory. That was Sellers' final major league game ever.
When I started thinking about this entry, the only thing that I remembered about Sellers is the Cincinnati/Boston trade. As I was thinking about it, I started trying to think of angles of how to approach this blog: imagining what it's like to be the "throw-in" in a multiplayer deal or trying to figure out how I would feel about being the fourth best player in a four-person transaction. But after doing a little bit of research, the Jeff Sellers story is bigger than that one transaction.
It has to suck to be 24-years-old and on the last day of the year, pitch the best game of your life. You spend your entire winter thinking of that last game and how things are going to start changing. Then you get traded. The Reds wanted him, maybe they thought that they'd catch lightning in a bottle with a youngish guy who had already made some mistakes.
Sellers probably heard this too. You think about how you're starting your prime now and getting a whole new start with a new team in a new league, this is going to be your year. Then, BOOM!, you get hurt. Of all the things that can happen, that's the worst. Especially when your manager is notorious steak head Pete Rose, who was also going through some stuff in 1989. Things were starting to finally line up your way, you know that baseball is full of stories of guys who go to a new team and get a new lease on life, why couldn't you be the next chapter of that story? But instead you got really hurt.
I wonder how often Jeff Sellers thinks about that moment in 1989 Spring Training? I wonder how many times he talks about how things were this close to changing for him and then he hurt his shoulder, got sent to the minors, tried to pitch through it, hurt his shoulder more, had surgery and was never the same.
If it was me, I'd probably think about it every single day.
No comments:
Post a Comment