Steve Curry 1989 Fleer

Do you remember a time when we were able to leave our homes without masks? Do you remember a time when we could gather together in public places and shake hands or hug and didn't have to stand six feet from one another? I barely recall these days of long ago--actually it was at the end of February--but it was during this time that the Baseball Card Bandit emailed me (YES! EMAIL!) this card. I'm now only getting to writing about it mainly because I had time remembering Curry and wasn't sure what to say. 

Curry, who looks almost exactly like Deadspin founder Will Leitch, pitched three games in the summer of 1988. Curry pitched three games in his entire pro career, and here is his line: 0-1, 8.18 ERA, 11.0 innings. He gave up 15 hits, 10 runs, walked 14 (!) and struck out four. The only good thing is that he didn't give up a home run during his trio of starts. 

His first MLB appearance was July 10 and his last appearance was July 23. Do you know what this means? Steve Curry lost his first decision and his next two appearances he received no decisions. Let me explain. 

At the beginning of 1988, the Sox were scuffling along. 1986 World Series goat John McNamara was still the manager and it was apparent that he lost control of the club house. So Boston canned him right after the All-Star game. They negotiated to get a few high-profile managers, but in the interim they named Walpole, MA-native Joe Morgan (not that one) manager on July 14. The Sox ripped off a 12-game win streak that the press dubbed "Morgan Magic". 

I remember Morgan Magic and it was insane how the Sox were winning for those two weeks. It seemed as if every game was won in walk-off fashion. One out in the bottom of the tenth and Todd Benzinger hits a game-winning dinger off of Minnesota Twins reliever Keith Atherton*. It was crazy. The Sox would ride this hot streak into the fall before losing to the Oakland Athletics in the American League Championship Series. 

* I could have sworn that Benzinger hit his homer off of seemingly untouchable closer Jeff "The Terminator" Reardon, but apparently it was Atherton, which isn't as good of a story. 

Back to Curry, with his start on July 10, that may have been one of McNamara's final moves as a Red Sox manager. According to RetroSheet.org, Curry didn't pitch too badly in that game, losing 4-1 to the White Sox. He gave up four hits, three runs and walked seven--which sounds to me like the dude was nervous. 

His second start came against the Twins where he had a reverse split of walking only three (good!) but giving up seven hits (bad) in 4.1 innings. Lucky for Boston, they scored 11 runs and that took him off the hook. Though he wouldn't get the win because he didn't pitch five full innings. Just two more batters and you would have got the "W", dude! Damn. 

Curry last start was also against the White Sox and he gave up four hits and four walks but also five runs in a little over two innings. The Red Sox scored 11 and cranked out 20 hits. And that was it for Steve Curry. The bullpen and the offense saved his ass big time in two of his three starts, Morgan and General Manager Lou Gorman had apparently seen enough and he was banished to AAA Pawtucket and was never heard from again, which seems kind of crazy because he was only 22-years-old. 

A couple of things:

1. I have a feeling that Steve Curry was definitely rushed to the Big Leagues and completely spit the bit. He pretty much got his ass kicked, BUT he was in the Show and like I say, that's something that no one can take away from you, no matter how much you stink the place up. I'm really surprised that no one gave him at least one more shot, especially in 1993 when the league expanded and they needed pitchers. A 27-year-old Steve Curry couldn't have been handy to anyone? Really? 

2. It's kind of crazy to me that the 12-game winning streak had two starts by someone who pitched so damn poorly. Like I said above, I was under the impression that these games were mostly close--and according to the game logs they were as 8 of the 12 wins were decided by three runs or less--but they also scored a ton of runs too. I guess I forgot that the pitching staff gave up a bunch of runs too (44 in those 12 games, which isn't great considering that there was a Mike Smithson shutout mixed in there too (exactly who you would have thought). 

3. When I Googled "Steve Curry Boston Red Sox" I got his Wikipedia page and his Baseball-Reference.com page and that's it. The next bunch of links were about how Golden State Warrior future Hall of Famer, Steph Curry is a huge Red Sox fan. I kinda feel bad for the baseball playing Steve Curry, but that's the way it goes, I suppose. 

Hopefully the BCB drops more cards in the mail soon. Not email though. So impersonal. 

Nick Esasky 1990 Fleer

On September 18, 2017 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

On Facebook, I wrote: Postmarked from Los Angeles, CA, the BCB sent the card of one of the more star-crossed players of the last 30 years. 

During the mid-1980s Nick Esasky was a solid player in Cincinnati but he had the misfortune of having Pete Rose as his manager. Rose was in the midst of his death march toward the MLB hit record and Esasky was at Pete's position of first base. By this point in their respective careers, Esasky was worth more to the Reds than Rose but Rose didn't care, he was going to get that record. The only position Pete could play was first (because he was ancient). 

That meant Nick Esasky bounced from third to first to left field and never really settled into a groove. After Rose got his record, the Reds brought in another blast from their past, Tony Perez. Again Esasky bounced around, as Rose thought it was a good idea to split time with his 44-year-old pal Perez at first. A 34-year-old Buddy Bell was at third and Eric Davis and Dave Parker were at the corner outfield positions. Lesson? Pete Rose is an asshole. 

In 1988 he was traded to the Red Sox with Rob Murphy for Todd Benzinger and Jeff Sellers. With a short left-field porch, the following year was a huge one for Esasky as he reached career highs in a lot of hitting categories. After the 1989 season he left Boston and signed with the Braves for big money. He lasted nine games before he was felled by vertigo. 

He never played again. 

Had he stayed in Cinci, he might have been the starting first baseman for the World Champion Reds. By then Rose was gone and Benzinger (he caught the last out of the 1990 World Series) had replaced Esasky at first base, but he did not provide the same offense that his predecessor did. 

Had he been healthy in Atlanta, the Braves probably wouldn't have signed Sid Bream (Esasky was the superior player) and maybe the Braves win the 1991 World Series. (Bream batted .125 that October.) 

And maybe the 1992 NLCS ends up differently too. Maybe it's not Sid Bream chugging around the bases in Game 7, maybe it's Esasky and perhaps he gets thrown out at the plate (though I doubt it because Sid Bream was incredibly slow). But let's say he did, that play sends Barry Bonds and the Pirates to the World Series instead of Atlanta. Perhaps Barry Bonds wins a championship and six years later he doesn't feel the need to take PEDs and he becomes the first unanimous Hall of Famer. 

Nick Esasky is the nexus of baseball realities.

2019 Notes: There isn't a lot to add to this entry, it's one of my favorite ones that I wrote and started the ball rolling on a different kind of BCB entry, where I use the player as a jumping off point for other things that I wanted to write about. 

When I heard that Esasky had vertigo, I was conflicted. On one hand, I felt bad for the guy. The year that he spent in Boston, Esasky seemed like a really good dude and he put up some pretty good numbers. On the other hand, I was pissed that he left the Sox; I mean we traded Todd Benzinger for him! And while I wasn't happy that he got a career-ending illness, I was a bit relieved that didn't happen while he was in Boston. And if I'm being honest, I felt a little twinge of "That's what you get for leaving MY TEAM!"

As a 15-year-old I was a real dick about sports and I actually feel terrible even thinking that back then. Ugh. I was the worst. 

Though I will say that when I read about this happening to Esasky, I thought that the Atlanta Braves were a snake-bit organization and nothing good would ever happen to them. Ever. Then the 1990s kicked in, they won like 15 straight division titles and I was proven wrong. Again. I'm shocked I never worked in professional sports. SHOCKED!

A Fruitless Obsession

I haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” and if this entry has any similarities to that the book, it is purely coincidental. What won’t be coincidental is that Gladwell has probably written about the topic much better than me.

I’ve been thinking about an issue a lot lately, so much that it’s become a quiet obsession, but ultimately it’s going to be an obsession in which will prove to be fruitless because it’s not quantifiable. What I’m trying to define is the exact moment when something (whether it’s a pop culture event like a television show or movie or song or a living organism such as an athlete or an actor or a writer or a ham-and-egger) goes from ordinary to extraordinary.

That seems like a very generic introduction, but I will explain it further using the professional athlete as a cypher. I began collecting baseball cards in 1986 and when I first opened my wax packs, I was excited to gaze upon any Jim Rice, Pete Rose, Steve Garvey, Ricky Henderson cards. These were super stars and more importantly they were older stars, stars with a track record, stars that had an impressive resume, stars that did stuff and that were slam-dunk Hall of Famers. In my mind these cards were surely the ones that were worth more than the pieces of cardboard that simply had a mishmash of minor league numbers on the back. The were the cards of prospects who had little more than a promise of greatness and an avalanche of hype.

Why would you value a picture of a guy who COULD something over the card of a man who DID do something? To me, this was logical.

After visiting a few baseball card shops and baseball card shows, it became apparent to me that my thinking was backwards. The thing that drove this hobby isn’t finding someone who already did do something, the trick is to find someone that is about to do something. That’s the hardest nut to crack. Because for every Bo Jackson Future Stars, there are a 1,000 Pat Dodsons from the same sub set of player. It occurred to me that baseball card people were interested in the blind prospect, the gold around the corner, the two in the bush versus the one in the hand. And for awhile, even though these players did absolutely nothing, these cards were valuable until one day they were proved that they weren’t.

At some point, most collectors turned into prospectors: betting a few bucks on Gregg Jefferies or Steve Avery or Cory Snyder. Kids bought magazines like Beckett Baseball Cards to find out who are the “no doubt” Hall of Famers who were destroying the minor leagues and were just waiting for a chance to dominate the Major Leagues. And while there are ball players that flame out and prove that they aren’t stars, there are a handful of players who did become great. Players who eventually become starting ball players, consistent All Stars, perennial MVPs and Cy Young winners and ultimately Hall of Famers.

After some time these players become the men who everyone talk about as the upper echelon of the game. What I want to know is the day, the specific game, the specific at-bat where they turn from prospect to star. When they realize their potential. And it’s also interesting to determine the opposite, the instant where everything goes to shit, when a player goes from prospect to suspect to an after thought. There has to be a moment. But where is that moment?

Finding this moment is difficult to pin down because a transformation is usually made over time: from fan (cult) favorite to city favorite to national favorite to a transcendent star. The latter is someone like Derek Jeter or Tom Brady; a player whom someone who doesn’t follow sports would now. Perhaps this is difficult to pinpoint because there are four different stops along this line, but these points are there. And it usually springs from an event: a big hit, a winning drive, etc. That event usually gets people talking and if he does it again, more people talk. The more that player’s greatest becomes ordinary, the more people talk about it and the more his stature grows. Though that greatness genesis begins somewhere.

It might be difficult to pinpoint an athlete’s greatness on a grand scale because it’s difficult to get a group of people looking at the same sky to agree on the color of said sky. So an argument ensues on the first “great” thing that a player has done.

One might think that a game-winning sacrifice fly in the eighth inning might be the start and shows the onlooker that the player can deliver when the game is late. Another person may say that a sacrifice fly is an out that virtually 99% of all major leaguers can do, but a game-winning hit is where the legend begins. Another may counter that there have been plenty of regular-season heroes, a true great makes his bones in the playoffs. And so on.

Perhaps it’s easier to determine your personal appreciation for how an athlete excels at his craft. Going back to 1986 and finding out that Roger Clemens struck out 20 Seattle Mariners certainly put him on my radar. As a relatively new baseball fan, I knew that this was a big deal (though I wasn’t sure exactly how big of a deal it was) but I started intently following him: watching his games, reading the press clippings the next day, making sure I watched the local sports report for tidbits on him. As his record grew to 8-0, 10-0, 12-0 and finally 14-0 to begin the season I had gone from a Roger Clemens fan to a Roger Clemens fanatic.

I wanted to read everything about him, his posters adorned my wall, I feverishly opened packs of cards to find his cardboard likeness. I talked about him non-stop that summer. Over the years that fanaticism never maintained the frenzy (it couldn’t) Roger Clemens was always my favorite player. I made excuses for why he pitched poorly in the post season, why Oakland Athletic Dave Stewart always seemed to have his number, why it was okay to ignore new manager Butch Hobson. Major League Baseball was Roger Clemens’ world and I was happy to observe it.*

* Of course then he pulled the ultimate villain move when he packed up his gear went north, never really acknowledging the Boston fans on his way out the door, holding some sort of vendetta against the Red Sox, ramping up his training and winning two Cy Young awards as a Blue Jay. Then he complained about the lack of winning Blue Jay players until he forced his way to the Yankees, retired, unretired, got embroiled in PED allegation, sold his wife and his colleagues out in a trial and behaved like a miserable self-absorbed person. Beginning with his defection to New York, Roger Clemens has been Public Enemy Number One.

Clemens is an easy example because his rise to popularity came at around the same time I began my obsession with baseball. Therefore it’s easy to chart my Clemens fandom with my love of baseball. But there are countless of other players that have come and gone that I have really enjoyed watching play. And while the game has stayed constant, the players have not and I’d like to be able to find out when I began liking them.

And while it may be simpler to pinpoint the greatness of athletes, you can do the same—albeit it’s tougher—with actors and actresses, musicians, writers or pretty much anyone. With an actor there is a certain scene in a movie where you realize, “Yes! This person is good at his craft and I like what they are doing. I want to see more of their work.” The same thing is true with music, you can listen to a CD once or twice or ten times and it finally clicks*. For a writer, it’s a book. And if you drill down even more, maybe it’s a particularly poignant page or paragraph.

* For me, music is a bit tougher because I always tie music to memories. One of the reasons why I like Pearl Jam, especially albums such as “Ten” or “Vs” is for the songs themselves, yes, but it also reminds me of college and my 20s. These CDs and others like it (Smashing Pumpkins “Siamese Dream”, Beastie Boys “Check Your Head” to name a few) remind me of friends I haven’t seen in awhile, meandering drunken conversations that went nowhere and everywhere, dancing with girls whose name I have long forgotten. It reminds me of a time when my life was laid out before me and the possibilities seemed endless. There have been other CDs and songs that I’ve loved since the 1990s, but they’re tethered to memories too. I remember devouring Cake’s oeuvre around the time my first daughter was born and I can’t hear “Italian Leather Sofa” or “Alpha Beta Parking Lot” without thinking of her.

The bottom line is that this is a very tough exercise whether you choose an athlete or an entertainer because you’re never going to know that you’re in that moment. For every Manny Ramirez cracking three homers against the Yankees as a Cleveland Indian rookie, there is a Todd Benzinger launching a late-inning home run off the seemingly untouchable Minnesota Twins reliever Jeff Reardon to prolong 1988’s Boston Red Sox Morgan Magic.

The ability of hindsight is absolutely key when figuring out when your favorite player truly becomes a favorite player and not a, to borrow baseball card parlance, a common with a great moment.