reminders of minor league team

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Niner
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reminders of minor league team

Post by Niner » Sun Jun 29, 2008 9:06 pm

The Mobile BaySharks were a minor league team in the Texas-Louisiana League for 1994 and 1995 and they played on a college field. After two years Mobile built Henry Aaron stadium and got a double a farm team and the BaySharks were history. The Texas-Louisana League is history too, although some of the teams in the league I think went onto another league.

I got a bunch of beer cups from both years and a few programs and score cards. Best thing is a baseball from the second season signed by the starting lineup and Butch Hobson who was the manager. Hobson had been a football and baseball player at Alabama and had played professional baseball for the Boston Red Sox and had managed them too for a while.

Don't think many of the BaySharks ever went further up the ladder... except one of the pitchers....can't think of his name at the moment. Oh...and as a team they weren't very good either...most of the time.

The name I was trying to think of...Blake Stein. Not exactly a HOF candidate.
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Post by Dalkowski110 » Wed Jul 09, 2008 10:27 pm

"The name I was trying to think of...Blake Stein. Not exactly a HOF candidate."

Maybe not, but he did have the distinction of being traded (along with T.J. Mathews and Eric Ludwick, the older brother of 2008 NL All-Star Ryan Ludwick) to the Oakland Athletics from the St. Louis Cardinals for Mark McGwire. Stein was considered a top notch pitching prospect and was the centerpiece of the deal from the standpoint of the A's. He struggled his rookie year in Oakland, which was 1998 (never played in the Majors for St. Louis), but seemingly rerailed himself in 1999. Unfortunately, he hurt his arm after only one start and was sent packing to the Kansas City Royals. He did okay at first and actually had pretty good 2000 and 2001 seasons (though got virtually no run support), but he hurt his arm again in 2002. After that, he went downhill pretty quickly and was out of professional baseball completely after the 2004 season. By far his best professional season was 1996, when he went 16-5 in 27 games for the St. Petersburg Cardinals and posted a sparkling 2.15 ERA. He never came close to recreating that season, either in the Majors or Minors.

BTW, looking at the roster you posted, you had three ex-Major Leaguers. They were Doug Simons (early 1990's Mets pitching prospect and longtime Mets organizational coach), Don Carman (a left-handed long reliever with Philadelphia who later went on to become Scott Boras' accoutant), and the team pitching coach, Neil Allen (former Mets reliever known for his zany personality and for being the throw-in with Rick Ownbey in the deal that got the Mets Keith Hernandez).
-J.W.

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You are good JW

Post by Niner » Wed Jul 09, 2008 11:14 pm

The BaySharks were fun to watch though even if they were not ready for prime time. They weren't part of any teams farm system. The best they could do was that they had a working relationship with the Red Sox and the Boston team sent then a guy or two they were interested in that they couldnt' fit into their normal system.

There were a few players that almost made it before they got to the BaySharks .....just had better players in the big leagues ahead of them so there was no way they could move up unless traded to some other team. Guy named Tim Becker on that roster was a South Alabama college player that got as far as playing a couple or three seasons as short stop for the Yankee triple A team previously. He was a pretty good player that just didn't get that break. He turned into a good high school coach though.
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Thanks!!!

Post by Dalkowski110 » Thu Jul 10, 2008 10:21 pm

I too collect baseball cards, autographs (baseballs, baseball cards, 8x10's and 4x6's, and scorecards), scorecards and yearbooks, ticket stubs, and pretty much everything and anything baseball related. My most prized card is a 1910 T-211 John McGraw (Hall of Fame manager of the New York Giants and arguably the greatest manager in baseball history) in near mint condition. "Mugsy" was my great grandfather's favorite baseball personality, with Christy Mathewson running a close second. The file attachment is in my second post.

My favorite autograph, while not my rarest, was also the first my Dad ever got. His friend Ira was a cousin of a "Major League pitcher and ex-Brooklyn Dodger" when he was Bar-Mitzvah'ed in 1958 (I suppose the guy didn't have anything to do considering this was December). Ira kinda showed his cousin off, but Dad just talked to him about pitching (Dad wanted to be a pitcher at age 12 in the worst way, despite his beloved New York Giants leaving the previous year). After they talked, Ira's cousin signed the only thing Dad could find he thought merited an autograph...a brand new 1958 J.D. McCarthy postcard. The pitcher, who wasn't having any success in the Majors at the time, later went on to have such a great deal of success that he is often considered to have the best five-year stretch of any pitcher of all time. His name was Sandy Koufax and he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. That's the one you'll see at the end of this post. Note that due to the ink patterns and low resolution of my scanner, it results in weird dots showoing up. It doesn't look like this in real life.
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-J.W.

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Post by Dalkowski110 » Thu Jul 10, 2008 10:26 pm

Here's the John McGraw card, which for whatever reason I couldn't fit on the same post as the Koufax signed postcard. Sorry I didn't center it too well.
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-J.W.

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Cool

Post by Niner » Fri Jul 11, 2008 11:01 am

I'm reading a book now by Fay Vincent entitled We Would Have Played for Nothing in which he prints interviews with some of the big names of the 50's and 60's....Carl Erskine, Whitey Ford, Frank Robinson, Billy Williams, Duke Snider...etc.

Lots of good by the way quotes about Sandy Koufax in it from various people interviewed...One of them:

Frank Robinson:
Koufax was just unbelievable. You know, he had trouble in his first few years in the big leagues throwing the ball over the plate. Then about the middle of '58 or '59 season, he started getting the ball over the plate, and he took off from there. He was unbelievable.

His fast ball came up, and I didn't see any other pitcher do that. I haven't seen any other pitcher throw a fastball down about knee-hight and the ball come up, rises up. He would always go to his fastball on 2-0 or 3-1 or 3-2, until he could get his curveball over. So you just had to wait for it. But to this day, he was a tough pitcher to hit against, although, like I said, you knew what was coming.......
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Post by Dalkowski110 » Sat Jul 12, 2008 7:54 pm

Koufax was an interesting case with regards to his "riser." Those who study physics claim it's not possible to get a fastball to rise unless a low sidearm pitcher throws it (best rising fastball in history: Carl Mays, but he was a miserable human being). But most batters that faced him claimed his four-seam fastball (today's terminology for it) rose. But among those who don't is...Sandy himself. I can't remember which book it was, but either Rob Neyer or Bill James wrote it and quoted Koufax. He claimed that his curve and changeup sank so dramatically that it made his fastball (which was coming in around 100 mph) look like it was rising. Koufax also thrived high in the strike zone with his fastball...a rarity for pitchers of the era, who mostly threw their fastball low in the zone and the secondary pitches higher up. Jocko Conlan (Hall of Fame NL umpire) backs this up and said that a lot of hitters especially early in Sandy's career would look for a fastball about belt high. Koufax got mostly letter high calls with his fastball. He also said that very few left-handed pitchers in the National League threw that downward-breaking curve; it was almost exclusively a "right-handers' pitch." This is why he thought that "[Sandy's] fastball appears to rise." But given that the object was to fool the batter...well, Sandy did MORE than a fine job...
-J.W.

By the way, interested in fine C&R Sporting Arms and C&R American factory sporting rifles? Go here...

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Mobile Professional Baseball Trivia...

Post by Dalkowski110 » Mon Jul 14, 2008 6:51 pm

I went online and dived through my books to find as much as I could for you, so here I go...

-Mobile is home to more Baseball Hall of Famers than any other city in the United States. Hank Aaron, Billy Williams, Willie McCovey, Satchel Paige, and Ozzie Smith were all born there. If Jake Peavy keeps up what he has going for about 7 or 8 more seasons, well, he'll be in, too...

-Often considered deserving of the Hall of Fame was Negro League great Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe. Because he could pitch and catch and play no other position, sportswriter Damon Runyon gave him his nickname (Runyon saw him catch Satchel Paige in game 1 of a double header, then pitch a shutout in game 2). Radcliffe, who lived to the age of 104, was quite a character. Maintaining his clearness of mind and alertness until the day he died, Radcliffe picked his biographer solely on the basis that he liked a few pages he'd written up on a semi-pro team in Bismarck, ND (though fortunately for him, the guy could write very well). He also pitched in a professional game as a publicity stunt at the age of 99, throwing four well-placed pitches for an intentional walk. During his playing days, aside from being an above average catcher and a superb pitcher, he was also known for completely disregarding his contracts.

-Another guy who Niner knows about some people feel should go in is Amos Otis. Otis came into his own with the 1969 "Miracle Mets" that won the World Series (though he also had a brief callup in 1967). Unfortunately, he didn't get along with manager Gil Hodges, who insisted he could play third base (until Howard Johnson came along in the mid 1980's, the Mets had an incredibly disproportionate number of third basemen). Well, Otis was a natural center fielder. Though slick-fielding Tommie Agee (also a native of Mobile) had the position locked up, the Mets did have a vacancy in right field, which Otis repeatedly said he wouldn't mind playing. The Mets responded by doing what they have historically done best...making a kneejerk, borderline insane trade for some nobody. Otis was sent packing to the Kansas City Royals for third baseman Joe Foy. Foy had a serious drug problem and batted only .236 in 99 games with the Mets before they probably paid the Washington Senators to take Foy off their hands in the 1970 Rule V Draft (which happened just after the season ended). And Amos Otis? He collected nearly 2000 hits with Kansas City, hit over .280, hit 193 homeruns (as a leadoff hitter, primarily), and stole 340 bases. And yes folks, I'm a Mets fan.

-I'm also a Tigers fan. One of the Tigers premier players acquired in 1998 was Luis Gonzalez, who went to the University of South Alabama in Mobile. Understandably, Tigers fans were pretty ectstatic to get the guy. He hit .267 in 154 games with 23 homeruns, but also walked a lot (57 times and he only struck out 62 times) and had an overall impressive batting eye. Along with first baseman Tony Clark, second baseman Damion Easley, and right fielder Bobby Higginson, the general feeling was that so long as the Tigers kept those four guys, they could stay afloat long enough to rebuild their beleaguered pitching staff (which consisted of the reliable Brian Moehler, promising youngster Matt Anderson, the so-so Justin Thompson, and a bunch of other guys that at least looked like they could throw a baseball). Well, the Tigers took a cue from the 1960's Mets playbook and inexplicably traded Gonzalez in early 1999 for someone they had absolutely no reason to believe would outperform him: a fellow on the one-year-old Arizona Diamondbacks by the name of Karim Garcia. He couldn't take a walk to save his life, struck out 78 times in 333 at-bats, and somehow managed to hit .222. The justification for the trade by the Tigers was that he had hit 9 homeruns during that same timespan. Everyone at the time was perplexed, though...even the Tigers eventually admitted that Garcia's ceiling was nowhere near as high as Gonzalez's. After one season of a horrible .240 batting average (plus 20 walks) and 14 homeruns, the Tigers still stuck with Garcia. But in 2000, he started off a pathetic 3 for 33, striking out ten times and not walking once. And that was that (although I had to put up with Garcia near the end of his career as one of the worst pinch hitters to wear a Mets uniform in 2004). And Luis Gonzalez? He was named to five All-Star teams with the Diamondbacks, hammered 224 homeruns, batted over .300 four times, and had an on-base percentage of over .390 for 5 straight years. Whoops.

-The SHORTEST professional baseball game that lasted 9 innings in history was played between the Mobile Sea Gulls and Atlanta Crackers in the old Southern Association way back in 1913. The game that involved no strikeouts and ONE walk (as well as Mobile turning a triple play!) lasted a mere 32 minutes, apparently because both teams had a train to catch. Mobile won the game by a score of 4-3.

-Despite winning the league champtionship in 1906, the first Mobile Sea Gulls team (which belonged to the short-lived Cotton States League) used three managers. George Reed, former Major League outfielder Joe Wright, and Charles Miller managed the team to a 74-44 record. The team finished first in 1907, too, managed by a guy named Bernie McCay. He was rewarded after the season by being fired. Mobile (which jumped to the Southern Association in 1908) wouldn't finish in first until the 1920's afterward.

-In 1961, the New York Mets hadn't yet come into existence. However, they were given exclusive rights to three farm teams: the Lexington Indians, the Shelby Mets, and the Mobile Bears. The biggest prospect on the Bears was a young outfielder named Paul Blair. Proving that their front office was a joke despite not even playing yet, the Mets inexplicably let Blair go to the Baltimore Orioles in early 1962, leaving him completely unprotected in the complex and short-lived "first-year draft." Blair was the only member of the 1961 Bears to have a Major League career longer than five years. Not one of his seventeen seasons (including thirteen with the Orioles) was spent in Mets blue and orange.
-J.W.

By the way, interested in fine C&R Sporting Arms and C&R American factory sporting rifles? Go here...

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...new members are always welcome!
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Quite a lot of research JW

Post by Niner » Mon Jul 14, 2008 7:58 pm

Thanks for the plug for the home town. Athough the research that says,"Mobile is home to more Baseball Hall of Famers than any other city in the United States" is only kinda true. Think a major city or two have about as many guys in the HOF.But no other metropolitan area of only a couple hundred thousand is anywhere close.

Several names in the big leagues made a stop in Mobile over the years although they came from other places far removed. Sal Bando and Rick Monday for instance played in Mobile. So did Chuck Conners... the Rifleman of TV fame who played for the Mobile Bears. Attached is a photo I stole from a thin book entitled Baseball in Mobile by Joe Cuhaj and Tamma Carraway-Hincle. It's a young Tony LaRussa who played second base with the Mobile Athletics. Think that team only lasted a year here in 1966. The picture wasn't taken in Mobile though...the old stadium that was torn down years ago never had an upper deck like the one in the picture looks to have.
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