The Great Baseball Trip of 1992

Been thinking about the great baseball trip of 1992 that my friend Eric and I took, starting 32 years ago today. Previously posted, here is an epilogue recapping the trip...

What a trip it was! Looking back over the entire trip, it really is amazing the things we experienced (links included below). Over the course of those two weeks in June of 1992, we saw...

13 FUTURE HALL OF FAMERS IN ACTION:

• Goose Gossage
• Paul Molitor
• Robin Yount
• Wade Boggs (3x)
• Dave Winfield (who hit a home run for us)
• Eddie Murray
• Cal Ripken (who hit a home run for us)
• Jack Morris (who pitched like every bit the ace he was) 
• Harold Baines
• Lee Smith
• Manager Joe Torre
• Manager Tony Larussa
• Manager Sparky Anderson
• We missed out on a pair of Hall of Fame middle infielders, because Alan Trammell and Roberto Alomar were injured when we saw their teams play  

OTHER STARS:

• Jose Canseco
• Mark McGwire
• Albert Belle
• Lou Whitaker
• Cecil Fielder
• Roger Clemens (saw 2x)
• Joe Carter
• Don Mattingly (saw 3x)

We saw a Major League record set one night and celebrated the next, as Jeff Reardon became MLB's all-time saves king.

Phil Plantier became a favorite of mine by hitting clutch home runs for us on back-to-back days.

Having seen our favorite team, the Cardinals, play countless games at Busch Stadium, for once we got to watch them play on the road.

We visited the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum, and Mickey Mantle's Restaurant, and heard a funny story dealing with a famous baseball moment.

We went to the top of the Empire State Building to take in the breathtaking New York skyline, we beheld the amazing natural beauty of Niagara Falls, and we went sailing on Lake Michigan.

We saw a softball game, played a little wiffle ball, and played A LOT of Strat-o-Matic Baseball!

We of course got to see seven ballgames in six ballparks, three of which no longer exist.

• County Stadium...A's 6 - Brewers 1
• Tiger Stadium...Indians 4 - Tigers 2 (11 innings)
• Skydome...Blue Jays 4 - Red Sox 0
• Fenway Park...Red Sox 1 - Yankees 0
• Fenway Park...Red Sox 4 - Yankees 3 (10 innings)
• Shea Stadium...Cardinals 8 - Mets 3
• Oriole Park at Camden Yards...Orioles 10 - Yankees 7

I caught a souvenir ball in batting practice.

Through it all, we logged over 3,700 miles, and Eric and I got to create shared memories that will forever seal our friendship.

Click here to see an index of posts in this series.

Click here to return to the first post in this series.

Happy 99th, Grandma!

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love baseball in general and the Cardinals in particular. This love was inherited from my mom who, in turn, inherited it from her mom, my grandmother, who would have turned 99 today. 

A card-carrying member of The Knothole Gang as a teenager, she grew up riding the streetcar to Sportsman’s Park for a dime each way. Her mom would give her a quarter, and she’d spend the extra nickel on a snow cone one game, and then a scorecard at the next one. On occasion, she would get autographs from the players after the game, some of which I now have in my possession, including those of Hall of Famers Johnny Mize and Enos Slaughter.

Pages from Grandma's autograph book

Back in 2002, I bought tickets to a game for her 77th birthday. As we watched at old Busch Stadium, she mentioned to me how much she enjoyed watching Fernando Viña play. The reason she gave? “The way he plays, he reminds me of Pepper Martin” (who played for “The Gas House Gang” Cardinals teams in the 1930s.

Another favorite story about her was the time a few years later when we went to my parents’ house for Easter dinner. I was surprised by her absence, and asked why Grandma (81 at the time) wasn’t there. Mom replied, “Oh, she went to the Cardinals game instead.” Albert Pujols hit three home runs that day, showing once more how wise grandma was! She died in late March of 2018, and we held her funeral service a few days later. After the committal and a luncheon, we came back to the house, turned on the television, and watched the Cardinals game. It was, after all, opening day of the baseball season!

Grandma and her friend Fredbird, on the Cardinal Cruise in 2004 

A New Project

Back in the 1980s, I was a baseball-crazed adolescent and the Cardinals were blazing around the basebaths to three National League pennants and the 1982 World Series championship. Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith is surely the most beloved player of that era among Cardinals fans, but if there is one guy who can (very speedily) give him a run for his money, it just might be Willie McGee. 

Willie played the first 8.5 years of his 19-year career with the Cardinals, before returning in 1996 to play his final four seasons in St. Louis. The wildly popular #51 now serves as a coach for the team. It was as a rookie in 1982 that Willie burst onto the national scene in game three of the World Series when he hit two home runs and made a pair of spectacular catches, including robbing Gorman Thomas of a ninth inning two-run homer. 

Three years later in his MVP season of 1985, Willie had the best year of his career, hitting .353 to win his first of two NL batting titles, stealing 56 bases, and winning both the Silver Slugger and the Gold Glove for NL centerfielders. Even though they fell just three outs short of winning it all, that season remains my favorite baseball season ever, and that year's Cardinals squad will forever be my favorite team.  

All the cards I purchased back in those days were by the pack from the local drug store. In 1985 though, there was one exception. A friend and I both responded to an ad in a card collecting magazine and purchased some of that year's Willie McGee and Dwight Gooden card. I was recently flipping through some old cards I've had in plastic sheets since those days nearly four decades ago (by the way, it feels really crazy to type those words), and I found a plastic sheet full of those Willie McGee cards. That, combined with having recently seen some guys I know from the collecting community on Twitter (see here and here) gave me an idea: I would try to collect as many copies of that card as I could. 

It fits on so many levels: 

• It's a reasonably inexpensive card, considered a common in most areas outside of St. Louis.
• It's a card from my favorite season and evokes all kinds of wonderful memories.
• It may just be the Willie McGee-est card ever, from his MVP season, with his awkward looking (though often effective) swing and the beautiful road blue uniforms pictured. 
• Willie was absolutely one of my favorites as a teenager, and I often chased after him, trying to get him to sign my cards.

Wish me luck. Tell #51 I'm chasing after him once again. And if you have a case of the Willies, you know what to do with them!

With my lovely wife, donning Willie's
#51 on my 51st birthday!

I guess 3+2 = 5, right?

I was unaware of this little nugget of information that I picked up today from the great Cardinals beat writer, Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. After a head-turning spring training of 2001, Albert Pujols was on the brink of making the Major League squad. 

So Albert almost ended up wearing #32 instead of his now familiar #5. What I found most interesting about this fact was its connection (at least in my thoughts) to my son, Jack. Jack was born in late 1999, so he literally does not remember a time before Albert took the field for the Cardinals. Living in St. Louis with a baseball-crazy dad, Jack quickly became a very big baseball fan in general and a very big Cardinals fan in particular. Albert Pujols was (of course) a favorite of his.

In fact, the very first MLB game that Jack ever attended was May 29, 2003. A friend had given us row one field box seats just past the Cardinals' dugout, and it just happened to be Albert Pujols Bat Night. To make things even more amazing, Albert even signed Jack's bat before the game! Jack hadn't even seen one pitch of MLB action, and he basically had no hope of ever having a better experience at the ballpark!

The summer of 2006, we moved from St. Louis to Michigan. Jack was about to enter first grade, and was extremely upset when we told him that we were moving. Ini fact, the only way that we were able to console him was by telling him that Detroit was only an hour away, and we promised that we'd take him there for baseball games, especially when our Cardinals came to town.

You may recall that this was the very season that the Cardinals met the Tigers in the World Series. Unfortunately we were unable to get tickets to Series games, but even so, ours was the only happy household in our neighborhood when the Cardinals finished off the Tigers in five games. We had already put Jack to bed on October 27th, but I made sure to wake him up for the bottom of the ninth so he could see his team win it all. You can imagine how all his new friends felt when he showed up at school for Halloween just days later dressed as Albert Pujols!

In spite of the fact that we lived in Tigers country, Jack has remained a Cardinals fan (and a Pujols fan!) all these years. Growing up, the walls of his room were filled with baseball pictures, pennants and plaques. They had a decided Cardinals emphasis to them, and even more specifically an Albert Pujols emphasis. And throughout Little League and travel baseball, Jack always wore #5 and played first base.

Here's why I found that nugget from Derrick Goold interesting though: When Jack was in high school, while he was still a first baseman, he didn't get to choose his number. What number do you think he was assigned? You guessed it...32. The very same number that Albert almost was assigned all those years ago!

For Personal Reasons, Still My Favorite

33 years ago today, the movie Field of Dreams was released. It’s a film that weaves together some of my favorite topics: the game of baseball, the nostalgia of its history, fatherhood, and redemption. 

Is it incredibly sappy? Admittedly, yes. Do they inexplicably screw up some of the historical details? Frustratingly so. Does it nostalgically idealize an era that was in many ways far less than ideal? Of course. 

Even with all of its faults though, it remains my favorite movie. Why exactly? Well, you have to consider the backstory of my first viewing of the movie.

One day in the spring of 1989, I got into an argument with my dad. I’ll spare you the details, but three important things stand out: 

1. It’s cause: I was a stupid, head-strong 17-year old boy. 
2. It’s content: I said something incredibly hurtful to him. 
3. It’s result: For the first time in my life, I saw my father cry. And I was directly responsible for it happening. 

Thankfully, I apologized almost immediately, forgiveness was offered and accepted, and we fully reconciled right there on the spot. Literally just one week later though, I went to see a movie. It was about a baseball fanatic who, as a stupid, head-strong 17-year old, had said something incredibly hurtful to his father, and was haunted by the fact that he never had the opportunity to apologize to him. Obviously, it hit close to home and stirred up all kinds of feelings. It still does today. And that is why, even though I realize that it’s not *the best* film ever, it is (and likely will forever be) my favorite movie.

Godspeed, Mike Shildt

Back in June of 2018, my son graduated high school on a Thursday. He wasn’t feeling well, but he played his final high school baseball games two days later on Saturday. Two days after that he was in the hospital, and two days later, he was diagnosed and began treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia. 

The next month, Mike Shildt took over as manager of the Cardinals. That September when they visited Detroit, we got the opportunity to meet him before a game. He couldn’t have been more kind, not just talking with Jack, but really listening to him. Just a few hours before his team was to take the field, battling for a wildcard spot, it was clear that he truly cared about the 18-year old Cardinals fan he had just met.

What Shildt did next amazed me. He gave Jack his personal phone number and told him that if Jack ever was having a particularly tough day, or if he was having a great day he wanted to celebrate with someone, he should give Mike a call. Then, to underscore the fact that he really meant it, and that Jack shouldn’t worry about bothering him, he said, “The only way I’ll be upset with you is if you don’t call.” Then, when Jack hadn’t called him for a week, Mike called Jack to check on him. He has since remained in touch with Jack, calling on occasion and texting back and forth with him as recently as yesterday. 

Today, the news broke that the Cardinals fired Shildt. In two days, this Saturday, Jack will take his final dose of chemotherapy, his three-plus years of treatment almost perfectly overlapping with Mike’s tenure as the Redbirds’ manager. I am of course thrilled to see Jack’s treatment come to a conclusion. At the same time, I am saddened to see Mike’s time with the Cardinals end. I am sad because my favorite team is parting ways with a manager who won a National League Manager of the Year Award, overcame numerous obstacles to lead his team to the playoffs in three straight seasons, and just weeks ago led them to a franchise-record 17-game winning streak (the longest such streak in the NL in 85 years).

Even more than that though, I am sad for him. Having spent his entire eighteen years in professional baseball with the Cardinals organization, he must now look for a new employer, after holding the job he considered himself so blessed to have. I wish him the best. He’s a good manager. He’s an even better man. I will forever be a Cardinals fan, but I will definitely also root for any team that he leads. Godspeed, Mike Shildt.

The Kindest of Random Acts

Facebook, Twitter, and other such platforms have unquestionably had a number of negative impacts on our culture. I don’t need to outline them here. But one of the great things about social media (when used well) is that it can actually foster community. I have countless people who I have never met in person, but have come to know through social media, and have been greatly blessed by those friendships.

Perhaps nowhere is this so true as it is with the baseball card collecting community that I have become a part of through Twitter. I have had a blast trading cards through the mail with these people all around the country. Two things in particular have been amazing about the experience.

First of all, many of these people have collections that are breathtaking! I am especially awed at the vintage cards that some of these collectors have! Up until recently, I had only a small handful of cards from before my childhood in the late 70s. People building complete sets from the 1950s and 60s abound in this community, and many of them have cards much older than that. It’s a thrill to simply see cards from these collections!

The second thing that has been a wonderful joy is the generosity of people in this community. Unlike when I traded cards with buddies as a kid, and we all wanted to get the best end of every deal, the common practice in this community is to generously trade cards or even simply give them to one another. Almost daily, my Twitter feed includes notices of such Random Acts of Kindness (“RAK”s) that my fellow collectors have benefited from.

I have never seen a RAK quite as large or generous though as the one that was recently done for me. A few months ago, I undertook my first project building an older set, working on the classic (and beautiful!) 1956 Topps set. I fully realized that there were likely a number of cards in the set that I would never get, but I figured I’d try to collect as many as I could.

Well, I came home from work on Monday to see an unexpected box in my mail. I opened it to find a note on top of a stack of baseball cards. The note said that a group of people got together in the Twitter collecting community and wanted to do something for me and my son (who is undergoing treatment for leukemia), and they had included a bunch of '56 Topps cards to make us smile and realize that people all over the country were rooting for our family. 

I was humbled as there were over 100 cards in the package. Dinner was just about ready as I walked in the door, so I had to wait until afterward to look through the cards. After dinner, as our family was watching TV together, I started to unwrap and flip through the cards. My entire family noticed as I gasped, seeing a Hank Aaron card on top of the pile. They asked what it was, and I didn’t want to interrupt the show we were watching, so I told them to just go on watching it, figuring that I could tell them about it at a commercial. As I began to look through the pile though, I gasped once more: Kaline, Berra, Clemente, Mays and a number of other Hall of Famers, including finally a beautiful Ted Williams card.

My wife could see that I was almost in shock, and she insisted that I tell them what was affecting me. I handed the cards to my son as he paused the TV show and he showed them to my wife and daughter. I initially choked back tears but eventually conceded to them, as I considered the kindness that had been shown to me by this wonderful group of people. A few of the cards included were the kind of “holy grail” cards that I honestly thought I’d never own, and now here they were as part of my collection!

These 20 people (none of whom have I ever met in person, and only perhaps half of whom have I even interacted with) truly took my breath away with this act. I wish there were words that could adequately express how grateful I am. If there are such words, they are certainly beyond me. This much I can say: I count myself incredibly blessed not just to have been on the receiving end of such generosity, but simply to be part of such a community. I look forward to future opportunities to show similar kindness as I am able--both to them and to others, and I invite you to consider how your acts of kindness can help make someone else's day (or week, or month, or year)!

Some of the amazing RAK Hall of Famers

 

Stan the Man

Today would have been Stan "the Man" Musial's 100th birthday. The following is adapted from a post I wrote elsewhere when Musial received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that can bestowed upon an American civilian. 

 

"Here stands baseball's perfect warrior. Here stands baseball's perfect knight."

-- Ford C. Frick, former Commissioner of Baseball.

Growing up a a baseball fan in St. Louis, we were blessed to have many Cardinals greats as heroes. But there was one hero who stood out above them all, and that one, of course, was Stan Musial. Even for someone like me, who was born after Musial retired, he was still unquestionably "The Man."

One of the greatest baseball players ever, he was perhaps even just as renowned for his ubiquitous smile and his propensity to pull out a harmonica for an impromptu rendition of Take Me Out to The Ballgame.

Once I was at a breakfast meeting for work. After we had ordered our food, in walked Stan the Man, who sat down at the table next to us. His food came almost immediately, a good five minutes before ours. Nobody minded.

I actually got to spend a little bit of time with him on another occasion. I had my mom's old 45 RPM record (if you're under the age of 35 or 40, ask your parents what those are) of the 1961 song Stan the Man by Steve Bledsoe and the Blue Jays. You can listen to the song below and that of course is the 45 shown above, pictured with a postcard of Musial's Hall of Fame plaque.

I had always thought it would be great to get the 45 autographed. Though he quite often signed in public for no charge, he eventually set up a company named Stan the Man, Inc. through which he sold autographs. I called them one day and asked about getting the record signed. When they said I could mail it to them, I was leery about sending it, so I asked if I could drop it off. They agreed that this would be no problem, and since it wasn’t far from my office, I headed over there one day during my lunch break.

When I got there, the guy I spoke with said, "Stan's actually in back signing things. Why don't you just come back and have him sign it now?" To say that I was thrilled would be an understatement! He turned out to be every bit as kind as his reputation suggested, and we spent about fifteen minutes talking, mainly about the Cardinals' season which had just finished. The event will forever be a cherished memory.

Of course, Stan Musial was not just a great guy. He was also one of the greatest baseball players of all time. He possessed my favorite statistic in all of sports: Of his 3630 career hits (fourth best of all time), exactly 1815 were at home, 1815 were on the road. What a testament to his consistency! When he retired, he held 17 major-league records, 29 National League records, and nine All-Star Game records. Many of those records have since been eclipsed, but to Cardinal fans, he will always be "the Man."

Bonus Musial Trivia: Musial's final hit was against the Cincinnati Reds. It was a single past the Reds' rookie second baseman, one Peter Edward Rose. Nearly two decades later, Rose would break Musial's National League record for hits in a career.

More Bonus Musial Trivia: Not only does Musial share a birthday with fellow Hall of Famer, Ken Griffey Jr., but (amazingly!) they were both born on November 21st in Donora, Pennsylvania, a town with a population of less than 5000 people.

Here’s the song on the 45, which (erroneously) pegs Stan the Man’s birth as being in 1921! Not sure if it was poetic license or just bad math, but it does make the rhyme work!

In Memoriam: Bob Gibson (1936-2020)

Bob Gibson was one of the great pitchers in MLB history, and without debate the greatest of all Cardinals pitchers. His 1.12 ERA in 1968 is still the standard by which pitching greatness is measured, and it literally caused MLB to change the rules of the game by lowering the pitcher’s mound. When he retired in 1975 with 3,117 strikeouts, he was one of just two pitchers in baseball history to have eclipsed the 3,000 strikeout plateau. 

Gibson’s last time taking the mound for the Cardinals was exactly 31 days before my fourth birthday, so even though I grew up a Cardinals fan, I (quite unfortunately) never really got to watch him pitch. I say never really though, because I did get to see him take the mound on one sunny May Sunday in 1987. It was an old-timers’ game more than a decade after he’d retired, so of course it’s not like it was prime Bob Gibson. After all, at such an exhibition, the pitcher’s job ordinarily is merely to toss the ball over the plate so the other players can hit it. 

I will remind you though, that Gibson was anything but ordinary. Perhaps the fiercest competitor the game has ever seen, throughout his Hall of Fame career he infamously wouldn’t even talk to his National League teammates at the All Star Game, because they weren’t really his teammates; a few days later they were going to be the enemy. And the legend is that once in an old-timer’s game, facing Pete LaCock (who had hit a grand slam off Gibson in the final game of Gibby’s big league career), Gibson intentionally drilled him with a pitch. 

Well, on this particular Sunday afternoon, Gibson actually followed all the unwritten rules...for the most part. He leisurely tossed pitches to the middle-aged (or older) hitters who had assembled at Busch Stadium on that day, letting them put the ball in play. 

There was one exception though. The great Johnny Bench was on hand that day. Having retired at the age of 35 in 1983, he was still only 39. There were players active in the big leagues who were older than him, and the 51-year old Gibson’s competitive juices apparently began to flow as he saw a potentially worthy opponent amble into the batter’s box. 

It’s possible that I have the details slightly off, but here’s how I remember it: The first pitch, Gibson threw a fastball that caught Bench off-guard. He took it for strike one. Bench geared up, now realizing that they were playing for real, but he still couldn’t catch up with Gibson’s heater, as he smoked a second fastball past the swinging Bench. With two strikes on Bench, Gibson did something that just wasn’t very nice. While Bench prepared to finally catch up to Gibson’s fastball, Gibby instead through him an off-speed pitch. Bench awkwardly offered an off-balanced, futile swing that basically made him look like the guy in the old cartoon batting off of Bugs Bunny. 

Not long ago, I did a little research to try to verify that my recollections of the day’s events were correct. I am, after all, of such an age that sometimes I find that my adolescent memories aren’t quite as I, well, remember them. In doing that research, I came across this picture from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Yep...that’s pretty much the swing from Bench I remember!

And that’s the story of how I got to see Bob Gibson’s 3,118th strikeout! 

RIP, Gibby.

-----

Related story: The same day I saw Gibby pitched, I also saw a number of other greats, and even got their autographs. I wrote about that here.

Now THAT'S a Pitching Matchup!

My birthday is October 4th, which means that while it usually is just after the season ends, sometimes it falls on the final weekend of the season. Recently, I was curious if there were any games played the day I was born, so I did a little research. 

It turns out that the only game played that day was game two of the ALCS between a pair of 101-win squads: the Orioles and the A's. Baltimore won 5-1 behind Mike Cuellar, with Brooks Robinson, Boog Powell & Elrod Hendricks hitting home runs. The win pushed the O's to a 2-0 series lead, and they would finish off the sweep the next day in Oakland.

More interesting than that though, was something else I noticed. Less than a week earlier at Shea Stadium in New York, the Mets hosted the Cardinals in what was the second-to-last game of the season for each team. With both teams already eliminated from pennant contention, it wouldn't seem to be all that noteworthy of a game.

What made the game particularly interesting to me looking back at it almost 50 years later was the two starting pitchers: Starting for the Cardinals was their big southpaw, Steve Carlton. Going for the Mets was their young flame-throwing righthander, Nolan Ryan. It would be the last game either man would pitch for his team, with both of them getting traded in the off-season. They would eventually become the two greatest strikeout pitchers in MLB history! 

The Cardinals would immediately regret trading Carlton, as the next season he would have one of the great pitching seasons in history, assembling a 27-10 record for a Phillies team that went 30-85 when he didn't pitch. He won the Cy Young Award with 310 strikeouts and a 1.97 ERA, and even finished top-5 in the MVP voting. All told, post-trade he would accumulate 252 wins and more than 3,000 strikeouts over the remainder of his career.

The results for Ryan were just as quick, and every bit as bountiful! Pitching for the Angels in 1972, Ryan would lead the American League in strikeouts (329), shutouts (9), and hits/9 innings pitched (5.3!) on his way to a 19-16 record and a 2.28 ERA. After leaving the Mets, Ryan would win another 295 games, strike out over 5,000 more batters, and toss seven no-hitters!

The one thing that would plague Ryan (especially in those earlier days of his career) was wildness. He would go on to lead the league in walks in six of the next seven years, including two seasons where he walked over 200 batters. On that day in September of 1971, this wildness reared its ugly head as he walked four of the five batters he faced, before being pulled from the game without even retiring a batter.

Carlton had more success that day, picking up his 20th win of the season. Perhaps reaching that milestone gave him the confidence to ask for $5,000-&10,000 (reports vary) more than the Cardinals were offering on his 1972 contract. Cardinals owner Gussie Busch found such a contract dispute to be impertinent and had Carlton traded to the last place Phillies for hurler Rick Wise. The rest, as they say is history.

The Chicken

As far as TTM requests go, this one was definitely a little different! Though he never took a single at bat in the Majors, Ted Giannoulas was as big a part of my childhood baseball fandom as many players! In his role as "The Chicken," he starred alongside Johnny Bench in what was at the time my favorite TV show, The Baseball Bunch. Each week, a big league player would guest star on the show, giving an instructional lesson to the kids on some aspect of baseball.

In those days, NBC's "Game of the Week" on Saturdays might be the only game you saw all week long. And in that pre-internet age, players seemed so distant that they were almost like mythical heroes. The opportunity to see them interacting with real kids (just like me!) and giving a lesson that I could learn from was a treat beyond compare.

To add a comic element though, the show included The Chicken. Giannoulas played the mascot, who had begun in 1974 as The San Diego Chicken, sponsored by KGB-FM, a radio station in San Diego. He grew in popularity over the next five years, but a series series of legal disputes and court proceedings between Giannoulas and KGB culminated in the Chicken flying the coup and setting out on his own. On June 29, 1979, the San Diego Padres hosted his Grand Rehatching, in an event that can only be described as a spectacle! Giannoulas counts it as his favorite baseball memory.

Giannoulas was very kind to not only sign my card, but to also respond to my brief questionnaire. I asked him what his favorite episodes of The Baseball Bunch, and he responded that his two favorite were when Ozzie Smith and Jim Rice visited. Those two are included below.

 

 

One last thing about The Chicken: I was fortunate enough to see him perform in person once. The week after I graduated from college, a couple friends and I made a trip down to Birmingham to see a certain basketball player take a crack at minor league back in 1994. Though Michael Jordan was the reason for our visit, it was a thrill to get to see The Chicken perform, as he was in classic form! 

Check out some of his greatest bits below! 

Wallace Johnson

TRIVIA QUESTION: What do Wallace Johnson and Danny Ainge have in common, other than playing Major League Baseball for teams in Canada and looking resplendent in powder blue? (Answer below.)

 

As I work on Project87, Wallace Johnson recently got me to 230 cards that I've gotten autographed from the 1987 Topps set. He also signed the '89 Topps card for me, and I thought both looked great in blue! 

What made the return even better though, was the fact that he also filled out the short questionnaire that I've been sending with recent autograph requests. I generally ask players what their favorite baseball memory was, and ask who their favorite manager and teammate(s) were, and ask them about the toughest opponent(s) they faced.

 

Johnson's most intriguing answer revealed his favorite baseball memory: His team's 1979 MVC Championship season of 1979 while he was at Indiana State. I found it incredibly interesting for a number of reasons. First, it surprised me that a guy who played in the big leagues for nine seasons and had one of the more memorable hits in Expos franchise history (more on that later) would consider his senior college more worthy of such mention.

 

There was another thing though. When someone mentions Indiana State and 1979, you can't help but think of Larry Bird, who led the Sycamores to the NCAA championship game in basketball that year. Just an instant after that came to mind, I recalled that I had once seen a picture of Bird in an Indiana State baseball uniform, and I began to wonder if he and Johnson had perhaps played together. That sent me off on a spree of research that culminated in this blog post.

First, the story behind Bird's foray into baseball. He did indeed play in a doubleheader for Indiana State's baseball team against Kentucky Wesleyan on April 28th. He struck out in his first at bat, but later rapped out a 2-run single. More to the point, Indiana State had (by far) their largest baseball attendance of the season!

TRIVIA ANSWER: Both Ainge and Johnson were (at least for a time) teammates with Larry Bird!

That wasn't the only memorable part of that season for Johnson and the Sycamores though. Individually, Johnson was one of the leading hitters in the nation, batting .491 to set what still stands as an ISU record. His success wasn't just personal though. He was captain of a Sycamore team that had a great season, going 41-11, winning the Missouri Valley Conference championship (with Johnson as Tournament MVP), and advancing to the NCAA Tournament. Johnson was inducted into the ISU Sports Hall of Fame in 1985.

After being drafted in the 6th round, Johnson spent the 1979, '80 & '81 seasons in the minors. He started the last of those seasons with the AA Memphis Chicks, before moving up to the AAA Denver Bears, who were coached by Felipe Alou to an American Association championship.

When MLB rosters expanded on September 1st, Johnson got the call to join the Expos who were in the midst of a race for the second-half NL East title in the strike-split 1981 season. He didn't see a lot of action, only coming to the plate ten times, but facing New York Mets closer, Neil Allen on October 3rd (the second to last day of the season), he hit a two-run triple to put the Expos ahead 3-2, on their way to winning 5-4, and clinching the only postseason berth in Montreal Expos history. Johnson would be added to the postseason roster, and subsequently had an RBI single in one of his two pinch hit at bats.

Johnson would go on to put together a solid nine-year career as a pinch-hitter, spending his entire MLB career with the Expos except for eight plate appearances with the Giants in 1983. He retired as the Expos' all-time leader in pinch hits, with 86.

After his playing days were over, Johnson spent a number of years coaching, first in the Braves' minor league system from 1995-97, followed by a five year stint (1998-2002) with the Chicago White Sox as their third base coach. 

One final thing I found interesting about Johnson was from a newspaper article from all the way back in 1979. In it, Johnson stated, "I was a paper boy in Gary when I was younger and sometimes when I'd get enough money together, I'd go to see the Cubs and White Sox play in Chicago." Johnson continued, "I still have autographs from Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Ron Santo."

How crazy is it that all these years later, guys like me are still excited about getting HIS autograph!