My Thunderchickens were THIS close to making the playoffs in the Illowa APBA League. Had they done so, it would have been a great story. But this cinderella story will have to wait to be written for another year. Todd Ventresca and his Three Rivers Gamblers had one more trick…
This week, Flashback Friday features a gem from Scott Veatch’s Vault that I found pretty interesting. By my guess, it came out in the late 60s (edit: Scott says it came out in 1964) and it’s a list of commonly asked questions by phone callers. I suppose in today’s lingo,…
Scott Veatch came through with this very interesting Ken Suarez card from the original 1966 set. Rookie catcher Suarez played for the Kansas City Athletics and actually started 26 games for them. Batting .145, his only extra base hit was a triple. He did walk fifteen times so his OBP…
Wow, it was really time for Maury Wills to retire. Scott Veatch passed on this 1972 Maury Wills card to me. It was Wills’ last year in the majors and at age 39, all offensive skills had been used up apparently. In 71 games and 30 starts, he went 17…
…especially this one Recently, I wrote about my 8-1 series victory over the Bamm Beanos to put myself in a good position to make the playoffs (in our league the top four teams go on to the postseason). I’ve been keeping a close eye on Todd Ventresca’s Three Rivers Gamblers…
I was going through my repository of Monster Cards (still thinking of doing my Monsters vs. Terribles series) and ran across this 1911 Joe Jackson card that Pastor Rich Zawadzki suggested. Deadball or no, it’s a monster card! Playing for the Cleveland Naps, Shoeless Joe hit .408 in 1911 which…
As some of you know, the baseball data disk doesn’t allow for extrapolation for the pitcher ratings of R, K and ZZ as well as the steal asterisks on batting cards. With the arrival of the new set, we now know who has these ratings. Reader John Briggs who just…
John Williams brought me back to my school days when he sent me photos of this APBA Baseball World Series Game booklet. John saw my previous Flashback Friday post that featured the brochure for the World Series Game set which included the league champions for six different seasons and thought…
For most of you on Facebook, this won’t be news but I thought it was worth bringing to the wider audience. It started as a simple post on the APBA Baseball group by Tom Zuppa last week linking to an article about this year’s candidates for the Baseball Hall of…
I almost didn’t have a Weird Wednesday column lined up for this week but Kevin Burghardt from Janesville, Wisconsin just posted this interesting card on Facebook. Kevin says this is “one of Charlie Finley’s designated pinch runners, this one not named Herb Washington”. Indeed. This Don Hopkins card is based…