Monster Card Monday: 1979 Fred Lynn

lynn

Beginning in his rookie year, Fred Lynn was the consummate hitter.  He was part of the famous Red Sox outfield that included Dwight Evans and Jim Rice and occasionally Carl Yastrzemski.  It was in 1979 when he had his career year for the Red Sox.  That year, he led the AL in batting (.333), OBP (.423) and slugging (.637) all while hitting 39 homers.

Chicago native, Lynn also drove in 122 runs and scored 116 himself all while playing impeccable defense in center field.

 

Split G PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB BB SO BA OBP SLG
1979 Totals 147 622 531 116 177 42 1 39 122 2 82 79 .333 .423 .637
Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 6/2/2014.

 

Lynn gets a somewhat uncommon 1-1-6-6-6 power number combination for his 1979 card.  Uncommon, I suppose because APBA didn’t want to make it too strong (and too unrealistic, for that matter) with a runner on third.  Indeed, Lynn would have five chances for a homer in that situation.

Fred Lynn gets a 55-7 on top of that.  With his four 8s, he has a 9 on 42.

Fun numbers:  44-6, 55-7, 26-14

Lynn was one of those players that did everything right.  While he didn’t steal many bases, he didn’t ground into too many double plays (41-28) either.  He was a great fielder (OF-3, 36 arm), walked plenty (five 14s) and even took one for the team once in while (one 22).

Here’s a trivia question for old time Red Sox fans:  Fred Lynn DHed just once in 1979.  Who played center field for the Red Sox when Lynn did that?  Hint: he wasn’t a full time Sox outfielder.

Thomas Nelshoppen

I am an IT consultant by day and an APBA media mogul by night. My passions are baseball (specifically Illini baseball), photography and of course, APBA. I have been fortunate to be part of the basic game Illowa APBA League since 1980 as well as the BBW Boys of Summer APBA League since 2014. I am slogging through a 1966 NL replay and hope to finish before I die.

6 Comments:

  1. I’ll go with that Tom Poquette. I’m doing a 79 replay (and Lynn is a monster…), but am NOT a Sox fan. :-)

    Bob

  2. I played 1979 with the original set that this card is from. It was my first APBA game, in fact, back in the glorious days when you got all the teams with the game. Lynn had the most insanely good year any player has ever had for me, and I’ve played a number of replays over the years.

    My ’79 AL was hit-happy (the reissue has regraded many of the pitchers and i am keen to play it again to see if it normalizes a bit. Hey, it’s been close to 40 years since I played it before.) Anyway, the Red Sox (97-65) scored exactly 1,000 runs, which gives you an idea how things went. Lynn had 622 abs, 239 hits, scored 157 runs, had 71 doubles (!), 2 triples, 47 HR, an insane 177 rbi, was 3 of 9 in steals, and hit a cool .384. Nutso cuckoo stuff. Jim Rice chimed in with 169 rbi. The rest of the team was more nearly normal, although Burleson scored 140 runs. The red Sox, for all their offense, did not win the east–the Brewers did.

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