Meacham had one, short tour of duty with the 1991 Tigers: 2-1, 5.20 in 10 appearances (four starts). Still, he managed to eek out an eight-year career.
If you think Justin Verlander is a beanpole, you should’ve seen Meacham: 6′ 2″ tall, 175 pounds.
He’s 41 today.
Whenever I watched Brandon Lyon pitch for the Diamondbacks the past couple of seasons, my immediate reaction was always he’s a younger Todd Jones.
Fact is, he throws harder than Jones — which can’t hurt — but no one is going to confuse him with Joe Nathan.
Last season wasn’t a pleasant one for the D-backs’ closer, a position he lost to Chad Qualls. Well, that’s not entirely true.
Despite four blown saves in 23 chances in the first half, hitters managed a .243 average against him and his ERA was 2.43. (Compare that to Jones’s 4.95 ERA and .297 opponents’ average in the first half.)
In terms of repertoire, it doesn’t extend far past a fastball and curve. In fact, that’s it. But the curveball is something to behold; no roundhouse breaking pitch, Lyon’s is top-to-bottom — or noon-to-six, as they say. Still, in 2008 he threw the fastball 72 percent of the time — 73 percent with two strikes.
As you might expect, Lyons doesn’t heave bullets across the heart of the plate. Instead, he has a Jones-like corners-nibbling approach. His favorite spots — against righties or lefties — are the outside corners. But against lefties his greatest success comes on the inside corner, up and in, and down and in. So, did the Tigers get themselves another Todd Jones?
Perhaps.
But Lyon is 10 years younger than the Tigers’ erstwhile closer and, in the spirit of optimism, he seems to have the durability and closer-ish stuff the bullpen so desperately needs.
(Oh, and Lyon wore number 38 in Arizona and will need a new one in Detroit…unless Jeremy Bonderman wants to give up his number. I’m guessing he ends up with 36.)
…the Tigers acquired catcher Dave Engle to the Twins for the one-time Lou-Whitaker-displacing Chris Pittaro and Alejandro Sanchez.
If I remember correctly, the Tigers viewed Engle as insurance for Lance Parrish but he played only three games at catcher, 23 at first and a smattering of games in the outfield. In 86 at bats he hit .256 and was released on Aug. 10, 1986.
While we’re at it:
Happy Birthday to former Tigers catcher/third baseman/World Series overachiever Marty Castillo, who turns 52.
Former Tigers reliever Frank Williams died last week at the age of 50.
Don’t remember him? He pitched for the Tigers during the dreadful 1989 season.
His line: 42 appearances, 71.2 IP, 3-3, 1 save, 3.64 ERA.
Williams’s life reads like a Hollywood fantasy. He was an orphan who grew up in foster homes in Seattle, but he made it to baseball’s major leagues, pitching for the San Francisco Giants, Detroit Tigers and Cincinnati Reds between 1984 and 1989. Over six seasons, he pitched 471.7 innings, had a 24-14 won-loss record with eight saves and an earned-run average of 3.00.
He earned $442,500 in 1988 and $425,000 in 1989. By the time he died last week, all that money was gone. He spent his last days bouncing around Victoria shelters and detox centres, a street-level alcoholic.
Be sure to read the entire story; it’s fascinating and heartbreaking.
(Hat-tip: Mr. Neyer.)
Shortly before Thanksgiving I was re-reading* Peter Walsh’s book “It’s All Too Much“, a treatise on de-cluttering home, office and life. (*Actually, I was re-listening to it as an audiobook.) Walsh, who is a regular on Oprah, TLC and other TV shows, made one particular point in this reading that hit home: If something is valuable and cherished, why is it in a box in your garage?
After hearing this I immediately glanced over at my crudely boxed baseball card collection and thought, “Yep. They deserve better.” And what better time to do this than over the holidays and near the start of a new year?
I first began collecting baseball cards regularly starting in 1977, though I do have random cards from earlier years, like this Mickey Stanley from Topps’ 1976 1977 series. (I’m not sure where many of the earlier ones came from; probably from my brother or from garage sales.) I stopped collecting — and by collecting I mean buying one or two packs of cards every week — in 1981. From then on, I’d buy one pack of cards a year just to see what the new season looked like.
This project would be like time travel for me, putting me face-to-face with cards that are tattooed to my memory — The Mets’ Bruce Boisclair posing with an aluminum bat; Doug Rau‘s chipmunk-cheek full of chaw — and some I’d hadn’t thought about in years.
Phase 1: Strategy
Before I could dive in completely, I had to decide how I use them. And that was one of the drivers behind this project. Over the past year or so, I’d been going to my collection to find cards of current or former Tigers players so that I could use it in a post on The Daily Fungo. I soon discovered that unruly stacks of cards were neither efficient nor convenient for my process.
Various and SundryMy card collection featured many bizarre pieces. From the Rennie Stennett card from the bottom of a Hostess Twinkie box to the 1980 Donruss card with Royals’ reliever Paul Splittorff‘s name misspelled as Spittorff.
Originally (and admittedly late at night when brain horsepower was but a flicker) I planned to organize the cards alphabetically across-the-board. My thinking was, if I needed to find Champ Summers, why have to figure out what team he was on first and then find his card? With the benefit of a night’s sleep, I realized that would not only suck the life force from me, but it would reach unprecedented levels of tedium. Thus was born Plan B:
But first, I needed to do some serious due diligence.
Phase 2: Triage and Vivid Memories
I wish I’d kept track of the many times I’ve sifted through my collection. One thing’s for sure, the condition of the cards themselves was evidence that it was A) at least once a year, and B) the frequency and care I took with them rendered them worthless on eBay. But that was the entire point of my baseball cards: I bought each pack to read them, learn from them and enjoy them. I never pretended that they would be a source of revenue.
This was the fun part, looking at the cards and remembering the precise trip to the corner store that secured them. (At least I think I remember specific purchases; who knows?) And the process was repeated for almost every purchase:
Where was I?
This exercise of culling the dupes also reinforced that fact that I’d recently turned 40. (Wow! Vic Davillilo is now 72?! Or, Rico Carty is still with us?) And, it shows how far we’ve come from the days when Topps would try to actually paint a player’s new team hat on him. (Don’t believe me? See Paxton, Mike, Topps 1978.) I had my own system for indicating that a player had been traded. On the Juan Beniquez 1976 card, for example, I wrote “Traded to Rangers.”)
Ah, youth.
When all was said and done, I’d nearly filled a shoebox with doubles and triples.
Phase 3: A to Z
Yeah. Good idea to ditch the full-blown alphabetizing idea. Thankfully, my wife was kind enough to help me tackle this administrative process. Over the course of four nights we organized and alphabetized:
The result? Every surface in my office covered with stacks of cards waiting for Phase 4.
Phase 4: Sheeting!
This, again, would’ve been a longer process had my wife (and, to a lesser degree, my mother-in-law) not pitched in. I placed several teams worth of cards in the sheets instead of watching the Lions/Titans game on Thanksgiving. Speaking of sheets, I opted to have one card per slot so that I could see front and back. This, of course, meant buying a truckload of sheets from Target and Amazon. In the end, I filled 360 sheets with more than 3,200 cards.
Phase 5: Storing
Today my baseball cards are in neatly arranged and filed away in a series of binders, labeled by year and brand — with two exceptions. One binder is dedicated to all my Detroit Tigers cards regardless of year or brand. Another small binder is for years and brands of cards that are so random they can only be lumped by year and alphabetized.
As you can see in the photo, what was once thousands of cards squeezed into boxes of varying shapes and sizes, is now a tidy, organized and easily referenced collection. (This is three of the seven binders.)
It’s been close to 30 years since I actively collected baseball cards and chances are I won’t start again. I did think about buying a complete set each year for my son until he was in high school, but that notion was lost along the way. Plus, I didn’t want to saddle him with 18 years worth of baseball cards if he didn’t want them.
But, at the very least, if he should want to browse through his Dad’s collection, they are in a state that won’t scare him away. At last.
Happy New Year to you and Happy 56th Birthday to former Tigers outfielder Lynn Jones.
The Tigers selected Jones from the Reds in the 1978 Rule 5 Draft. He played for the Tigers from 1979 through 1983 and was a part-timer’s part-timer. He appeared in an average of 61 games for the Tigers in those five seasons. His best season was 1979 when he hit .296 with four homers and 26 RBI in 95 games.
After the 1983 season the Tigers granted free agency to Jones and he signed with the Royals. He faced the Tigers in the ’84 ALCS and won a World Series with K.C. in 1985.
Final stats for his eight-year career: 527 games, 239 hits, seven homers (six with Detroit), and a .252 average.
Happy Birthday, old number 35.
P.S. Today also marks the birthday of Tigers Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg.
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