As has been the recent trend,
on this infielders card we get a couple guys who had significant MLB careers
and a couple who didn’t stick around terribly long. Andy(?) Thornton
looks like he’s up on a mountain somewhere and appears to be in his Braves
uniform which I only know about pre-research because he was on the Atlanta team card. Two of
these guys appear to be smiling and Frank White actually seems to be
suppressing a laugh which would make this by far the most jovial of the rookie
cards to date.
Terry Hughes grew up in Spartanburg, South
Carolina where he was a local basketball and baseball
legend and had been scouted in the latter sport since he was in eighth grade.
Given what was generally viewed as “can’t miss” status, he was playing high
school ball that year and during his HS Career hit .288, .321, .400, and .615.
He only has four seasons because during his junior year he was suspended from
both his hoops and baseball team (I do not know why). He also played American
Legion ball in the summers and hit .415 prior to his senior year in that
league. Apparently every team scouted him and in the ’67 draft the Cubs made
him the second pick after Ron Blomberg (and before Bobby Grich). Terry eschewed
another American Legion season to play Rookie ball and hit .278 at that level.
In ’68 he moved around a bit and in A ball that summer hit .283 while on loan
to Boston, .221 back in the Chicago system, and .328 with a .424 OBA in a month
of Double A ball. ’69 was all Double A around some military time and was the
first year he played principally at third as he had specialized in shortstop
until then. In an off year he hit .249 but in ’70 he bounced to hit .286 in
Triple A and made his MLB debut in September. The next two seasons were spent
strictly in Triple A and both years he missed some time to injury. In ’71 he
hit .255 while playing mostly in the outfield and in ’72 he had his best
offensive season, hitting .302 with a .385 OBA and 13 homers as he returned to
third base. Just prior to the start of the ’73 season he was sold to the Cards
for whom he also played in Triple A, hitting .289 with 51 RBI’s before being
called up in August to do late inning work the rest of the season. That year he
also had his first Toops rookie card and so, like Sergio Robles on the prior
post, this card isn’t technically Terry’s rookie one. After the season he was
involved in a big trade, going to Boston
with Reggie Cleveland and Diego Segui for John Curtis, Lynn McGlothen, and Mike
Garman, another heralded ’67 draft pick. In ’74 Terry spent all of the season
on the Boston
roster, putting in time at third behind Rico Petrocelli and Dick McAuliffe. In
’75 he was the last guy cut in spring training and he returned to Triple A
where he hit .253. He then put in a partial season back with the Cards at that
level in ’76 and was done. Terry hit .209 in 54 games up top and .269 in the
minors. By the early Seventies he was taking college classes and he eventually
got a degree in education. After playing he returned to South
Carolina where since 1989 he has been a baseball coach and teacher
at Boiling Springs High School.
John Knox is listed here as a
third baseman but he would play nearly exclusively at second for Detroit; Ron
Cash from a few cards back was listed as a second baseman but he played both
corner infield positions. With Reggie Sanders from Ron’s card the whole infield
was covered almost so Detroit
was sure in overhaul mode at the time of this card. John was born in Newark,
NJ, but by the time he was in high school had relocated to Ohio and then went
on to Bowling Green State University there where he graduated with a degree in
education and finished as the school record holder with 107 career hits. He was
drafted by Detroit
in ’70 and that summer hit .315 in A ball with a .437 OBA. The next year he put
up .271/.368 numbers in Double A before spending most of the next two seasons
as a Triple A Toledo Mud Hen. He had pretty similar seasons, posting a
.294/.374 year in ’72 and .274/.367 numbers in ’73. He made his Detroit debut the former
year in August and then in ’73 hit .281 while playing sparingly, both years
behind Dick McAuliffe and Tony Taylor. He then spent all of ’74 and ’75 on the Detroit roster where he
hit a combined .287 while playing behind light-hitting Gary Sutherland. The
knock on John back then was that he wasn’t a great fielder and in ’76 when Detroit had a bunch of
younger infielders in the wings, he was sent back to Triple A. Early that year
he was sold to Cincinnati
– not exactly an open book at second – and for them stuck at the Triple A
level. In ’77 he stopped playing to sell real estate and life insurance in the Toledo area and after a
failed comeback in ’78 he was done. He finished with an MLB average of .274 in
219 at bats and a minor league average of .276 and did an inning of late
defensive work in the ’72 playoffs. It has been hard to track this guy since
then but he was later admitted to his school’s hall of fame and he does some
work with a greyhound rescue group down in Texas so that may be where he now
resides.
Andre Thornton would hold
onto the “Andy” tag on his Topps cards through the ’76 set. Born in Alabama, he and his family relocated to a suburb of Philadelphia where in
high school Andre was a big three sports star. He was also a bit of a pool
hustler and when he was signed it was in a pool hall, by the Phillies in the
late summer of ’67. He only hit .182 in a few games in A ball that year but
upped it in ’68 at the same level to .249 with 31 RBI’s in 185 at bats. In ’69
he missed a bunch of time for his National Guard military hitch but hit .251
with 13 homers and a .373 OBA around that in the year he became deeply
religious. In ’70 he was off to yet another A team but his at bats went south
by about 100 as he missed time to both The Guard and to a broken hand. In ’71
he had a strong bounce. Finally up to Double A he hit .267 with a .399 OBA, 26
homers, and 76 RBI’s. He had one ten-game streak during which he hit nine
homers. That got him promoted to Triple A the next year where Andre continued
his improvement with a .290/20/65 season in just 300 at bats for two teams
since he was traded mid-year to Atlanta
with Joe Hoerner for Jim Nash and Gary Neibauer. He remained at that level to
start the ’73 season but after a poor start he was sent to the Cubs for Joe
Pepitone where he would have a huge slugging binge the next two months, putting
up a .289/17/45 run with a .484 OBA in just 135 at bats. That prompted his late
July call-up to Chicago
where he hit .200 in the few games in which he saw action the rest of the way.
In ’74 he split time at first base while putting up a .261 average with ten
homers, 46 RBI’s, and a .368 OBA. The next year he got more starts there and
responded with a .293/18/60/.428 year that seemed to solidify his hold on the
spot after he missed the first month-plus with a broken wrist. But a poor start
in the ’76 season got him benched and then traded to Montreal for Larry Biitner and Steve Renko
where his slump continued. After that season he was sent to Cleveland for pitcher Jackie Brown. A
famously slow starter Andre was hitting only .150 and had been benched in favor
of Bill Melton at first when he got back in the line-up and went on a tear, putting
up a .286/25/65/.400 stat line in the last 100 games. From there he didn’t look
back and over the next two seasons he would average .248 with 30 homers and 99
RBI’s as the club’s leading slugger while providing excellent defense at first.
Amazingly those seasons came after a horrible accident in the ’77 off-season in
which his wife and daughter were killed and Andre and his son badly injured. In
spring training of ’80 he suffered a knee injury which required two operations
and caused him to miss the whole year. Then, between the strike and a broken hand,
’81 was pretty much a hot mess. But in ’82 Andre recorded probably his best
season, putting up a .273/32/116/.386 stat line while winning the AL Comeback
Player of the Year award. By now mostly a DH, Andre would record four more
pretty good power years - in ’84 he won
a Silver Slugger - before retiring during the ’87 season. He finished with a
.254 average with 253 homers, 895 RBI’s, and a .360 OBA and was twice an
All-Star. By that time he was in wide demand as a speaker and he also owned a
string of Applebees restaurants for a time after playing. After he sold his
chain to the parent company he founded GCI, a logistics company. That firm
merged with ASW, a supply chain management company, in 2007 and since then
Andre has been the firm’s CEO. He has a SABR bio and a whole chapter devoted to
him in Terry Pluto’s “The Curse of...”
When Ewing Kauffman founded
the Royals in the late Sixties, one of the first things he did was establish
the Royals Baseball Academy, a team-run institution that took select local kids
to Florida each year and would teach them a higher level baseball they would
otherwise have not been able to access. In the first class of ’70 Frank White
was a member, having played ball in high school and even a bit at a local JUCO
before the family ran out of money. After a year in the Academy he went to
Rookie ball as a shortstop in ’71 where he hit .247 and then moved fast. He
split ’72 between A and Double A, hitting .267 with 12 homers and 24 stolen
bases. In ’73 he moved up to Triple A, began putting in most of his time at
second base, and hit .264 around two stints up in KC where he did support work
at short and second and hit .223. Technically he wasn’t a rookie in ’74 because
he got into too many games in ’73 and his second year he also put in some time
at third, producing roughly the same numbers. He did one more year of reserve
work in ’75 when his average took off to .290 and early the next season
established himself as the regular second baseman, a position he would then
hold for 14 years. He would be middling on offense for a bunch of years and his
OBA was never very high, but he didn’t strike out too much, and he would
occasionally do pretty well, hitting .275 in ’78, stealing 28 bases in ’79, and
hitting .298 in ’82. Frank’s forte was his defense and beginning in ’77 he
would win six consecutive Gold Gloves and during that time make four All-Star
teams. In ’83 he was moved up in the line-up and that year he had 77 RBI’s. In
’84 he hit 17 out and he then became an outright slugger, the next three years
averaging 20 homers and 77 RBI’s. In the ’85 Series he batted in the clean-up
spot and in ’86 and ’87 won two more Gold Gloves while also returning to the
All-Star game and winning a Silver Slugger the first season. He remained with
KC through the ’90 season, finishing with a .255 average, 160 homers, 886
RBI’s, over 2,000 hits, and 178 stolen bases. Defensively he is 12th
all-time in assists and putouts at second base and ninth in double plays. In
the post-season he hit .213 with 16 RBI’s in 42 games. After a year off in ’91
he became the first black manager in the Boston
chain when he manged the Rookie franchise in ’92. He then coached a year in the
minors before moving up to Boston
from ’94 to ’96. From there he returned to KC as a coach (’97-2001); assistant
to the GM (2002-’03); manager of the team’s Double A franchise (’04-’06); and
director of player development and community relations (’07-’10). That last
year the Royals got real miserly with his salary and he quit the community
relations role and after the 2011 season he was fired from his part-time
announcing role because the team claimed he was too critical. Since 2012 he has
been a coach for the independent Kansas City T-Bones and a sales representative
for a roofing company.
This group raises the bar
pretty high with 34 MLB seasons between them, as well as seven All-Star games,
eight Gold Gloves, two Silver Sluggers, and a Comeback Player award. Reading
their last names in succession sounds like an amusing headline: “Hughes Knox
(Knocks) Thornton White.” I guess it would have worked if Andre was a pitcher.
Pitchers come in handy
getting from the last card to this one:
1. Sergio Robles and Jim
Palmer ’72 to ’73 Orioles;
2. Palmer and Dick Drago ’77
Orioles;
3. Drago and Terry Hughes ’74
Red Sox;
Then we get a pretty
efficient ‘round the card:
1. Terry Hughes and Dick
McAuliffe ’74 Red Sox;
2. McAuliffe and Willie
Horton (watch this guy) ’64 to ’73 Tigers;
3. Horton and John Knox ’72
to ’75 Tigers; Horton and Andre Thornton ’78 Indians;
4. Thornton and Pete LaCock ’73 to ’76 Cubs;
5. LaCock and Frank White ’77
to ’80 Royals.
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