#334 - All Star Third Basemen

For the All-Star third basemen, Topps uses photographs taken at their go-to stadiums - at least in this set. Brooks Robinson is at Yankee Stadium and Ron Santo at Candlestick in a photo that looks a bit more current than his regular card one did. Brooks looks a little out of whack, like he just left a Bronx barfight. But I do love that cartoon oriole on his cap. Brooks was a perennial All-Star back then as was Ron but the latter guy really is the only one of the two whose stats were appropriate for starting status. That's a good lead-in to check on those now. We start with Brooks and his AL buddies:

Brooks Robinson - .228 with 7 homers and 37 RBI's
Dave Nelson - .287 with 4 homers and 31 RBI's
Sal Bando - .265 with 18 homers and 54 RBI's
Buddy Bell - .274 with 5 homers and 34 RBI's.

Almost half the AL is represented here. Based on stats alone at this point in the season, both Graig Nettles and Bill Melton were more deserving but Graig was still trying to live down his Indian past and Bill always got dissed by voters and managers. Brooks had an admittedly tough season and is a legacy guy. Both Nelson and Bell - the sole Indian All-Star - were hitting close to .300 when chosen. Dave's other stats are a bit light but that year he was pushing for starting time at third against five other guys. Buddy's seem light too until you realize he had already nearly matched his RBI totals for all of '72. Sal was the big banger in the group. He, like Brooks, was another All-Star regular. Now for the NL:

Ron Santo - .298 with 11 homers and 50 RBI's
Darrell Evans - .271 with 27 homers and 67 RBI's
Joe Torre - .298 with 9 homers and 45 RBI's.

So Ron, also well above .300 when selected, has deserving All-Star stats. Darrell, like his infield teammate Davey Johnson, was banging the ball at a big clip that year. And Joe was already listed at first but since he played both positions I threw him in again. I think the NL clearly has the edge here. Like both catcher and second base, the starters are now all Hall of Famers. In fact the only guy on these card fronts so far NOT in the Hall is Dick Allen.


Another puzzle piece. They should have made this the second piece to keep people guessing, although I guess anyone that read a newspaper back then would have known who the subject was. We DO know it's a right-hander from this section.

In music on this date in '74 "The Way We Were" returned to the top spot in the US.

The big compelling national story in '73 and '74 - outside of inflation - was Watergate. In addition to the occasional music news I thought it would be relevant to highlight some of the important dates regarding the back story and actual events from back then. The set-up starts in '71:

6/13/71 - The New York Times began serializing a group of documents it called The Pentagon Papers. These were Defense Department Documents regarding covert and other actions during the Viet Nam War that were leaked by a department analyst named Daniel Ellsberg.

9/9/71 - A DC-area psychiatrist's office is burglarized. One of the psychiatrist's patients is Daniel Ellsberg and it is thought then that information was being sought in the burglary to discredit Mr. Ellsberg. Months later it turns out the group responsible for the burglary is employed by the White House and will be named "The Plumbers" by the media for their orders to fix media leaks that could discourage President Nixon's re-election. While the discrediting strategy would not prove terribly effective with Mr. Ellsberg it would prove so months later with a man named Thomas Eagleton who was originally George McGovern's VP candidate but had to step down after it was revealed he had been subject to electric shock therapy as a psychological treatment in his younger days. It would prove to be a big blow to the McGovern campaign.

5/28/72 - Bugging equipment was installed in the Democratic National Committee ("DNC") headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. The headquarters took up the whole sixth floor of the hotel. It would later turn out the equipment was installed by essentially the same group that burglarized the office of Ellsberg's shrink.

6/17/72 - Five burglars were arrested at 2:30 am during a break-in at the Watergate DNC headquarters. A security guard called the police after he noticed that tape he had taken off a stair doorway had been replaced to prevent the door from locking. The police then basically just followed the taped doors up to the sixth floor which was the last one taped and the burglars gave themselves up. They were caught with bugging equipment, pen-sized stun guns (?!!), and $2,300 in sequential $100 bills. The burglar's names were Edward Martin, Frank Sturgis, Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, and Virgilio Gonzalez. Barker, Martinez, and Gonzalez were all native Cubans who had been involved in the Bay of Pigs fiasco early in the JFK presidency. Sturgis was a former WW II vet who was a leader of that operation. The most interesting guy was Martin. His real name was James McCord and he was an ex-CIA agent who was presently employed as security director for a group known as CREEP (Committee to RE-Elect the President).

More tomorrow.

#160 - Brooks Robinson

So Blogger was just down for a day plus, which means this is the third time I'm typing this. That's my only complaint, though, since Blogger's free and looks great. On to more noteworthy things, I have always really liked this card. Like the other Robinson with whom he once played, Brooks' card is pretty regal. He appears pensive and looks much younger than his years; so young, in fact, that he bears a striking resemblance to Tim Matheson, who played Otter in "Animal House." Brooks was in the midst of a general decline in his offense in '73 but he still had some great moments during the season, like setting a record for lifetime homers by a third baseman and hitting nearly .300 from August on, when the O's went on their big surge to reclaim the division title.

Brooks Robinson is a Hall-of-Famer requiring no introduction. He grew up in Arkansas and went to a high school that did not have a baseball team. He was actually a very good basketball player and had imagined he would go to Arkansas on a hoops scholarship. But a local former minor-leaguer saw him play summer ball after he graduated and wrote a letter to his old teammate who just happened to be Paul Richards, the Baltimore GM and manager of the mid-'50s. Richards sent over a scout and Brooks was signed in '55 for the maximum non-bonus baby amount, $4,000. He then kicked off his career pretty handily, hitting .332 in B ball before seeing some late action in Baltimore. In ' 56 he hit .272 in Double A before another September call-up. Brooks didn't hit too well in his limited time but he did get  to hang out with his eventual predecessor, George Kell, who tutored him on third base and some off-field stuff. Brooks then started the '57 season as the regular guy at third but after a couple months of sub-.200 hitting was returned to Double A where he hit .266 over most of the summer. He returned to Baltimore in August and though it took him a while to get his offense churning, he hit over .400 the final three weeks. That gave the Birds the impetus to trade Kell and the next season that looked like an excellent move when Brooks came out of the box strong and was hitting north of .300 through early June. But he then cooled off significantly, showed not too much power, and split starts the balance of the season. Then '59 was nearly an exact replica of '57 but this time he was sent down to Triple A where he killed the ball, and when he returned in the summer, he claimed his spot at last with a .292 average the rest of the way.

When the Sixties arrived, so too did the reign of Robinson as an institution at third base. In 1960, his first uncontested season as a regular, he was an All-Star and a Gold Glove winner. He would retain the former honor the next 14 seasons and the latter one the next 15. Five of the next six seasons his average wouldn't dip below .284 and outside of '61, when he was moved to the leadoff spot, and '63, when the whole team offense sort of imploded, he averaged 95 RBI's. In the meantime the Orioles, a pretty terrible team when his career began, were riding some excellent young arms, some strong power, and defense to contender-dom. In '64 Brooks had his big MVP season and two years later he would play in his first post-season, fresh off the acquisition of his fellow Mr. Robinson, former Reds slugger Frank. That year the Birds won the Series in a roll over LA as Brooks put up his second 100-RBI season. In '67 both Jim Palmer and Dave McNally went down with big injuries so a title defense wasn't happening and Brooks' offense saw a discount. It remained there in the tough year of '68 and though his average bottomed out in '69, his power sure didn't as he closed the decade the top side of 20 homers and 80 RBI's to help his team return to The Series. But that time around they were the upset losers.

Robinson saw a nice offensive upswing in '70 and '71, both pennant-winning seasons for the Orioles. That first year he pretty much won The Series for Baltimore with his huge bat and an unprecedented defensive show. Then following that second season the O's sent Frank Robinson to LA and Brooks' numbers tumbled pretty hard as Baltimore missed the playoffs. He would then post a .288 average in '74, but that would be his last good one as he only hit .201 in '75, his final year as a regular, and his last as a Gold Glove winner. In '76 he split starts at third with new guy Doug Decinces and in '77 he did some reserve work at the hot corner in his final season. Brooks finished with a .267 average in 23 seasons (a record for seasons with one club) with 2,848 hits, 268 homers, and 1,357 RBIs. On top of the MVP, All-Star games, and Gold Gloves, he is still first in games, chances, putouts, and assists at third base, as well as second in fielding average. In the post-season he hit .303 with five homers and 22 RBIs in 39 games. He made the Hall in '83, voted in on his first shot.

Robinson, about whom nobody has written a bad word, got into some financial problems before he retired that would dog him for a bunch of years. In 1978 he got a job as the color guy for Orioles broadcasts which he did through '93. During that time and thereafter he has been a fixture at many autograph shows. Despite his financial issues, he has done a bunch of work raising money for charities, as well as other work in support of MLB. He sounds like a great guy.

Here's another card for which there is no room for the star-bullets. I'll add one. For the baseball centennial celebrated in '76 - I've mentioned this on other posts - each team was asked to submit its most special moment. For the O's it was the '70 Series win and Brooks' performance in it. He was a pretty modest guy. For almost every interview I found researching this post he would always bring up one record: he hit into five triple plays. I guess he has a pretty good sense of humor as well.

The thing with playing for one team is that these things get tough:

1. Robinson and Luis Aparicio '63 to '67 Orioles;
2. Aparicio and Sparky Lyle '71 Red Sox;
3. Lyle and Jim Ray Hart '73 to '74 Yankees.