RIP Les Rohr, 1946-2020

[G-Fafif]

Les Rohr, the first player the Mets ever chose in the amateur draft, 74, on November 6.



https://406mtsports.com/baseball/legion/1969-miracle-mets-pitcher-les-rohr-of-billings-dies-at-74/article_e68e5379-9e05-5310-b7c9-e88c84b260af.htmlhttps://406mtsports.com/baseball/legion/1969-miracle-mets-pitcher-les-rohr-of-billings-dies-at-74/article_e68e5379-9e05-5310-b7c9-e88c84b260af.html

[Edgy MD]

Crap. It's been a bad week for Commonwealth Mets.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

I tried like hell to reach him to do his SABR bio. Wound up connecting with a local sportswriter who sorta hinted he was a kind of moody loner who couldn't really be relied on for stuff like that. But anyway, an interesting figure in that he was drafted 9 rounds ahead of Nolan Ryan by the same scouting team.



https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/les-rohr/https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/les-rohr/

[batmagadanleadoff]

This card comes up on a Les Rohr google image search. It's Zvon's. He colorized a b&w Rohr photo. (Nice job!) The Shea background is from another source -- both images mishmashed into one baseball card. I know this to be true because I'm familiar with the b&w Rohr photo that was the source for the Z card.



[FIMG=333]https://i.pinimg.com/564x/99/c7/43/99c7432095cf954cf5af4ab64828bc96.jpg[/FIMG]



_______________



Typewriter Chewing Gum - Les Rohr in memoriam:



[FIMG=333]https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50591878208_7b7d78aacf_o.png[/FIMG]

[Edgy MD]

I had a parody of him teed up that I never got to use.



There was a lot of feeling there.

[batmagadanleadoff]

This is an excerpt from a Sports Illustrated piece by Alexander Wolff on his childhood experience collecting the autographs of the 1969 Mets, and specifically, Tommie Agee's Hancock, which was the most elusive. I've read it several times and I'm certain that I once posted the article to this forum. The Les Rohr comment is the line I most remember from the piece.

I would never trade my Kevin Collins, though the Mets did—had to, that June, to the Expos, along with Steve Renko and a couple of minor league pitchers—for Donn Clendenon, the righthanded power hitter they so desperately needed. I had to have the coaches, too: From Rube Walker, the pitching coach, to Joe Pignatano, cultivator of tomato plants in the bullpen. Card collecting had also alerted me to a problem attending the task of set completion. The cards in Topps' sixth and seventh series always appeared on store shelves in my area in late summer, when they would barely get in circulation before being chased from the shelves by football cards. The analogous hurdle for the autograph collector came when the Triple A season ended and farmhands came up. There was little time to collect those September call-ups from Tidewater and Memphis, but they belonged in the metal box, too. I had to scramble to get Bob Johnson's autograph, as well as Jim Gosger's. The signatures of Bob Heise and Jesse Hudson. And Les Rohr. Les Rohr is right in front of Nolan Ryan in the metal box. Though he appeared in only one game that season, giving up five hits, a walk and three earned runs in one and one third innings (an ERA of 20.25), Rohr is just as essential to me as Ryan. His is a minimalist name—Les is Rohr—and a rendering of that name is all he sent me. Some of the other September Mets, new to the majors and likely intrigued by fans' solicitations, seemed to want to do more than merely sign. They wanted to engage in dialogue.

https://vault.si.com/vault/1986/09/15/mets-autographshttps://vault.si.com/vault/1986/09/15/mets-autographs

[Frayed Knot]

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: ... an interesting figure in that he was drafted 9 rounds ahead of Nolan Ryan by the same scouting team.

Gotta question the strategy of a scouting team who apparently decided that girls names were a drafting priority: Leslie Norvin Rohr, Lynn Nolan Ryan

Maybe that partially explains the troubles of the 1960's Mets



Also Rohr was born in the UK, went to HS in Montana. Hardly your typical path to the bigs.

[Edgy MD]

Ryan, if I correctly recall, was the passion project of one area scout who couldn't and wouldn't shut up about him in reports to the organization. When he finally got a regional cross-checker to come by and take a look, Ryan had a crappy day, and cross-checker pretty much said, "Well, I'm not seeing it, but if you're really this ga-ga over the guy, I'm not gonna shoot down your reports."