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Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket
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Posted


Wow. On the beach near St. Pete I guess?


Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket
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Posted




Posted


Bubblegum residue on the card, I'm sure.

I love Youngblood's career. He came up as a lousy infielder who had the tools to play anywhere. When those tools didn't amount to a hill of beans as a secondbaseman, the Mets settled on him in right where he was a perfectly good player for a team with no aspirations. Decent glove, helluvan arm.

After he left the team, he bounced through Montreal --- getting his hits-for-two-teams-in-one-day thing taken care of --- before settling in San Francisco. He hit everywhere he played, but not quite enough for a starting outfielder on a team with greater hopes than Joe Torre's Mets had. So he pinch hit, filled in in the outfield, faked it at third on occasion, and really faked it at second on the very rare occasion. Think Scott Hairston.

But, well, he did all sorts of damage off the bench in 1983, so they figured, "What the hell, let's hope he remembers how it's done make him the 1984 starting thirdbaseman. He's a great athlete, so how bad can he be? Even if he muffs it, he's bound to hit enough to make up for it."

He ended up putting up an absolutely Butch Hobson-worthy 36 errors in only 117 games over there. To make matters worse, his hitting fell off too. The record at bb-r says he managed 2.0 WAR on offense, but gave back 2.6 on defense. I think about that year every time a guy is hitting off the bench and I wonder why the team doesn't just give him a position and live with whatever defense they get. Sometimes managers know what they're doing.

To their credit, the Giants put him back on the bench and kept him around until 1984. In 1989, he finished with the Reds in the town he started with in 1976, playing under Pete Rose, who he had backed up when he came up.


Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket
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Posted


Sometimes. Torre said 'Blood was one of those guys "who paid a high price for his versatility." It's almost as though if he were a slightly worse athlete, managers wouldn;t be tempted to try him anywhere and he might have gotten a better chance to be a regular somewhere on the diamond.


Posted


Classic stuff is hard to get my hands on. Here's some contemporary Metpo. It's got better production quality, but lacks the nuance of the old-time character, plotting, and atmosphere found above.



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