Vida Blue Lives! (Split from Baseball Passings 2013)

[batmagadanleadoff]

I had Vida Blue running away with [ROY] in the A.L., unaware he was not eligible.

Around that time, but at least one year after your school essay, Sports Phone's Quickie Quiz of the Day asked its' callers to identify the youngest Cy Young Award winner ever. It's currently Doc Gooden but at the time of that quiz, the correct answer was Vida Blue for his spectacular '71 season. When Sports Phone revealed that Dean Chance was the youngest CYA winner, I called in to correct them (after not getting initial credit for my right answer).

I still remember that episode.

A National story:




cover illustration by country's then top commercial artist
Bob Peak, at his peak

[G-Fafif]

batmagadanleadoff wrote:

I had that book. Bought it at the East School book fair in third grade (after my composition). Read the hell out of it. On a handful of occasions in my life I've trimmed my baseball library, usually of season preview books and works I didn't much care for in the first place. That's in the handful I wish I'd saved. Not out of any great need to reference it for research, but because it was Vida Blue, baseball's new pitching sensation.

[Edgy MD]

And this is perhaps my favorite SI cover of all time:



Guy looks like a baseball god. I got the idea that if you put that magazine cover on the mound with the A's behind it, you had better 'n' a 50% chance of getting the win.

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

Just to clarify that despite his presence in this thread, Vida Blue is still among the living, correct?

[G-Fafif]

Mets � Willets Point wrote: Just to clarify that despite his presence in this thread, Vida Blue is still among the living, correct?

Vida = "Life" in Spanish. So yeah, as far as we know.

[Frayed Knot]

For a time there 'Vida Blue' was the answer to a number of trivia questions, to the point where there was a sort of mantra among trivia buffs that if you didn't know the answer to something then it was best to just guess Vida Blue.
Stuff like: 'Last switch hitter to win the MVP' was one of the favorites. (like youngest CY, it was true at the time but has since been updated).


I worked briefly a whole bunch of years ago with a guy who had been a Vida Blue fan solely on the basis that he shared the distinction of having the last name of Blue (funny how Green, Black, White, and Brown are quite common as last names while all other colors are virtually unheard of). He then went on to explain that the story behind his name involved his father, a first generation Jewish New Yorker named Isadora Bluestein, simply shortening the family name in an attempt to spare his children future discrimination following his being kept out of both the NYC fire & police departments despite scoring very highly on the tests.

[stevejrogers]

Mets � Willets Point wrote: Just to clarify that despite his presence in this thread, Vida Blue is still among the living, correct?

I had the same reaction looking at the first post on this page. Yeah, someone split this...faster than Vida's fastball!

[seawolf17]

Didn't he have VIDA on the back of jersey for a little while?

[Benjamin Grimm]

I think he did when he was in San Francisco. Not sure about in Oakland.

[Edgy MD]

But also this.

[Valadius]

Sports Phone? What?

[G-Fafif]

seawolf17 wrote: Didn't he have VIDA on the back of jersey for a little while?

In the book mentioned upthread, the story was told of how Charlie Finley, who turned Jim Hunter into Catfish, wanted Vida to change his first name to True. "The broadcast boys will call you True Blue," the owner said to the prodigy. Somehow, Vida (named for his father) declined.

[Frayed Knot]

Any others that we know of aside from Vida and Ichiro?

[batmagadanleadoff]

Andy didn't change his name to Channel, but still:






and ....

[Edgy MD]

[Guest Swan Swan H]

Johnnie LeMaster, who was tired of hearing it from the crowd.