?ħ0’s MLB: In 71 i turned 27 and was as far away as i’d ever get from giving a rap about baseball. Not that I would have necessarily made the team, but I could have least have tried out. I focused on playing on school basketball teams, and never tried out for my high school baseball team. I only played a couple of seasons of little league and that was pretty much it for me regarding organized baseball. I have no idea where that mitt is now, but I wore it down to a frazzle, mostly in pick-up games, in an era when baseball pick-up games even existed. And my first mitt had his autograph stamped on it. He would be better appreciated if he was playing in the SABR era.īonds was my main Giant, too. 323Īnd his power numbers gave him a real good OPS just about every year. His OBP was solid throughout his career until near the end.: Bonds’ average could fluctuate, but he took walks and got some hit-by-pitches.
People thought his 189 season strikeout record would last forever, and now it doesn’t even make the MLB history top 10 list. Yeah, Bonds caught some grief for his strikeouts in those days, in the pre-SABR years, when the strikeout had so much stigma. It’s too bad Giants for all their HOF guys couldn’t win more in the 60s in NL golden era, and after this things just got worse. I could never do Fuentes bat flip but I tried to imitate Bonds stance all the time. His avg used to go up and down but just his stance was intimidating–he held bat angled just slightly away from him at the top and then whipped it around. He hit 180 HRs in 6 years with great slugging and ran and threw with abandon. He struck out a lot and often looked bad on breaking balls, but he had all 5 tools. Kingman, who in his younger days could run well but was a terrible 3b.īonds was my hero though.
Bryant won 23 games couple years later and then fell off map.ĭirty Al and Fuentes on the IF plus the young Speier, and the young George Foster, just another in a long long line of top flight black and latin OFs. Steve Stone in his younger days, Steve Hamilton who had a lot of good years as a Yankee at end of career. And now that the SF Giants won rings in 20, I can thank the ’71 team for helping to set the stage.Ĭool thread, and thx for link flav.
Not a World Series winner, unfortunately but still a pretty cool team in my mind. I had been through a lot with them in that ’71 season. So, here’s to the ’71 team. But I now had a shared history with the Giants. Of course, that season ultimately ended in disappointment, and we had no way of knowing that the Giants wouldn’t make the playoffs again until SIXTEEN years later. Lon’s call for a Giants’ homerun, on paper, doesn’t sound like much: “You can TELL it goodbye!” But it was the hoarse crackle in his voice or something. He was obviously awesome, and the world of Giants baseball enveloped me that summer. Certainly the A’s were winning more in those days. Who knows- if the awful Monte Moore hadn’t been the A’s broadcaster, there’s a chance I could have ended up an A’s fan. It was only last season, as I was walking along that really cool walk-of-history on the McCovey statue side of the Cove, which has plaques with the starting lineups from the first game of each SF Giants season, that I was reminded that Hal Lanier started at shortstop that first day of the season, and Speier took over later at some point.īut as much as anything, it was Lon Simmon’s play-by-play that drew me in. Obviously there were other players on the team, but these are the guys from the ’71 team that stick in my mind. Ken Henderson is retired in Pennsylvania, or not. My relatively quick and unimpressive research also shows that Tito Fuentes is a Spanish language broadcaster for the Giants, as he has been for years Chris Speier is some kind of special assistant for the Reds Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Juan Marichal rule the world as baseball royalty Gaylord Perry rules his own particular world of retirement somewhere in North Carolina Alan Gallagher and Hal Lanier may or may not still be managing obscure independent minor league teams in towns only slightly bigger than Bodie, Calif. I was curious about the current whereabouts of the ’71 team the team that created a Giants fan out of me. And we lost Bobby Bonds in 2003 and Dick Dietz in 2005. Dodgers, and collapsed with a heart attack and passed away. In 1987, Don McMahon was pitching batting practice to the L.A.