Wednesday, April 24, 2013

#123 Lou Whitaker, Tigers



Card Front: What a beauty of a card! We find Lou in action during a game as visitors at Yankee Stadium. Obviously Lou hit some kind of ball and is busting out of the left side batter's box for first base. I love the look of the tighter uniforms and the stripes on the top of the stirrups is SO CLASSIC!! You can even see his teammates in the dugout looking to see if the hit will get through. There is still nothing better than day baseball.

Card Back: We see the beginnings of what should have been a Hall of Fame career. Lou won the Rookie of the Year in 1978 for the American League. He was a five time All Star, and three time Gold Glove winner. Lou and Alan Trammell made up one of the best double play combinations in the 80's. Lou had great numbers defensively and was great with the bat too, but was only able to muster 2.9% of the vote in 2001. Conversely, a guy like Roberto Alomar had very similar career numbers and got into the hall.

Six degrees or less to Seattle: Lou was one of those guys that I love that stayed with one team his whole career. During the 1992 season in the Motor City, Lou would team up with Kevin Ritz. Kevin saw time in 151 games in his career with the Tigers and Rockies. During Kevin's next to last season in 1997, one of his Mile High teammates was John Thomson who was a rookie for the boys in purple and silver. John was a bit of a nomad playing for 5 different teams in 10 seasons. During John's time as an Atlanta Brave in 2004, he shared locker room space with Nick Green. Nick is another nomad seeing time in 11 organizations and playing in the big leagues for 8 teams. In the 2007 season, Nick saw time in 6 games as a Mariner before leaving after the season to be in the Yankees minor leagues.

Blog related to the team: The Tigers are a long, and storied franchise. It surprises me that they don't have more fans in the blog world. One that I have recently found is doing an outstanding job. I hope that you have all gotten a chance in the last few months to check the home of Hot Corner Cards. He is working on a project similar to mine where he wants to collect all the Tigers cards out there. If you have some extras Detroit cards go over and see if you can help, and tell him I sent you.

Next Card: #124 Dan Schatzeder, Expos

3 comments:

bigbern28 said...

slick card, awesome player, great post!!!

Commishbob said...

Somehow I never appreciated Whitaker when he was playing. Not sure why that was. But he sure had a nice career as I look back on it.

Nice card.

Dhoff said...

2.9%...so aggravating. Well, at least today he had two bloggers talking about one of his cards. Great post, sir.