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Wednesday, February 22, 2012

1965 Topps AL Rookie Stars

By the time they got to the high series, Topps had so many rookie stars they couldn't fit 'em all on the team rookie cards. Here's a AL rookie Stars card featuring Darold Knowles, lefty reliever who pitched 16 years for 6 different teams. Seven if you choose to differentiate the Washington Senators and Texas Rangers.


Richie Scheinblum had almost as many uniform numbers as Darold as he bounced around to six different teams in his eight-year career.


Don Buschhorn pitched in 12 games for the Athletics as a 19 year old and never pitched in the majors again. The year before he was in A-ball. The year after he was in Double-A, and would not advance higher. A team would never EVER bring up a 19 year old kid from A-ball to the bigs in one year nowadays, would they? They'd at least make a token effort to rush him through at least Double-A first. I've seen a couple of kids in the '60s brought up for a cup of coffee when they were a teenager never to be seen in the majors again while looking up these players. I really want to know what the deal with these cases was now. Was it a bonus thing? Did the kid catch the GM in a bar with some floozy? Did they not really know about/care about prospect development back then? Have baseball talent evaluators turned into a bunch of over analytical stat-obsessed weenies who demand that prospects are just so before they can play in the bigs due to complicated roster rules and arbitration time clocks? Of course the average age on my favorite team if you drop Huddy, Chipper and Uggla is about 22 and a half, so maybe at least in my neck of the woods the kids are getting to play like in the '60s.

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