NOBODY BEATS THE WIZ BOB FRIEND
When I was a kid, I felt betrayed by negative numbers.
Don’t get me wrong– I loved numbers at first. They helped bring order to the world, and the linear act of counting was very centering.
One, two, three. I have three Jerry Grote cards.
Then I went to school and we started learning the basic mathematic functions, which helped to provide a useful narrative overlay for daily events.
If I lose one of my Jerry Grote cards at church, I will then have two Jerry Grote cards.
In 2nd or 3rd grade, teachers started dropping hints about the existence of negative numbers. We scoffed in our 2nd or 3rd grade way, because the concept of less than zero just seemed absurd.
But time passes. Grandparents die. Parents too. One of the Tadler boys has trouble navigating his Camaro through a bend in the Washington Avenue tunnel, and your older brother loses his best friend.
Negative numbers gradually begin to make sense.
I went through a similar cycle of childhood betrayal and painful enlightenment when I first realized that there were players who had spent meaningful time with the Mets but never appeared on a Topps card wearing orange and blue.
Topps cards were my Encyclopedia Baseballica, and I trusted them to be complete and comprehensive. But I realized eventually that there were significant gaps in my education as a result of this fealty to the company.
Take Bob Friend, for example.
The former Pirates all-star spent the first half of the 1966 season with the Yankees, who in mid-June sold him to the Mets.
Friend was 35 years old, and in the final season of a career that would see him tally a 197-230 record. He threw 86 innings for the Mets, with the high point coming 49 years ago today, when he twirled a complete game shutout over Claude Osteen and the Dodgers.
But none of this activity resulted in a Topps card picturing Friend with the Mets. His 1966 card shows him with the Yankees, and his release by the Mets in October of that year led to his retirement, ruling out an appearance in the following year’s set.
In my mind’s eye I can see the 1967 Topps Bob Friend card. He is posed in centerfield at old Shea, the August afternoon sun casting a shadow that bisects his face, as he stares off into the distance looking for a signal that will never come. I flip the card over and see a long line of stats stretching back to 1951, along with a couple of comics covering his ERA title in 1955 and his 20-win season in 1958. And up there in the top left corner I can see the card number: -1.
I enjoyed this.
I guess the flip side is that I’ll never forget the two innings Dean Chance pitched for the Mets in 1970 because of his ’71 card.
Always love your card stories Doug. Awesome read.
Bob Friend…Dean Chance… Nice Pitchers!
Josh Wilker wrote a pretty terrific book, Cardboard Gods, in which he used old baseball cards as the organizing structure in his memoir.
Each short chapter would begin with a card, like Bob Friend above, and he’d then tell a biographical story that may or may not loosely relate to the card. For example, in this case, he might have expanded greatly on the single most interesting sentence of this post: “One of the Tadler boys has trouble navigating his Camaro through a bend in the Washington Avenue tunnel, and your older brother loses his best friend.”
It was just a very cool idea, to use cards as a springboard for storytelling.
You should read it, Doug. Maybe it will give you an idea or two.
Thanks James. It’s funny– I’ve owned a copy of Cardboard Gods for years, but I’ve never read it. My sense has been that it probably does a version of what I’m trying to do so much better than I do it, that reading it would be a dispiriting/paralyzing experience.
Mind you, I realize that this is an unhealthy, unproductive attitude, but welcome to my brain…
Bob has one of the more interesting records in baseball being the winningest pitcher in baseball history with a losing record, 197-230. I will always remember him relieving Vernon Law for a victory in relief in the 19th inning after Fred Haney, the manager pinch hit for Law with the score 2-2 in the 18th. Friend gave up what appeared to be the winning run to the Braves with Eddie Matthews and Hank Aaron and the Pirates scored 2 in the bottom of the 19th to give Friend the victory. He was a big favorite here in Pittsburgh and still lives here.