1990 CMC, Tommy Shields

#21 Tommy Shields

This is a card that I got signed at Spring Training last year. Tommy is the manager of the Royals Rookie team in Burlington, North Carolina and I was able to get this card signed after the minor leaguers worked out the day I was there.

Since this was the only card I could find of Tommy, I assumed that he never made it to the Majors. Turned out that I was wrong. He played in two games with the Orioles in 1992 and then played in twenty games with the Cubs the following year.

In his two games with the O's, he was only used as a pinch runner. He never played the field or stepped into the batters box. Both times he pinch ran, he was running for Sam Horn. Sam pinch hit on both of those occasions and walked both times. Brady Anderson made the third out of each of those innings, preventing Tommy from scoring and recording an actual stat. Luckily, Tommy made the Cubs roster out of Spring Training the following season. It would have been sad to have played in two games and only been used as a pinch runner.

With the Cubs, Tommy hit .176 with 4 runs and an RBI. He played one more season for the Cubs AAA affiliate before retiring and moving on to coaching. He got his first managerial job in 1996 when he managed the Orioles Gulf Coast League team.

1989 Procards

#1679 Jay Bell

I got this card signed through the mail sometime in the early 90s when Jay was playing for those great Pirate teams. I don't really know why I sent a card to him at the time, since he didn't put up decent numbers until after he left Pittsburgh. Maybe I had an extra minor league card of him lying around that I wanted signed. I don't know. But, I'm glad that I did.

Unlike the last Procards card on here, this one wasn't part of a team set. But it still has a remarkably high number. I used to be able to find packs of this stuff at a local gas station around 1990. All of the cards were AAA players. This card and a Mark McGwire one are about the only decent cards that I got from this set.

Jay is best known for fathering a son that came up with the name for the Diamondback's mascot (which isn't even a snake).

This is really off topic, but, I love the name Buffalo Bisons. It's like saying the Automobile Cars or the Cougar Mountain Lions or the Father Padres or the Buccaneer Pirates or...I could go on and on about this, but I will just leave it at this. The Buffalo Bison's (and the Bills, for that matter) name is much better than the Buffalo Sabres. Nothing against the Sabres, but their name sucks. The only problem with the name is that the plural for bison is bison. So, it's like calling the Manitoba Moose the Mooses.