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.