The major league baseball amateur draft occurred yesterday, the forty-first such draft I’ve lived through, not that I’ve ever paid much attention to any of them. Certainly I was least equipped to fathom the one that occurred in June 1968, when I was a two-month-old blob, so I didn’t understand then or for many years afterward that 1968 first round draft pick Bobby Valentine was, for a while at least, a superstar in the making.
From what I have read about him not only as a baseball player but as an all-around athlete (I think he was particularly good at basketball), the player from baseball history he seems to have most resembled in his golden early years was Pete Reiser, the legendary ambidextrous line-drive smashing speedsteer from the 1940s, whose probable Hall of Fame career was derailed by his penchant for smashing into outfield walls. Like Reiser, Valentine’s athletic ability seemed to suggest he was capable of playing any position on the diamond. Also as in the case of Reiser, it seems in retrospect that it would have been wise to confine Valentine to a position that would keep him away from walls—in 1973, while still in the formative stage of his career, Valentine wrecked his leg in a collision and entanglement with a chain-link fence while trying to catch a ball hit by Dick Green. Read the rest of this entry ?
Cardboard Gods 
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