'21-'22 Sheffield Wednesday FC

What are you doing?

And who in their right mind would think that's Harold Baines? Baines never played in Seattle, and looks nothing like that. It's definitely Alvin Davis. Played in those mid-80s teams with Phil Bradley and Harold Reynolds. Good player, Davis.

 

Mattingly, by the way, had only about three or four years of the caliber one associates with 'Donny Baseball'. After his back injuries, he was pretty much bang average. He only played about a dozen years, in the end - years sandwiched nicely between the Yankee pennant-winners of '76-'81 and the great Yankee teams of the late 90s, so he never really won squat. After his first four or so years, he looked a dead-on lock for Cooperstown, but it all went south pretty quickly.

... kinda like Dwight Gooden, only his downfall was not his back, but crack.

 

But Jim Kern?

Jim Kern wouldn't be worth posting about in a Jim Kern thread.

 

You spelled 'hideous' precisely right.

That dude is all over the place. And a whole lot of what he's labeling as polyester are flannels.

Lastly, I have to wonder why Davey Lopes has blacked out both of the Rawlings patches on his glove. Perhaps he had a sponsorship contract with a competing manufacturer for shoes or some other equipment. Still, it's just weird.

 

Water levels are really high as the Don River runs by the South Stand at Hillsborough. From a video clip I've just seen, it looks to bo only a couple of feet from breaching it's banks and flooding the stadium. And with continuing rains forecast, it seems more than likely. We've seen the hillsborough pitch under water in recent memory, so it doesn't stretch the imagination.

Just when Wednesday appeared to have a bit of momentum going, it was squelched by the covid delay. Now that it seems to be coming together again, is another delay just around the corner? Fingers crossed for Wednesday and a lot of property owners in S6.

 

That's definitely Kurt Bevaqua, but I swear I have no recollection of him ever being with the Mariners.

 

I've looked it up, and apparently Bevacqua was signed by the Mariners in their initial expansion draft and played with them in Spring training, but was released before the season started, opting to go with Craig Reynolds instead. So he technically never played a regular season game with Seattle.

However, according to wiki, Topps put out a 1977 baseball card with Bevacqua as a Mariner (and I'd guess that's the photo). What's weird about that (at least to me) is that 1977 was prime baseball card-collecting age for me, and if Bevacqua had a Topps card as a Mariner, I'd think that I would have some recollection of him as a Mariner from that alone - even if I never saw him actually play as a Mariner. And yet my instant reaction to seeing that photo was "Bevacqua on the Mariners? That's not right."

edit:

ok, I've gone and done a bit more research. My presumption that the photo posted was the one used on his Topps card was wrong (but it does have that posed, baseball card look, doesn't it?). This, however, was his card from '77:


So now it makes a little bit more sense, as that's not a Mariners uni (it's a Brewers jersey with the cap photoshopped [or the 70s equivalent thereof]) and there's no reason to think that I ever actually saw him as a Mariner. Hell, without the moustache, that doesn't even look like Bevacqua, anyway (or at least not in my memory). At any rate, it's all academic, as Kurt Bevacqua will always be first and foremost known as the major league baseball bubblegum blowing champion.

And with that, I'm closing the book on Kurt Bevacqua. If this thread's going to continue going down the path of mediocre mid-70s baseball players, it should at least make it lovable ones, like Jorge Orta or Bombo Rivera.