Trading Cards

Princeton baseball coach Scott Bradley tweeted out a picture of George Brett under the words "Monday Mentors" earlier this week.

Bradley said this about Brett: "He mentored an entire generation of players just by the way in which he played the game!"

Brett played 21 Major League seasons, all with the Kansas City Royals, whom he led to the 1985 World Series championship. He was a 13-time all-star and three-time American League batting champion, not to mention a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer with 98.2 percent of the vote. 

Among his long list of accomplishments, he's one of only four Major League players ever with at least 3,000 hits, 300 home runs and a .300 career batting average. Can you guess the other three? TigerBlog will give you until the end today to figure it out.  

Another interesting fact about Brett is that he's one of only 18 players in Major League history to have played at least 20 seasons, all with the same team. The record is 23, held by both Brooks Robinson (Baltimore) and Carl Yastrzemski (Boston). To show you how rare it is these days, only four players among the 18 played at all during this century, and two of them finished their careers in 2001 (Tony Gwynn with San Diego and Cal Ripken Jr. with Baltimore). The other two are Craig Biggio (Houston) and Derek Jeter (NY Yankees). Yadier Molina is the active player with the longest such streak, as he is in his 17th year with the Cardinals. 

Brett played from 1973 through 1993, which meant he was active during Bradley's entire career (1984-92). Other than five games with Cincinnati in his final season, Bradley played the rest of his career in the American League, which means that he and Brett crossed paths a lot. 

Though Bradley came up with the Yankees, he did so a year too late to have been a part of Brett's most famous home run, the Pine Tar home run of 1983. If all you know about Brett is the way he charged out of the dugout when his home run was disallowed (but later restored, forcing the game to be continued from that point), well, then you have a sense of how hard Brett played at all times.

Later on Monday, during a head coaches' Zoom, TigerBlog sent a message to Bradley through the chat saying that Brett had been his favorite player when he was younger. He was going to say that Brett was his favorite baseball player of all-time, but he'd have to qualify that by saying "other than Princetonians who played in Major League Baseball."

While the subject is Princeton baseball and the Major Leagues, Steven Feldman is the Class of 1968 historian, and he sent this to TigerBlog, one historian to another:

“Since we are in the heart of the Major League Baseball season, here are nine baseball cards representing most of the Major League baseball cards that have been issued for players who played baseball at Princeton. One card missing is the famous Moe Berg who played Major League ball in the 1930s and 1940s.  He also worked as a spy for the United States. Today, Berg’s 1933 Goudey baseball card is worth hundreds of dollars. The Princeton player on the card with three players is Bob Tufts. The two players who are currently active are Mike Ford of the Yankees and David Hale of the Phillies. The other players shown are Dave Sisler, Chris Young, Ross Ohlendorf,  Will Venable,  Danny Barnes, and Matt Bowman."

Now that's pretty cool stuff.

One slight correction is that Berg played in the Major Leagues from 1923 until his retirement 16 years later. His final Major League game was on Sept. 1, 1939 – and you probably know what else happened that day.

In fact, Berg became more famous for being a spy in World War II than he had been as a baseball player. There have been books and movies about his role in the war, including his map-making of Tokyo before the war while barnstorming there and then his work in uncovering the process the Germans were making towards an atomic bomb.

The answer to the trivia question is Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Stan Musial. That's extraordinary company. 

If, like TigerBlog, you wondered about Joe DiMaggio, he had the home runs (361) and the batting average (.325) but not the hits (2,214).

(note, TB originally wrote Babe Ruth instead of Willie Mays. Ruth did not have 3,000 hits).