I recall that in 1979 the very first pack of baseball cards that my dad ever bought me had the Vida Blue card shown above in it. Of course, I already knew who Vida Blue was since he was a product of Mansfield, Louisiana. When Blue was attending DeSoto High School, he was a football star in addition to a genius on the baseball field. Playing quarterback for a 10-2 DeSoto squad his senior year, Blue threw for 3,484 yards and 35 touchdowns and also ran for an additional 1,600 yards. Yet despite many football scholarship offers, Blue stuck with baseball and wound up playing 17 major league seasons with the Oakland A's, San Francisco Giants, and Kansas City Royals. A 3-time All-Star, Blue won both the 1971 American League Cy Young and MVP awards, finishing the year with an astonishing 1.82 ERA. Leading up to the A's winning back-to-back-to-back World Series championships from 1972-74, Blue became the fodder for r-n-b singer Albert Jones to record a song about him...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs_8KRZZd2Y
No comments:
Post a Comment