(Here’s to the Nameless, Faceless Guys in Every Pack of Baseball Cards)
“Yeah, I was in the show. I was in the show for 21 days once – the 21 greatest days of my life. You know, you never handle your luggage in the show, somebody else carries your bags. It was great. You hit white balls for batting practice, the ballparks are like cathedrals, the hotels all have room service, and the women all have long legs and brains.” – Crash Davis, Bull Durham
The particulars of any random Major League baseball game aren’t very consequential and those from the Sunday afternoon game on September 28, 1980, at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota between the Minnesota Twins and Kansas City Royals were no different. But, like almost any Major League baseball game, there are stories abound if you look beyond the surface. The Twins would defeat the Royals 8-7, but that’s not what we’re here for.
Like 99% of all major league baseball games, the details of this contest have long ago floated away, lost to the ephemera and the windswept nature of time gone by.
The final highlight was Twins second baseman Rob Wilfong doubling off Royals reliever extraordinaire Dan Quisenberry in the bottom of the seventh, scoring catcher Butch Wynegar with the winning run, completing a rousing four-run comeback to extend the Twins winning streak to nine games, on their way to twelve straight victories, the second-longest streak in franchise history, behind only the 15-game streak put together by the World Champion 1991 team (and immortalized in the 1992 movie, “A Few Good Men”). But that’s not what we’re here for either.
For the Royals it was an eighth straight loss, which, at the time, tied the longest losing streak in team history. (*For hardcore baseball fans there are almost always mysteries, vagaries, coincidences, anomalies in the numbers. This eight-game losing skid tied streaks from 1971 and 1974, both of which ended with wins over… the Minnesota Twins.) *(Recognizable to any Twins fan in the 1970s: The Royals 2-1 win over the Twins that snapped their eight-game skid in 1971 was in the first game of a day-night doubleheader in which the Twins would open the first inning of the afternoon game with a run produced by three straight singles from Cesar Tovar, Rod Carew, and Tony Oliva. They would go scoreless for the next 17 innings, losing the nightcap 3-0. For the Met Stadium faithful, if you missed the first inning of the first game, you watched 15 scoreless innings before the Royals put up three in the 8th inning of the nightcap.)
(Recognizable to any Royals fan: this particular losing streak would come to end two days later at home against the Seattle Mariners. Down 5-4 in the bottom of the 14th, George Brett would hit a bomb into the right field seats with two on to win 7-5 in walk off fashion.)
Anyway, back to 1980.
In late May of 1980 I’d received a package in the mail that was the most exciting thing I’d ever gotten or ever will get. I was in 9th grade and two months earlier I’d acted on an add I’d seen near the back of The Sporting News. The Renata Galasso company was offering the full set of Topps baseball cards for $17.99. The same add had popped up over the last couple of springs, but the asking price was way too much for this grade school kid. I spent probably twice that much each year on packs of baseball cards, but in increments of three or four packs at a time.
All the cards all at once? A baseball card fanatic’s dream.
I think I pushed my 14 dollars of life savings all in and my saint of a mother covered the rest and wrote out a check and I mailed it off to this New York company in mid-March. It was a different world back then, you couldn’t just make a couple clicks on Amazon and have a delivery before the sun set. “Expect 8-10 weeks for delivery,” seemed a more than reasonable request for such a prize, but trust me, those two months trudged by.
Then one day in late May, I got home from baseball practice and I was met with a smile from my mom. My package had arrived. OMG x a million. There isn’t anything on earth that could show up at my door right now and get me even half as excited. I opened the box as if I was handling the Shroud of Turin.
There is a romantic version of getting all the cards in a set by buying pack after pack after pack. I certainly understood the thrill of opening your 50th pack of the spring and FINALLY getting that Rod Carew card. I’m not sure there’s a reasonable analogy in adult life.
But this was all the cards all at once. It was better than I even thought it would be.
The first six cards of the set were “in-action” highlight cards from the 1979 season. The sixth “highlight” card was of the Phillies Del Unser, who’d hit home runs on three consecutive pinch-hit appearances, just the second time that had been done in baseball history (the first was Lee Lacy, just a year before). I played golf with Del 22 years later at Talking Stick in Scottsdale and I’m bummed I didn’t remember that stat. He was super cool, appreciated the fact that me and my brother-in-law knew who he was, and we had a great time playing as a threesome. He was everything you’d want out of a retired former pro baseball player: a scout for the Phillies, tan, carefree, obvious athlete, out playing golf by himself in Scottsdale.
The cards started zipping through my hands. A lot of nameless, faceless guys and then boom: Johnny Bench. More nameless, faceless guys and then boom: Reggie Jackson.
Good god, was this fun. There were 726 cards in the set. When you look back now, there are more nameless, faceless guys than you might think, or remember. Balor Moore, Ed Putnam, Larry Harlow, Tony Brizzolara. As a seasoned handler of baseball cards, you learn to zip by these guys pretty quickly. Some of them would become semi-famous in your group because you’d get 12 of their cards before you ever got a Rickey Henderson card.
“I’ll trade you 10 Tony Brizzolara cards for Cecil Cooper.”
“Nice try.”
Topps Inc. made some assumptions that didn’t quite pan out. Joel Finch, Ralph Botting, and Sandy Wihtol were “Future Stars”? Future members of the nameless, faceless at best.
Here’s the deal though, and I’ll ask Charlie Brown to forgive me if I’m stealing one of his bits. If you have a f-ing baseball card of yourself?!? Your life is better than most. You might be a member of the nameless and faceless to some 14-year-old in Minnesota, but you’ve got a freaking Topps baseball card of yourself? Better than most. These two guys might not be Charlie Brown’s Joe Shlabotnik, but they are, in fact, what we’re here for.
Would you believe one of these nameless, faceless guys holds an MLB record?
The night I got my full set of 1979 Topps baseball cards, I went to see The Empire Strikes Back with a couple of my brothers and sisters. For a fourteen-year-old, that was a pretty good day.
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Another part of baseball’s mysteries, vagaries, etc., is that the numbers can always be deceiving. This Twins team, winners of 12-straight games, had started the season 54-71 and saw their tired, defeated manager, 55-year-old Gene Mauch, resign from his position on August 24. The Royals, losers of eight straight games? They went 97-65 to win the A.L. West by 14 games and go on to demolish the 103-win New York Yankees 3-0 for the A.L. pennant before bowing to the Philadelphia Phillies (and my guy Del Unser) in the World Series four games to two.
The Royals were led by the aforementioned George Brett, a 27-year-old third baseman who would flirt with a .400 batting average for much of the summer, before finishing at .390 and winning the A.L. MVP award.
Brett wasn’t in the lineup on this yawning Sunday afternoon, but would certainly flex his MVP cred in the sixth inning. In the managerial ping pong that can induce so many Sunday channel flips, Royals manager Jim Frey sent out right-hander Jose Cardenal to pinch hit for the big lefty first baseman Ken Phelps with the bases loaded. Twins’ interim manager Johnny Goryl countered by sending in righthander Pete Redfern to replace his lefty on the mound, Mike Kinnunen.
Frey said, “fine, I’ll see your right-hander and raise with my lefty bat who happens to be flirting with .400.” Advantage Frey.
Brett took Redfern deep, deep into the right field bleachers for a pinch-hit, grand slam. That’s what guys who win MVP awards do. That’s why you’re overjoyed when you pull a George Brett card in your pack of baseball cards.
Now, you can read about George Brett anywhere. And if you’re a baseball fan that last tidbit probably made you do three things – revel in the wonder of George Brett, smile at the memory of Jose Cardenal, and wonder, “who the hell is Mike Kinnunen?”
Brett’s heroics were in the sixth inning, and if you’ll recall, this essay is titled, “5th Inning…”
You see, it was the 5th inning that roused the ghost of Joe Shlabotnik, and unveiled vagaries and details lost to the winds of time. The six outs in the fifth inning of this long-forgotten ballgame were recorded by two nobodies completely lost to the ephemera, Craig Chamberlain and Mike Kinnunen.
Version 1.0.0
Now is probably a good time to go back and read that quote from the fictional Crash Davis at the top of this page.
Here’s another fictional quote from the very real Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, who played in one major league baseball game for the New York Giants on June 29, 1905.
“We just don’t recognize life’s most significant moments while they’re happening. Back then I thought, ‘Well, there’ll be other days.’ I didn’t realize that that was the only day.”
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Craig Philip Chamberlain was born on February 2, 1957, in Hollywood, California. He was born four months before my oldest brother, Woody. I tell you that to give you a frame of reference. My brother Woody was a baseball prodigy. A big, athletic youngster, his arrival at youth baseball games at Linden Hills Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the late 60’s and into the 70’s was always greeted with raucous cheers from his adoring teammates, “Have no fear, WOODY IS HERE!” Woody lit up Linden Hills and several other neighboring parks with prodigious home runs and blazing fast balls.
Woody’s bat and overall baseball skills led him to play ball at the University of Minnesota, a freshman on the Paul Molitor-led Gopher team that made it all the way to the College World Series.
Woody was a neighborhood baseball god who made it pretty far in the sport. Unlike today, every neighborhood across America in the 1960s and 1970s had a baseball god. Not every neighborhood had a Craig Chamberlain.
Craig Chamberlain made it to the show.
As a ninth-grader at Los Alamitos High School, Chamberlain was the MVP of the Griffins’ baseball, football and basketball teams in the same year. An outstanding linebacker and quarterback on the gridiron, he starred at third base on the diamond. “Any pitcher will tell you this, but nobody could hit as good as me,” he recalled to SABR in 2020.
As a senior in high school, Chamberlain was the starting quarterback and made the Orange County AAAA all county football team. He had a 6-2 record for the baseball team, highlighted by a 2-homer, four shutout inning start. Though he saw himself as a third baseman first, it was his right arm that held his baseball future.
Sprinkled throughout his sterling athletic career were an alarming number of injuries. Four broken arms and torn knee ligaments led to him going undrafted in baseball following his senior year of high school in 1975. Stops at three junior colleges and the slow dissolve from third baseman to pitcher were part of the journey.
A 15-2 record and All-Southern California honors led to the Mets drafting him in 1977. He chose to accept a scholarship and pitch for the Arizona Wildcats instead. He went 10-1 for the Wildcats with a 2.26 ERA. One of the best starting pitchers in all of college baseball. The injury bug hit again though — a stress fracture kept him from pitching in the Regional Final, a heartbreaking loss against a USC team that would go on to win the College World Series.
Two days after the announcement of his stress fracture, no team selected Chamberlain in the regular MLB draft, but the Royals took him with the second pick of the secondary phase of the draft. He couldn’t pitch the rest of that summer because of the injury but reported early the next spring to the Royals brand new “minicamp” for rookies and rehab players.
“We considered the cost of our camp as money well spent because we found Craig Chamberlain,” GM Joe Burke remarked a year later. “Our manager and coaches knew little about him.”
“None of the hitters wanted to face him in batting practice,” skipper Whitey Herzog noticed. “He wasn’t wild, just mean with his stuff.” Catcher Darrell Porter said, “I caught him in spring training, and I was impressed with him then as much as with anybody else I saw. His fastball moves as good as any I’ve seen.”
Being in spring training with the three-time defending AL West champions boosted Chamberlain’s confidence. “When I got my first close look at major league players, I said to myself, ‘Well, maybe you’re closer than you think’,” he said.
Chamberlain started his professional baseball career in AA with the Jacksonville Suns. After a rough 4-8 start, he went 7-0 in July, including a one-hitter and a 34 and 2/3 innings scoreless streak that ended one out from tying the Southern League record. Two weeks after his streak ended, the Royals called him up to the big leagues, and on August 12, 1979, he made his major league debut against the Detroit Tigers, starting in front of 32,671 fans at Kaufman Stadium in Kansas City.
The kid who broke his arm four times between 7th grade and his senior year was about to start a game in the big leagues.
Chamberlain carried a shutout into the 9th inning and scattered six hits in posting a complete game victory. Record: 1-0.
Start 2: Versus three-time Cy Young winner and future Hall of Famer Jim Palmer and the Baltimore Orioles, owners of the best record in the American League. Pressure? Chamberlain fired a 3-hitter, again going all nine innings in a 7-1 Royals win. The Baltimore Sun said Chamberlain “simply overmatched the Birds” with a “blazing fastball.” Record: 2-0.
Start 3: Versus another future Hall of Famer, Dennis Eckersley (still a starter at the time, and 16-6 on the season). Pressure? Eckersley went eight strong innings, but Chamberlain was better, posting another complete game in a 4-2 win. Record: 3-0.
Three complete game wins. Two against future Hall of Famers.
Lights f-ing out.
How good was this career start for Craig Chamberlain? Two of the most ballyhooed beginnings to pitching careers in Major League history occurred within five years of each other, on either side of Chamberlain’s debut.
Mark Fidrych of the Detroit Tigers in 1976 and Fernando Valenzuela in 1981 for the Los Angeles Dodgers both made titanic splashes in not only baseball, but in pop culture. Both Sports Illustrated cover boys, both with songs sung about them, both forever etched in the annals of baseball lore. For the three games to begin his career, Chamberlain was every bit their equal.
In his fourth start, the Brewers handed Chamberlain his first loss, and five days later he pitched eight sterling innings at Yankee Stadium, only to have the Royals bullpen blow the game in the ninth and tenth innings.
The time from Chamberlain’s big-league debut to the gem at Yankee Stadium spanned 22 days. And, to borrow from Crash Davis’ quote at the top of this essay, it’s not hard to hear Chamberlain saying, “the 22 greatest days of my life.”
Alas, this is a Joe Shlabotnik story, not a George Brett story. Shooting stars don’t light up the sky for very long.
Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, who captivated the nation in the bicentennial summer of 1976 as a 21-year-old, was out of baseball by age 26. Fernando Valenzuela remains a Mexican baseball legend, and had a long career, but never again reached the heights of his Cy Young, Rookie of the Year beginning.
Craig Chamberlain?
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Michael John Kunninen was born April 1, 1958 in Seattle, Washington. He starred at Lincoln High School as a lefty pitcher and stayed home to pitch for the Washington State Cougars in college.
Kunninen pitched well at WSU and after his sophomore year was chosen to play on Team USA in the 1978 Amateur World Series. Kinnunen starred for the silver-medal winning USA (Cuba took gold), going 3-0 with a 0.45 ERA, allowing just one earned run in 20 1/3rd innings, striking out 17 and firing two shutouts. Terry Francona and Tim Wallach were the hitting stars for the team and would both go on to long big-league careers.
That showing and three solid years at Washington State led to the Minnesota Twins drafting Kunninen in the 10th round of the 1979 draft. The Twins fast tracked him to the majors in 1980 as a middle reliever, and he made his big-league debut on June 12 against the Detroit Tigers. Kinnunen pitched 2 and 1/3 innings and got no decision.
The 21-year-old would pitch in 21 games for the Twins that season, all in relief. He was far from great, but not necessarily terrible either, posting a little too high ERA of 5.11.
On the afternoon of September 28, 1980, Kinnunen would relieve Twins starter Roger Erickson in the third inning after Erickson had given up three straight singles. He ended the third with no damage and got the Royals out in order in both the fourth and fifth innings. In the sixth inning he gave up back-to-back singles to Willie Aikens and Darrell Porter, and got Amos Otis to fly out before walking Hal McRae. He was pulled for Pete Redfern, who was brought in to face pinch hitter Jose Cardenal, who, as we mentioned, gave way to George Brett.
Kinnunen would make another nondescript outing for the Twins the following Saturday, in a 17-1 loss to the Royals on the second to last day of the season. His last pitch as a Minnesota Twin was lined up the middle for a single by, (guess who?) George Brett, on October 4, 1980. He wouldn’t throw another pitch in the major leagues for over 2,000 days.
In the time between big league pitches, Kinnunen pitched for teams in…. deep breath… Toledo, Louisville, Arkansas, Wichita, Memphis, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Omaha, and Rochester. The Twins sent him to the minors out of camp in 1981 and he didn’t make it back to the bigs until the Orioles called him up in 1986. He pitched in middle relief for the Birds nine times in 1986 and 18 times in 1987.
I promise I’m not trying to be mean, but with that many minor leagues stops and the role he filled, middle relief, he’s very forgettable. It’s almost like he wasn’t there at all.
But he was there, and because baseball is constantly blessing its followers with uncanny minutia, he even has a major league record to prove it. It might be the perfect record for one of the nameless, faceless baseball card guys to own. You want lost in the ephemera? Nobody has ever pitched in more games in the big leagues (48) and have zero decisions to show for it. No record at all. No wins. No losses. No saves. No blown saves. 0-0 with a 5.11 ERA and a career WAR of -0.5. Nothing but ephemera.
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Things didn’t go quite as well for Craig Chamberlain in 1979 following his remarkable first 22 days. He lost his last three starts of the season, including a late season loss to the California Angels that ended the Royals three-year run of division titles. Rod Carew hit a bad-hop single to left to secure the first playoff appearance in Angels history in front of 40,000 at Anaheim Stadium — in Orange County, where Chamberlain grew up.
Chamberlain went to camp in 1980 full of hope, not so far removed from his sterling Major League start the previous summer. The Royals had a new manager in 1980, Jim Frey, who replaced Whitey Herzog. Not as familiar with Chamberlain, Frey made him the last cut out of spring training, instead giving the last pitching spot to rehabbing veteran Steve Busby.
Chamberlain spent the summer as a workhorse for the Royals AAA affiliate in Omaha, going 11-10 with a 4.76 ERA before getting called up in September. The Royals had a double digit lead in games in the AL West and the best record in the majors when they called him up. He made five appearances, all in relief and pitched less than 10 innings.
On Sunday, September 28, 1980 he would take the mound at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota in the middle of the 5th inning after starter Paul Splittorff had given up two singles and a walk. After getting Roy Smalley to hit a sacrifice fly to right, Chamberlain intentionally walked Glen Adams to fill the bases. Twins’ catcher Butch Wynegar then hit a screamer of a line drive, right at first baseman Ken Phelps, who stepped on first to complete the double play.
Craig Chamberlain walked off the mound and toward the Royals dugout not knowing what he knows now, or he might have savored it for a moment or two. It was the last pitch Chamberlain would ever throw in the big leagues.
The 22-year old rookie who’d entered the league like a lightening bolt the summer before was done. Poof. Swept away to the winds of time. It wasn’t an injury, though he’d suffered more than his share. He’d toil through eight minor league seasons over the years, and end his baseball career pitching for an Independent League team as a 38-year-old in 1995. Nobody is ever promised the big leagues.
Brett’s pinch-hit grand slam and the Twins seventh-inning rally pretty much made everything that happened previously in the game entirely forgettable. But let the record show that the fifth inning, on September 28, 1980, at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota pitted 23-year-old righty Craig Chamberlain, of Hollywood, California against Mike Kinnunen, a 22-year old lefty from Seattle, Washington.
It’s probably notable that these two pitchers were born on Groundhog’s Day and April Fools’ Day respectively. Their stories are nowhere near unique, they happen all the time, year after year, nameless and faceless guys show up in baseball card packs before getting ushered out of the big leagues. And surely getting that brief, little taste of life in Major League Baseball, when whisked away, can probably feel like a cruel joke.
Those winds of time that we mentioned earlier eventually drop things back to earth, and last month this picture landed on Twitter with the following caption:
This 1978 photo of Kansas City Royals players Frank White, Willie Wilson, Amos Otis, and Hal McRae in Hawaii is absolutely amazing.
It turns out the picture is actually from spring training in 1981, at Ft. Myers Beach. The correction was made in the twitter comments by the woman in the white bathing suit, Lisa Sager Allen, the first wife of broadcaster Craig Sager, who took the picture.
The player not named on the left is pitcher Craig Chamberlain. He wouldn’t make the team out of that camp, so he may not have qualified as “absolutely amazing” to the person who posted it.
Craig Chamberlain is now a very successful realtor in the Los Angeles area of his upbringing, and Mike Kinnunen, as of 2009, was living in Puerto Rico and working at Roberto Clemente Stadium. They were the epitome of the nameless, faceless rabble you’d get in any baseball card pack in 1980. They both grew up dreaming about becoming professional baseball players and they both lived out that dream.
You couldn’t tell them on that September, 1980 day in Minnesota to hold on tight, because baseball dreams are as hard to hold on to as a passing wind, or the setting sun. But they lived it for a little, all guys on baseball cards do, and I hope the conversation comes up from time to time and I hope they both get to say it:
“Yeah, I was in the show. I was in the show for two years once – the 2 greatest years of my life.”
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