The Year in Angels Cards, 1963: Peak Drunkard

Reviving the tradition of combing through every season’s Topps haul for secret histories and unusual delights

On New Year’s Eve of 2014, just months after what would be the lone playoff appearance of Mike Trout’s 20s, I completed* a five-year, mid-life crisis odyssey of acquiring and organizing every damn Topps baseball card of a Los Angeles, California, Anaheim, or Los Angeles of Anaheim Angel.

As I explained at the time over at Halos Heaven, the once-great Angels fansite that I wrote a LOT for between 2006 and 2015,

I started this exercise mostly as a way to see what the fellas looked like -- whaddya know, Chuck Hinton’s black! George Brunet did not miss a cocktail! -- for those years before I started attending games (pre-1973, basically). It’s helpful to have a more complete visual picture of team history, see who ages badly, how mustache fashion (d)evolves, delight in the graphic-design missteps of previous generations; as well as gain some armchair insight into who various people thought our "prospects" were and weren’t at any given time.

Unsurprisingly, this prompted a new data-rich, illustrated writing series. “We’ll be looking at the teams, the history, the card values, the ugly mugs and hidden secrets,” I vowed, “and will hopefully stumble into insights along the way of interest to those of you who don’t give a rat’s rectum about baseball cards.”

So I tore through the 1961 set (occasioning discovery of how Ken Aspromonte’s promising managerial career was cut off at the knees to enable the hiring of baseball’s first black manager), then 1962, which was an excuse to remind people that, despite their reputation as comic-relief mediocrities in the shadow of the ridiculously dominant Dodgers, the Angels were then and are still now the most initially successful expansion franchise in MLB history.

And then ... well, that’s the last I wrote about my baseball card collection. In fact, it was the last I wrote for Halos Heaven. Nine years, bupkus. So wha’ happen?

Well, the great, tempestuous, one-of-a-kind Halos Heaven OG EIC, Mat Gleason, was forced out of his own site by the evil corporate overlords who had purchased it, just because he wrote some, ah, intemperate things about the drug-relapse of free agent bust Josh Hamilton. I wasn’t exactly manning the barricades for a Rev. Halofan restoration, mind you, but the site’s decline was at that point inexorable.

More immediately relevant, though, was the date of my last piece: January 9, 2015. One week after that post, I learned (through the trades, natch) that I and fellow co-host Kmele Foster were being cut loose from the nightly Fox Business Network program I had worked so hard to co-found in 2013, The Independents. Its successor show, Kennedy, debuted on Jan. 26; my second child, Coco, debuted the day before that. All throughout this tumultuous and time-sucking process at Avenue of the Americas I had continued to serve as editor in chief of Reason magazine. What I am trying to say here is that I needed a nap, not some more damn fool extracurricular funbaggery.

By the time I got some rest and shook off the accumulated cobwebs, it was April 2016, then we started The Fifth Column podcast, then I stepped down as Reason EIC to cover the Gary Johnson campaign, then we suddenly had to find a new apartment, then AHAHAHA TRUMP, and meanwhile the Mike Scioscia era was wheezing toward its unhappy close. And, well, sometimes things just fade away.

BUT! The cards are still very much here in my office; I started The View Level last year precisely for such skylarking, and now that The Unicorn has left the building it’s so much prettier to look backward instead of forward. So enough with the excuses! Let’s get on, belatedly, with the TOPPS 1963 Angels baseball card set, with the usual reminder that the stats and info on the back of those quadrangles pertain to the 1962 season. Which, in the Angels’ case, was absolutely magical:

Number in set: 32

Buy it now, for: $265

Generalized description: The Midcentury Modern fifties vibes of the 1961 and especially 1962 collections have given way to a more technicolor early sixties feel. The name/team/position slats at the bottom (with text flush left) are bright red, blue, yellow, or green; on the right of these and poking up into the main photos are little second-pic circle-bubbles, where (unless you’ve got some fancy Topps All-Star Rookie hardware like Dean Chance and Bob Rodgers) smaller black-and-white shots are exacto-bladed onto backgrounds of fetching red, blue, yellow, mustard, and two shades of green. Team name toggles between “L.A.” and “Los Angeles” Angels; sometimes the position is “Pitcher,” sometimes it’s “P.” The backs have that winning black-on-yellow typeface for the stat-lines, plus the Bazooka Joe-style cartoons.

Angels unis of this era were pretty sweet, with button-up jerseys, western saloon font, black undersleeves, and the LA caps (which all but a handful of burr-heads are wearing) featuring the classic silvery yarmulke-style halos on top. The cards are mostly headshots, with some positional posing. We are still in the hungover-astronaut phase of above-the-shoulder grooming, with no facial hair to speak of, aside from the odd unibrow. One black guy, one Puerto Rican, and one dude wearing cop sunglasses in two separate cards under two separate names ... but we’ll get to that.

Highest-priced: Jack Spring, #572 $3.99. As per usual in sets from this era, it’s the high serial number, not the high performance value. Spring, a reliever, pitched 186 innings in his 8-season MLB career, with an ERA+ of 92 (100 being league average) and total Wins Above Replacement (WAR) of 0.2; the 1962 season (which is the one we’re looking back at with the 1963 set) was his high-water mark for games (57), innings pitched (65), and saves (6).

Manager Bill Rigney, an outsized influence on the similarly inclined Tony La Russa, was a pioneer in heavy, creative bullpen usage. The 1962 Angels set a new Major League record for fewest complete games (23) and most saves (47), on the way to a shocking 86-76 record in just their second year of existence. As such, this was one of the single most influential managerial seasons of the decade, touching off an explosion of bullpen experimentation. Spring along the way became one of baseball’s first real situational lefties: No reliever (minimum of 40 appearances) had ever before logged more games than innings pitched until Spring managed the trick for Rigney in 1963.

Rookie cards: Bo Belinksy, Dan Osinski, Felix Torres, Tom Satriano. You could write whole books about that rookie class; certainly its lead anti-hero.

Belinksy, a fast-talking East Coast pool hustler, began his first Major League season by holding out for a higher salary during spring training, getting engaged to va-va-voomster Mamie Van Doren (while canoodling with plenty other bombshells besides), then throwing the first no-hitter in Dodger Stadium history. Beat writers and Hollywood hucksters loved the guy (except when he was punching them in the face), but also, he was a walking trainwreck of a human being who shot one wife, threatened to wing another, ate all the cocaine, and went just 28-51 over his steadily deteriorating career. “No major league player ever,” Angels beat writer Ross Newhan wrote in his 1982 history of the franchise, “received more publicity for accomplishing less.”

The expansion Angels were the real-life Bad News Bears, an MLB precursor to the Portland Mavericks. A bunch of scrap-heap misfits and bull goose loonies (imagine a teenaged Jay Johnstone rooming with Fear Strikes Out veteran Jimmy Piersall in preseason Palm Springs) somehow combining with enough raw young talent to in this magical season find themselves in first place against the late-dynasty Yankees on July 4^th. “Everyone on this team played together -- off the field; and that included the sportswriters,” Ron Fimrite would later recount in Sports Illustrated, back when that was still the greatest magazine in the universe. "We were like a family then," clubhouse manager Tom Ferguson told Fimrite. "The writers protected the players, and the players protected the writers."

This being the dawn of jet travel, groupie culture, and the fateful intersection between Hollywood and professional sports, it was hard for participants to recognize then what seems obvious in retrospect. Namely, that the Angels drank (and drugged) themselves out of doing in the 1960s what the Kansas City Royals managed in the 1970s (very much at the Angels’ expense): becoming the model expansion franchise.

Player after player abused themselves into truncated careers -- Belinsky, Steve Bilko, Ryne Duren, Eli Grba, Leon Wagner, Steve Dalkowski, Nick Willhite, probably many more. It’s plausible that Jim Fregosi’s drinking help cut short what was a potentially Hall of Fame trajectory. General Manager Fred Haney shipped out ace starter and Belinsky-wingman Dean Chance in the prime of his career in part because he never could get fully clean. (One of the many, many gruesome passages in Maury Allen’s Bo: Pitching and Wooing pertains to an incident with Belinsky and Chance in the wee, small hours on Wilshire Blvd., where a normally deferential cop was “forced into action by the sight of the bleeding girl on the street,” though the gal eventually declined to press charges after Bo made some insincere promises to stay with her. “As a rule ballplayers and police get along remarkably well. Each knows that belting a girl around in a car is just clean, wholesome fun. The cop also knows the player can't stand having any such experience make the newspapers.”)

Along the way, as the clubhouse pickled, Rigney lost his once-golden touch in developing young talent, and the franchise stumbled backward toward mediocrity. Played up for yuks at the time, the team’s hard-living ways wrecked many lives. “The way I was drinking it is amazing I can remember anything,” Ryne Duren once told an interviewer. “I had six alcoholic seizures and six DUIs. How I never killed myself I’ll never know.”

Best player the year before (1962): Dean Chance, as a 21-year-old rookie in 1962, went 14-10 in 206 innings pitched, finishing 4^th in the league in ERA (2.96) and park-adjusted ERA+ (130); and 9^th in both pitching WAR (4.1) and saves (8). You read that last part right -- Chance had 24 starts (including 6 complete games and 2 shutouts), and 26 relief appearances, his role flapping around per Rigney’s whims. Last pitcher to have more than 5 complete games and saves in a single season? Chris Bosio for the Brewers in 1988. Before that Bob Stanley for the 1980 Red Sox. Only pitcher to lead the league in both categories? Giants Hall of Famer Carl Hubbell in 1934.

Best player that year (1963): Albie everlovin’ Pearson, the choir boy of the chain gang. Lil’ Albie, the fan-fave leadoff-hitting center fielder and shortest player in the Majors (at a comical 5’5”), finished 2nd in the American League in walks (92), on-base percentage (.402), times on base (271), runs scored (92) and offensive WAR (5.5); 3^rd in hits (176), 4^th in batting average (.304), 5^th in stolen bases (17), and 9^th in WAR (4.9). He made his only All-Star team, and finished 14^th in the Most Valuable Player vote.

Looking at Pearson’s 1961-63 run, which produced 80% of his lifetime value in a career shortened by back injuries, is an object lesson in how differences in playing environment warp statistics and befuddle unsophisticates (i.e., most of Angel management throughout the franchise’s existence). Take a look at these numbers, stripped of context:

1961: .288/.420/.400, 96 walks,  92 runs

1962: .261/.360/.352, 95 walks, 115 runs

1963: .304/.402/.398, 92 walks,  92 runs

Pretty much the same, right? Especially those first and last seasons. Well, no.

The American League in those years went from 4.53 runs per team per game to 4.44 then 4.08; the slash-line dropped from .256/.329/.395 in 1961 to .247/.312/.380 in ‘63. That may not seem like a lot, but the last time the AL saw a three-year decline in offense by more than 10% was 1987-1989 (not coincidentally, another period when Angel management mistook declining offensive context for declining offensive production).

But wait! It gets more distortional. The Angels in 1961 played in the league’s most offensive park, the South Central bandbox of Wrigley Field. In ’62 they moved to cavernous Dodger Stadium, which by ’63 was the toughest ballpark in the league to score runs in. When you strip out league and ballpark distortions, using Baseball Reference’s marvelous Neutralized Batting tool, the lil’ fella’s numbers look more like this:

1961: .267/.396/.371, 87 walks,  78 runs

1962: .259/.358/.351, 94 walks, 114 runs

1963: .319/.418/.414, 98 walks, 102 runs

Albie was huge in 1963, but like several other diamonds-in-the-rough finds from Rigney and Haney (such as Leon Wagner, Ken McBride, and Billy Moran), his All Star-caliber shelf-life was short, making it incumbent for the team to develop young talent behind him. Which they did ... and also did not.

Most past WAR: Bob Turley, 13.2. That is a remarkably low number for any team. Angel expansion-mates the Washington Senators, for example, had on their 1963 club future Hall of Famer Minnie Miñoso (51.8 prior WAR), Piersall (29.0), and Don Blasingame (16.1); the 1964 Mets had Frank Lary (30.3) and Roy McMillan (25.9), the ’64 Colt .45s included HoFer Nellie Fox (48.1), Pete Runnels (30.1), Turk Farrell (18.7), Hal Brown (16.7), and Don Larsen (14.6). New franchises have a tendency to accumulate aging ballplayers looking for one last score; the Angels largely bet on the future, and it largely worked.

Most future WAR: Jim Fregosi, 48.4, 44.9 of which would come in just 1963-70. (Say it loud, say it proud: Fregosi was the shortstop of the ‘60s.)

Johnny Handsome: George Thomas had some pretty dreamy peepers.

Make the walls peel off: Billy Moran.

Now THAT’S what a ballplayer looks like: Buck Rodgers. Not a lot of action shots to go on, so I’ll take the steely concentration of the future manager.

Uh, this guy’s a professional athlete?: Tom Morgan, wisecracking barfly.

Missed it by THAT much: “With a fine minor league career behind him,” the back of Jacke Davis’s card reads, “Jacke looks like he can’t miss with the Angels.” In fact the Angels just before the season traded the 27-year-old outfielder to San Francisco, where he was stuck behind two future Hall of Famers and a guy who would end up with more than 2,000 hits, plus three younger Caribbean-born backups who between them would amass nearly 5,000 hits of their own.

Which is to say, Jacke Davis missed with the Angels, then missed with the Giants, who then flipped him after a couple months of hitting .174 in AAA to the Mets, who flipped him to the Cardinals, who flipped him to Houston, all in the minors, all in 1963. He never did make it back to the Show, and was out of baseball by the end of 1964.

Dude, where’s my card?: Bob Botz probably has the biggest complaint, having pitched 63 relief innings in 1962 with an ERA+ of 113 and 2 saves in his age-27 year. But as fate would have it, the Angels traded him in April, and 1962 would be his one-and-done season.

Miscellaneous weirdness: OK, let’s see if you can spot the problem:

On the right, wearing his signature cop sunglasses, is the inspiration for Major League’s Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn, the erratic, half-blind, flame-throwing headcase (and three-time All-Star, flukily enough) Rinold “Ryne” Duren. On the left is, uh, Ryne Duren, except for that different-looking fellow in the mini-pic on the bottom, Eli Grba.

It’s true, both were 6’2” right-handers of midwestern stock and European parentage who came to the Angels from the pennant-winning 1960 Yankees bringing with them funny-sounding names, oversized spectacles, and an unquenchable thirst for hooch. But as the sleuths from the Lifetime Topps Project point out, the picture-swap was still rather on the “egregious” side for the card company: “Duren was a notable name and a recognizable [face] by this time. He’d pitched for the Yankees for a number of years, he was a bit of a character, and he wore very distinct, thick glasses.”

Grba, though less known throughout baseball, has a firm if small place in Angels lore, being the franchise’s first selection in the expansion draft (and therefore the first player in any expansion draft), and also the starting pitcher and complete-game winner in the team’s first game. He had a decent year in 1961 at age 26, going 11-13 with a 4.25 ERA (good for an ERA+ of 105) in 211.2 innings pitched, hitting a couple of home runs to boot. And also, ”I was losing control of myself and what was happening to me. I had unknowingly entered a deadly partnership with an evil entity named alcohol. And I would soon learn the hard way that this cruel demon would be the controlling partner, the one who would dominate my life for many years to come.”

Grba married a gal he met at a daytime bikini contest in a bar, bought a house he couldn’t remotely afford, got shaken down by paternity-suit hucksters, and raised league hackles by hanging out with notorious Midwest gangsters who were rumored to be betting on baseball. He took to day-drinking (including on days he pitched), keeping his game-time energy up by gobbling greenies. “Those little pills seemed to show up everywhere I went,” he wrote in Baseball's Fallen Angel. “As for the Angel ballclub, players used them openly in the clubhouse, as they were readily available from the team trainer, who handed them out like candy mints to anyone who asked.”

Banished to Rigney’s doghouse, spiraling out of control, too toxic to generate trade interest, the Angels’ Opening Day starter of 1961 and 1962 threw his last big-league pitch on Aug. 4, 1963. “For much of what happened [after],” he wrote, “I can recall very little. So much of that period is lost from my memory.” Grim stuff.

So what was the deal with that card-swap? I hereby nominate Sam Miller, my favorite working baseball writer (and a true-blue Angel fan) to hunt for that pebble. Keith Olbermann, believe it or not, might actually know the answer, being a repository of vast baseball-card knowledge, but he’s likely not taking assignments from me. My hunch is that the designated photographer had a limited time to capture his subjects, asked around for the big right-hander with the glasses and the funny-sounding name, and maybe poor Eli was busy sleeping off a bender. So too, apparently, was the editing desk back in New York.  

So! Stay tuned to this irregularly updated space for more tales of Angels baseball-card lore!

* The work is never finished. C’mon, man!