The Central Arkansas Geocaching all-star team features two of the best center fielders to play the game.
Willie Howard Mays, Jr. nicknamed "The Say Hey Kid" spent the majority of his career as a center fielder with the New York and San Francisco Giants before finishing with the New York Mets.
Mays won two MVP awards and shares the record of most All-Star Games played (24) with Hank Aaron & Stan Musial. Mays ended his career with 660 home runs, currently fourth all-time. He won a record-tying 12 Gold Gloves starting the year the award was introduced (six seasons into his career), and he was elected to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.
Willie Mays' career statistics and longevity in the pre-PED era, the more recent acknowledgement of Mays as perhaps the finest five-tool player ever, and the overwhelming consensus of many surveys and other expert analyses carefully examining Mays' relative performance have led to a growing opinion that Mays was possibly the greatest all-around baseball player of all-time
George Kenneth "Ken" Griffey, Jr. nicknamed "Junior" and "The Kid", played 22 years in Major League Baseball for three teams. He spent most of his career with the Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds, along with a short stint with the Chicago White Sox.
A 13-time All-Star, Griffey was one of the most prolific home run hitters to play the game; his 630 home runs rank as the sixth-most in MLB history. Griffey was also an exceptional defender and won 10 Gold Glove Awards as a center fielder. He won the AL MVP in 1997, the Silver Slugger award 7 times, and was elected to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.
Willie Mays is an obvious choice for this team, but since my dad is such a big fan, I'm sneaking in Junior on the loophole of having the same number and position. I did some research online trying to determine if Junior wore the number in honor of Mays, but it appears to just be a coincidence. In any case, Griffey was compared to Mays for the duration of his career, and the combination of power hitting and defense makes it a very logical comparison.
When I got into baseball card collecting, I gradually got my father interested in the hobby as well. He went to considerable trouble to assemble two complete sets of vintage cards for a couple of my birthdays. '74 Topps for one birthday, and '75 Topps for the next. He accomplished this audacious feat over about a year by dealing with baseball card shops in several states. What's incredible is that he did this all before eBay and Craigslist even existed.
The relationship a young man typically has with his father goes through a few phases. First, he's a hero. Then he's an idiot. Then, over a very long timeline, he gradually becomes a hero again. I'm finally at the age where I've been through all those phases, and have a great relationship with my father; my teenage years were a very different story. But baseball was something that we always had in common. Dad and I used to go to Travelers games and card shows together, and it was a place where we were able to bond during the most difficult years. On vacations, we'd always make it a point to find a major league game when we traveled, and we made the pilgrimage to Cooperstown together.
By the time I got to high school, some things changed. First, I became more interested in playing drums in a garage band and trying to pick up girls than shuffling through stacks of cardboard gold. Second, the market was flooded with cards, and none of them were worth much. There was such a glut of baseball cards in the late 80's that their value began to decline to next to nothing for all but a couple of players. In fact, I think you can purchase complete sets of cards from those years for less now than you could 25 years ago. Finally, the companies rebranded, and started to offer premium editions, increasing the cost of a pack of baseball cards from a quarter to about $3-5. This effectively priced kids out of the hobby, and transformed it into a marketplace for investors. This was the time when people started buying action figures and leaving them in the sealed package, hoping to one day be sitting on a gold mine. Somehow, we lost track of the fact that baseball cards were created for kids to collect and trade, and that action figures were created to be played with.
Dad kept up the collection for a few more years, and was obsessed with owning every Ken Griffey, Jr. card ever made. I don't think he did that for his whole career, but he definitely had the first few seasons covered. Two and a half decades later, I can say he invested wisely.
Dad did eventually stop buying cards, but to this very day, there is a huge cabinet in his home office bursting at the seams with long little boxes. Now that Dad's retired, I wonder if he's ever going to open that cabinet, and spread the cards all over the floor and admire them, like I once did.
01/06/16 Update Congratulations to the Kid for not only making the hall on the first ballot, but breaking Tom Seaver's record as the leading vote-getter. Only three writers didn't vote for Griffey, for reasons that I can only assume were strategic. I'm looking forward to calling my dad tomorrow. Also, in honor of Junior's election, I'm adding a hint.
Congratulations to Floaten with the FTF!
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