Wednesday, January 30, 2008

#86 Ron Karkovice



Why this card is awesome: Firstly, I am not sure if that purple blob on Karkovice's crotch is a printing error or what. Click on the card to see what I mean. Anyway, this card is awesome because Karkovice played in Hawaii in 1987. That's baseball + Hawaii, folks. I call it paradise. Read more about the Hawaii Islanders franchise right here. I'll also add that Karkovice has the most similar skin and mustache color I've ever seen.

Cool stat: Karkovice had 16 game-ending plate appearances, and they were all losses. He also had 77 go-ahead plate appearances, including 3 different games where he had 2 go-ahead jobs in the same game. One of those games was this crazy one, where he had two go-ahead plate appearances that were both reaches-on-error!

8 comments:

Cannonball said...

He had two go-ahead plate appearances in that one, but I think that you wanted this one:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/MIL/MIL199307150.shtml

Andy said...

Yeah, you're right cannonball.

BTW did you get your cards in the mail from winning the earlier contest?

Luke said...

he's what, 25 , on this card and looks older than Nolan Ryan!

Cannonball said...

WOW. I would have pegged him as in his mid-thirties and said that he hadn't aged very well. But 25? You can even take away the mustache, and he'd look old.

That game in which he had two go-ahead reached on errors was especially neat because he there were two outs both times that he came up.

Steve Gierman said...

The White Sox experimented with numbers on the left front pants leg in the 80's. That's just an unfortunate shot of that. They were a red number that looked purpleish in certain lights.

It took me years to realize that Officer Karkovice had a moustache. It blends in freakishly well.

Andy said...

oh yeah...like with Baines right here.

Cannonball said...

Not at all. You can spot Karkovice's mustache from a mile away in that Baines one.

MMayes said...

The great stat with Karko is that he was backing up Carlton Fisk for part of 1987. Karko not only didn't hit his weight, he didn't even hit the number of the player he was backing up. Carlton Fisk, #72; Karkovice .071.