Tuesday, March 11, 2014

#271 - The 1968 No. 1 Draft Pick - Tim Foli


What a card: This is the beginning of the third subset in the 1985 Topps set. After the Record Breaker and Father-Son subsets, cards 271-282 featured past Major League Baseball No. 1 draft picks. It's a 12-card subset, so not every No. 1 pick is featured.

My observation on the front: The best part of this subset, for me, was seeing players that I knew in uniforms that I never knew or barely knew they wore. Tim Foli was an Expo, Pirate or Angel to me. But a Met? He looked so weird as a Met. And so weird without glasses.

More opinion from me: I just went through and tried to determine why Topps skipped certain years of No. 1 picks in this set. The best I can determine is it wanted to stick to players who were still in the majors as of the 1984 season. Some of the No. 1 picks that they skipped -- for example Mike Ivie and David Clyde -- were done playing by 1985.

Something you might know: The Mets sent Foli, Ken Singleton and Mike Jorgensen to the Expos in 1972 for Rusty Staub.

Something you might not know: Foli got into a few scraps during his career. While with the Mets, first baseman Ed Kranepool thought Foli was purposely bouncing balls to first base during infield practice. Because of that, he refused to participate in a pregame toss with Foli in front of the dugout. Foli got in Kranepool's face and teammates broke it up.


My observation on the back: Goodness, I hated these backs. High school and college highlights? So boring.

The blog wants to speak now: The Pop Culture category is updated.

2 comments:

Dave said...

Foli doesn't look right without his glasses

steelehere said...

For what it's worth, Notre Dame High School is 15-20 miles (and numerous L.A. suburbs) away from Canoga Park.