If Jim Wohlford’s itinerant 15-year, 4-team career was a series of romantic relationships, the first of these affairs, with the Kansas City Royals, was The One. He met the Royals while still practically a kid, full of promise, and they’d grown up together. According to the back of this card, the California-born Jim Wohlford had even relocated to Kansas City permanently. Likewise, a profession of love and devotion had been made to him by the trade of fellow young suitor Lou Piniella so that he, Jim Wohlford, could claim left field for his own.
But he did not flourish under the strains of this commitment, and had he been paying close attention he could have noticed that the club, blooming from youthful prettiness to mature division-winning beauty, was growing distant, benching him more and more against righties, beginning to rely on him only occasionally, maybe to pinch-run for John Mayberry, maybe to pinch-hit against Tom Burgmeier. Finally, perhaps just before the photo for this 1977 card was snapped, the Royals, looking better than ever, looking stunningly good, walked up to Jim Wohlford and told him, “Jim Wohlford, sit down. We have to talk.”
From then on, if this card is any guide, Jim Wohlford led the league in forlornness, loosing demoralizing sighs as he drifted from one doomed, lackluster relationship to another, his unreliable bat on his shoulder like a hobo's bindle. He tried first to salve the pain of being dumped by the Royals by consorting for a while with a young ripening barroom beauty, the Brewers, before leaving the Brewers just as the club was on the brink of blooming into boozy glory. Maybe any sweet days with the Brewers just reminded him of the Royals, and so were more pain than pleasure, which would explain the embrace, via free agency, by Jim Wohlford of a rainy, joyless three-year numbness with the San Francisco Giants, who eventually jettisoned him for someone named Chris Smith, a name so generic as to suggest the fictional. Last came the sad lingering rendezvous with the fallen foreign-accented former bombshell, the mid-1980s Montreal Expos, who returned Jim Wohlford’s forlorn muttering with cognac-addled rants about Mike Schmidt and Rick Monday and secession. That ended too, of course, as all things will, not long after Jim Wohlford watched from afar in 1985 as the only royal blue heaven he’d ever known won it all without him.
I have a vague memory of Pete Rose and Larry Bowa having a fight when Rose was on the Reds over a play at 2nd base. Does this ring true or was it some other hot headed infielder who couldn't hit but felt he was God's gift to baseball?
The guy just looks like a dweeb but you can bet he was probably all everything at his high school.
Was it Rose and Bud Harrelson in the 1973 NLCS?
As always Josh, your writing is the best.
Unfortunately, that year and every other year I happened to be placed on his team, he spent all his time trying to make his son into a star. While early on this looked like a reality, unfortunately the kid who once towered over everyone topped out at 5'11" and peaked when he was about 12. From there he went on to become a mediocre athlete, struggle to stay academically eligible, burn down his house while smoking pot, and last I heard was dealing drugs in Fresno.
Congratulations Jim, you pushed your son so hard at sports that you forgot to teach him about life. Oh, and you're an arrogant son of a bitch who was voted the worst left fielder of all-time by ESPN's page two recently.
There just aren't as many bindle stiffs as there used to be.
(Not as many railroad jerks, either.)
People voted Jim Wohlford the worst left fielder of all time?
I can't find the link now, but believe me, he was on there :)
This is way better than talking about VORP or ranking prospects. Baseball's back, man. I took a friend to Yankee Stadium last nite and am catching the home opener of hard hittin' New Britain later this evening with my brothers. Portland's in town, so I get to see Justin Masterson pitch.
As for him never doing anything remotely productive, he did, on three separate occasions, finish in the top ten in the league in times caught stealing.
14 : I'd be interested to hear how Masterson does. I think I've heard they have him loosely projected as a reliever. I didn't recognize any other names on the New Britain roster, but I think, on name alone, Bubba Bell bears watching. I also noticed that the roster includes a Chris Smith, perhaps related to the earlier Chris Smith who let an aging Jim Wohlford know what he was worth.
1. Reading cardboardgods is always worthwhile because you just might see an essay in which "numbness" is used as a noun.
2. Jim Wohlford was an active player when I first started following baseball. I don't have any recollections of him as a player but immediately, upon seeing his name, remembered his 1986 Topps card. It was one of those cards that seemed to turn up in every pack - there are at least five of them deep within my mother's basement.
That year, the first that I really collected cards, I lived and died by the stats on the backs. I sorted them into piles based on whether or not they hit 20 or more homers, won more than 10 games, etc...
Late that year, as those piles grew, it seemed like I kept getting Wohlford, or Buddy Biancalana, or Reid Nichols instead of Boggs, Mattingly, or even Keith Moreland.
Wohlford hit a woeful .192 in 1985. Here's that awful card...
http://www.billscollectiblestuff.com/servlet/the-3036/1986-Topps-344-Jim/Detail
Who's he watching? Raines? Dawson? Razor Shines? His expression and posture both seem resigned.
3. I went to the game the other day, on a whim...woke up, grabbed the bus, $10 ticket. And there I was, sitting in the sunshine, shrieking at a rookie catcher for throwing a ball into center field on a two-strike, two-out count which allowed the lead runner to score from third. It's gonna get warm soon.
The baseball game got suspended because of a power outage so my brother and I retired after one inning to the Wild Rover for some calimari and a couple of drinks. He left, but I wound up hanging out with one of the kids that worked there; a fresh off the boat Irish kid named Peter. I bent his ear asking the dating status of all the different waitresses and wound up closing the place. At one point I recalled relieving myself in a gold toilet. I left a copy of the 1918 Red Sox book there with my George Whiteman bio. I brought that in to show my brother.
The Rover is on the way to work, so I stopped by this morning to pick the book up. I commented on the opulence of the restroom and the gold toilet. The manager said "Aha! So you're the ####### that pissed in that guy's tuba."
Though "We NEED to talk" always stung more bitterly than "we HAVE to..."
The barroom beauty of the Brewers was a nice subtext.
However, why would the mid-80s Expos ever be condidered a "fallen bombshell?"
- I'd think of her more like a homely yet exotic (read: interesting and maybe attractive after a few drinks) type of chick who woulda-shoulda-coulda (in '81) if only she hadn't dressed a certain way, or gotten a nose piercing, or a particulary unflattering haircut...
Also why would the Expos/Lass be talking about Mike Schmidt?
Here are the boxes from those piles of Schmidt:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/MON/MON198010030.shtml
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/MON/MON198010040.shtml
(sorry)
I will give him the fact that he does help out the community by getting some ex-ballplayers to come to his golf tournament and baseball clinics. If it weren't for him, I wouldn't have been able to meet Johnny Bench and find out how apathetic a guy can be while teaching 12-year-olds.
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