Thursday, August 25, 2011

Baseball Card Stories from Steve Fireovid

Steve Fireovid pitched sixteen years of professional baseball, including parts of six seasons in the major leagues, where he went 3-1 with a 3.39 ERA in 31 games. Now the owner of Fireovid Financial Group in Bryan, OH, he kindly answered my questions about baseball cards.

"Honestly, I don't have real fond memories of my cards. I have so many minor league cards that they serve as a reminder to me of how many years I spent there. That may sound way negative, spoiled, or any number of ways that aren't wholesome, but that's what they do for me.

My favorite card, hands down, is a minor league card of Stan Clarke, who I
played with in Omaha in '89. He was (and I'm sure, still is) a great guy. He was also a loose cannon. He was a left handed pitcher. He took his picture with thick-rimmed glasses, which weren't his. He posed like players did way back, frozen in his follow-through. He had a knuckleball grip on the ball and I believe his fly was down."
 
Thanks! Fireovid actually did some clowning around of his own in that set. A pitcher who threw and batted righty, he posed batting lefty.

4 comments:

  1. Cool. I had a similar Q&A with Fireovid a while back. He stated that he hated his 1987 Topps card. I loved his book, The 26th Man.

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  2. Crazy interesting stories about this guy. I might have to pick up that book!

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  3. What a bizarre coincidence, just last night I was taking a bunch of boxes of '87 Topps that I have, and going to pull some out to give to someone, and I came across Fireovid's card. I took a minute to look it over.

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  4. Yeah, his book The 26th Man has come in handy on several posts of mine. I should be getting around to featuring his research-based post sometime here.

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