Wood vs Wood #90

Last time the '62 card beat the '87 card in voting, 7-0. Back-to-back shutouts for the vintage guys. Let's see if '87 can get on the board this time.

Jim Piersall was one of baseball all-time characters, enough that there was a movie made about him in 1957, Fear Strikes Out, about his battle with bipolar disorder. (I remember watching it in high school psychology class. We watched a lot of movies in that class.) It was based on Piersall's autobiography but Piersall said it was a distortion. His antics including spraying home plate with a water pistol, hiding behind the Yankee Stadium monuments, and running the bases while facing backwards for his 100th career home run. He was also involved in numerous fights on and off the field. Piersall actually had a pretty good career, lasting seventeen seasons, mostly for the Red Sox and Indians. He led the AL in doubles in 1955 and had 256 in his career, as well as a lifetime .272 average with 104 HR and 591 RBI. Later a coach and an announcer, he died in 2017.

Nobody's made a movie about Dave Stieb, but there's a pretty popular YouTube documentary about him and I've seen his cards pop up on the blogsphere a lot lately. Stieb was a very good, though rarely great, pitcher for the Blue Jays in the 1980s, best known for several near-miss no-hitter before finally acheiveing the feat in 1990. That documentary is apparently a call for Stieb to be voted into the Hall of Fame. In his sixteen year career he went 176-137, with 1,669 strikeouts and a 3.44 ERA. That's a very nice career but not Hall-of-Fame worthy, especially considering that he never won 20 games in a year or struck out 200 batter in a year. None of his ten-most similar comps on Baseball Reference are in the Hall; he's most similar to Virgil Trucks and Ken Holtzman, which seems about right. Stieb now works as a building contractor in Nevada.